Gem, a Crypto On-Ramp Firm Acquired by Blockdaemon

Gem’s offboarding and onboarding solutions to integrate into the blockchain infrastructure platform. Blockdaemon, a blockchain infrastructure platform, recently acquired Gem, a crypto on-ramp firm, for undisclosed fees.

Gem is an application programming interface (API) firm whose role is to provide fiat-to-crypto on-ramps and off-ramps, or fiat-to-crypto bridges. This company also provides trade data aggregation services and know your customer (KYC) product.

The primary intention of the Blockdaemon infrastructure is to allow its users to stake, scale, and deploy nodes while at the same time maintaining institutional-grade security and monitoring. Currently supported by more than 50 blockchain networks, custodians, exchanges, financial institutions, and cryptocurrency platforms mostly rely on the platform.

“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,” said Blockdaemon CEO, Konstantin Richter in an interview with CoinDesk. “The other area that we think nodes should cover, and that is very relevant to our institutional customer base, are fiat on- and off-ramps,” further added Richter.

Crypto on-ramps are more often “bad and poor products,” said Richter, though good on-ramps provide new sources of transaction-based revenues.

The acquisition of Gem by Blockdaemon follows the latter’s $207 million Series C funding that took place earlier this year, at a valuation of $3.25 billion.

Blockdaemon will incorporate Gem’s embeddable user interface (UI) flows and API, allowing users to buy over 40 cryptocurrencies from 125 countries via on-ramp services utilized by decentralized finance platforms Celsius and ShapeShift, a crypto management platform.

Explaining the reasons behind the acquisition, Richter said, “[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… It’s ultimately transaction-based revenue for payments and on- and off-ramping of fiat.”