The U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase plans to buy yet another company in what’s become one of its most aggressive years on record for M&A. The crypto giant has agreed to acquire the Solana trading platform Vector.fun, Max Branzburg, Coinbase’s vice president of product management, told Fortune. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year. Branzburg declined to disclose the acquisition terms.
Vector.fun is a decentralized exchange on the blockchain Solana. The product’s users primarily trade memecoins and can follow other traders’ bets and investments. As part of the acquisition, Coinbase will shut down Vector.fun’s mobile and desktop trading apps, and hire the platform’s 13 employees.
Coinbase plans to use Vector.fun’s technology to expand the assets its users can trade on its app through decentralized exchanges. (This feature is separate from Coinbase’s core business of centralized trading.) Currently, the company only lets users trade tokens through exchanges built on top of Base, Coinbase’s own blockchain. The crypto exchange hopes to expand access to Solana, said Branzburg.
“The Coinbase app is really meant to be an agnostic platform to enable people to trade all of the assets they want to trade,” he added, referencing the company’s efforts to become what it calls the “everything exchange.”
M&A frenzy
Coinbase’s acquisition of Vector.fun is its ninth purchase in 2025, three times more than its haul the year prior. And it’s laying out serious cash. In May, it struck a deal to buy the crypto derivatives exchange Deribit for $2.9 billion. In October, it paid $375 million for the initial coin offering platform Echo. And it’s also explored an acquisition of the stablecoin company BVNK for around $2 billion, a deal that both companies eventually called off in November.
“We’re seeing a lot of those opportunities where companies are just hitting a level of maturity, and technology is hitting a level of maturity where it makes sense for them to look to join forces with Coinbase,” said Branzburg.
While the crypto exchange weathered a tough 2022 and 2023 where it posted little to no profits, it rode the crypto bull market to build out its balance sheet with a profitable 2024 and 2025.
Coinbase isn’t the only company looking for startups to buy. In the third quarter of 2025, there were 96 M&A transactions in the crypto industry for a total of more than $10 billion, according to a recent report from Architect Partners, a crypto M&A advisory and financing firm. That’s the largest quarter on record, per the firm’s data.
Other significant deals in 2025 include Ripple’s $1 billion purchase of GTreasury and Kraken’s $1.5 billion bet on NinjaTrader.