Blockdaemon Acquires Crypto On-Ramp Company Gem

Blockchain infrastructure platform Blockdaemon has acquired crypto on-ramp company Gem for undisclosed terms.

Gem is an application programming interface (API) company that offers fiat-to-crypto on-ramps and off-ramps, or bridges between fiat and digital assets. The company also offers a trade data aggregation service and a know your customer (KYC) product.

The Blockdaemon blockchain node infrastructure is intended to allow users to stake, scale and deploy nodes with institutional-grade security and monitoring. The platform supports more than 50 blockchain networks and is primarily used by exchanges, custodians, crypto platforms and financial institutions.

“We aim to provide the full node stack for institutions, which includes dedicated instances, high availability clusters, abstraction APIs, yield earning nodes via staking and liquidity.” Blockdaemon CEO Konstantin Richter told CoinDesk in an interview. “The other area that we think nodes should cover, and that are very relevant to our institutional customer base, are fiat on- and off-ramps.”

Crypto on-ramps are often “bad and poor products,” said Richter, but a good on-ramp offers a new source of transaction-based revenue.

The acquisition follows Blockdaemon’s $207 million Series C funding round earlier this year at a $3.25 billion valuation.

Blockdaemon will integrate Gem’s embeddable user interface (UI) flows and API that lets users purchase over 40 cryptocurrencies from 125 countries through the on-ramp services, which are used by the likes of decentralized finance platform Celsius and crypto management platform ShapeShift.

“[Gem] makes it very easy for people to take funds from anywhere and connect them and put them into another payment or yield earning platform, a little bit like Stripe,” Richter said, explaining why Blockdaemon made the acquisition. “It's ultimately transaction-based revenue for payments and on- and off-ramping of fiat.”

CORRECTION (March 9, 15:47 UTC): A previous version of this story incorrectly identified Moon Pay as one of Gem's customers.