A heartfelt thank you to our customers, our many ecosystem partners including the protocol teams we work closely with, our investors, and to the pioneers who choose to trust us. We feel honored to have your continued support.

Today, we’re incredibly excited to share the news that Bison Trails will be joining Coinbase. This is a major milestone in the ongoing Bison Trails journey. We will expand our impact as a standalone product line: the foundation of Coinbase’s infrastructure suite to advance the crypto ecosystem.

The Bison Trails platform will continue to support our customers, some of the most respected names in crypto and financial technology. With Coinbase’s backing, we will enhance our infrastructure platform and make it even easier to participate in decentralized networks and build applications that connect to blockchain data.

As an investor in Bison Trails since our Series A, Coinbase is already our trusted partner. Over the last year, we worked closely with the Coinbase Custody team to launch several innovative product integrations, improving the user experience of staking DOT, SOL, and CELO for institutional token holders.

Through our collaboration we found a deeper alignment and a shared vision for the future. As blockchain technology and the use of crypto assets becomes ubiquitous, the products and services of the Web 3.0 era will need to be powered by reliable and secure infrastructure. Coinbase sees this opportunity and is deeply committed to both our success and the growth of the crypto ecosystem.

As we join Coinbase, we will stay committed to our mission to provide superior infrastructure on multiple blockchains, to strengthen the ecosystem, and enable the pioneers of tomorrow. We will uphold our values with everything we create. And the herd will continue to grow.

Vision and growth

Aaron and I have built software companies together for more than a decade. In 2016 we were totally captivated by the innovation happening in the blockchain space and the potential of a world of products and services built on decentralized networks. Blockchains by design provide data integrity, transparency, and access to a verifiable source of truth with limitless potential applications and use cases.

Even though we were experienced software engineers, it was difficult to build anything that connected into these new networks securely and reliably. Aaron and I talked with many teams of innovators who were facing the same challenges. We saw an opportunity to build a stable and easily accessible infrastructure layer. We were super excited about this idea to make it easier and safer to build products and enable people to participate in this emerging ecosystem effortlessly.

In March of 2019 we officially introduced Bison Trails to the world—along with a $5.25M seed round—as “the world’s infrastructure as a service company designed for next-generation blockchain networks.” It’s remarkable to look back at that announcement post and recognize how little of our approach changed in the time since, despite the rapid growth and evolution of the ecosystem.

"As the blockchain ecosystem matures, it will enable a new global workforce, where participants can take part in value creation regardless of their background. But participating in this new decentralized economy today is often difficult, technical, and blockchain specific. Bison Trails wants to enable a future where blockchain participation is easy, more transparent, and truly decentralized. The infrastructure that we’re building today will pave the way for an entire generation of new decentralized companies, services, and participants to access blockchain economies and networks."

We spent the rest of 2019 on building the herd, focusing on scaling our values-driven culture as our company grew. In June of 2019 we launched the non-custodial Bison Trails platform with support for Algorand and joined the Libra (now Diem) Association as a founding member. By November of the same year we secured a Series A financing round led by Blockchain Capital including Coinbase Ventures:

“We’re entering a new phase in blockchain development and participation, one marked not by pure asset speculation, but by robust, usable, and scalable networks where stakers, voters, validators, investors, and many others actually participate in the growth of these communities. We believe we’re still at the very beginnings of this massive shift in how people participate in blockchain networks, and we plan to make blockchain participation as accessible, safe, and scalable as possible.”

In 2020, our rapid growth continued. We adjusted to life during a global pandemic, added platform support for many protocols (including eth2), announced the launch of our QT product for developers to connect to blockchain data, and much more.

Throughout it all, including the most difficult times, we remained committed to our values and our mission. Our team today is a reflection of these values and I could not be more proud of the herd and our support for each other. I’m so impressed by how far this team has come.

Today QT powers billions of queries and transactions per month. Our fully managed platform powers critical infrastructure for the world’s leading exchanges, custodians, and enterprises. We support 20+ protocols for participation, to make it easy to run node clusters that keep networks secure and earn participatory rewards.

And with the beginning of a new year, we are also starting a new chapter.

Coinbase + Bison Trails

Coinbase is one of the leading companies in our space, driving the crypto retail market, user adoption, and pioneering the products and services offered to the institutional market (both with custody and institutional trading).

We are incredibly excited to join Coinbase as a standalone product line in the Coinbase portfolio, an anchor of Coinbase’s third pillar of crypto services for developer tools and ecosystem advancement. With additional support and resources from Coinbase, we anticipate rolling out more products and services that encourage participation, development, and innovation.

Over time, Coinbase also plans to extend additional infrastructure and API services that have been developed to power Coinbase products—through the Bison Trails platform—for the benefit of the entire crypto ecosystem.

Thank you again to our customers and our ecosystem partners. We couldn’t have achieved this milestone without you! Looking forward to what’s to come in 2021,

—BisonJoe & BisonAaron

About Bison Trails

Pioneering Blockchain Infrastructure®

Bison Trails is a blockchain infrastructure platform-as-a-service (PaaS) company based in New York City. We built a platform for anyone who wants to participate in 20 new chains effortlessly.

We also make it easy for anyone building Web 3.0 applications to connect to blockchain data from 30 protocols with QT. Our goal is for the entire blockchain ecosystem to flourish by providing robust infrastructure for the pioneers of tomorrow.

In January, 2021, we announced Bison Trails will be joining Coinbase to accelerate our mission to provide easy-to-use blockchain infrastructure, now as a standalone product line as part of Coinbase. The Bison Trails platform will continue to support our customers. With Coinbase’s backing, we will enhance our infrastructure platform and make it even easier to participate in decentralized networks and build applications that connect to blockchain data. Read more.

THIS DOCUMENT IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. PLEASE DO NOT CONSTRUE ANY SUCH INFORMATION OR OTHER MATERIAL CONTAINED IN THIS DOCUMENT AS LEGAL, TAX, INVESTMENT, FINANCIAL, OR OTHER ADVICE. THIS DOCUMENT AND THE INFORMATION CONTAINED HEREIN IS NOT A RECOMMENDATION OR ENDORSEMENT OF ANY DIGITAL ASSET, PROTOCOL, NETWORK OR PROJECT. HOWEVER, BISON TRAILS (INCLUDING ITS AFFILIATES AND/OR EMPLOYEES) MAY HAVE, OR MAY IN THE FUTURE HAVE, A SIGNIFICANT FINANCIAL INTEREST IN, AND MAY RECEIVE COMPENSATION FOR SERVICES RELATED TO, ONE OR MORE OF THE DIGITAL ASSETS, PROTOCOLS, NETWORKS, ENTITIES, PROJECTS AND/OR VENTURES DISCUSSED HEREIN.

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