After years of venture-funded dominance, Coinbase is reviving the idea that crypto projects can raise money directly from their users.
The US-based exchange announced on Oct. 21 that it acquired Echo, a community-fundraising platform founded by veteran investor Jordan “Cobie” Fish, in a $375 million deal to rebuild fairer, on-chain capital markets.
According to the exchange:
“Echo believes in democratizing early-stage investing, so that more people can support the next generation of breakthrough companies…Integrating Echo’s tools will help us enable more direct community participation, joining projects with capital, entirely onchain.”
The purchase positions Coinbase at the center of a trend reshaping token financing. Echo has already processed more than $200 million across 300 deals, using its products Echo Private and Sonar, a self-hosted public-sale tool.
Together, they let projects run compliant token sales without relying on centralized launchpads or opaque venture allocations.
Meanwhile, Echo will remain a standalone brand, but Coinbase plans to fold its infrastructure into a full-stack pipeline spanning its exchange and Base layer-2 network. This means the fundraising platform’s tool of launch, fundraising, and secondary trading would be fully integrated into the Coinbase platform.
Coinbase says the integration will eventually extend beyond crypto tokens to tokenized securities and real-world assets (RWAs).
From ICO Bust to Regulated Launchpads
Coinbase’s acquisition inevitably recalls the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) boom of 2017 and 2018, when startups reportedly raised around $20 billion globally before the bubble collapsed under regulatory pressure.
However, a five-year freeze in public token sales followed as private venture rounds took over.
Now, with clearer rules springing up globally, including the United States, Europe’s MiCA framework, Singapore’s licensing regime, and KYC-based launchpads, public fundraising is resurfacing in a controlled form.
According to Tiger Research, compliant launchpads have generated hundreds of millions of dollars in 2025, with projects like Plasma’s XPL token using Echo’s Sonar system to close oversubscribed sales.
Coinbase’s Echo acquisition signals a bid to institutionalize that momentum. By routing early-stage offerings through its regulated exchange, the publicly-listed firm can expose vetted projects to 110 million verified users while giving retail investors a legal path into deals once limited to VCs.
A return to the crowd but not to 2017
Whether this marks the return of ICO-style speculation is less certain.
Analysts at Tiger Research see today’s environment as structurally different because compliance is stricter, yields are lower, and information asymmetry is narrower.
According to the firm, launchpads such as Buidlpad in Korea show strong short-term performance, but average token gains have settled below 5×, a far cry from 2017’s 100× rallies.
At the same time, Blockworks Researcher Carlos said:
“The current ICO landscape navigates a tradeoff between high adverse selection (bad founders) & capital formation maturity (high valuations).”
Still, demand for transparent, on-chain fundraising remains high. Echo’s model of screened participants, verifiable smart-contract funding, and open cap tables offers a regulated framework for retail inclusion.
Tiger Research stated:
“Public launchpads provide renewed access to ‘early investment opportunities’ that remained closed for some time. They offer individual investors excluded from venture capital-centered market structures a path to participate in early-stage projects through fairer and more transparent methods.”
If successful, Coinbase’s bet could bridge two eras of crypto finance: the speculative crowdsales that ignited public interest and the regulated token markets now emerging under global oversight.
In the process, the exchange may prove that community capital formation, once dismissed as a relic of the wild-west cycle, still has a future on Wall Street rails.
However, Tiger Research cautioned that significant challenges persist. The firm explained that open participation and selective efficiency inherently conflict, making it difficult to balance inclusivity with quality control.
It noted:
“Overly transparent criteria invite system exploitation. Opaque criteria weaken trust.”
Considering this, Tiger Research added that striking that balance will require further institutional and technical refinement as the industry matures.