from Hacker News

PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

by jeanniesarah on 3/3/21, 3:10 PM with 153 comments

• by ceilingcorner on 3/3/21, 4:37 PM

  I have no interest in cryptocurrencies and I don’t own a single cent in any of them. But the continual barrage of hostile comments in every single HN article looks mostly like groupthink to me.

  Clearly cryptocurrency will continue to play a growing role in the future. Denying this seems simply delusional.

• by jyu on 3/3/21, 4:30 PM

  Remember that there are people behind these decisions and they are largely rational actors. Someone at PayPal is getting a big promotion and bonus from pushing this deal. If crypto goes nowhere and they shut down this project, then it can be rationalized as "getting in too early" or some other "unforeseen externality" that happened, totally out of their control. But the promotion and risk taking executive will have solidified his/her position with headcount and other markers of success.

  There are always things we don't know going on behind the scenes for these types of moves.

  Remember when Marissa Mayer was poached from Google to run Yahoo, and the first big move she made in a series of bungles included buying Tumblr for $1.1bn. Then she termination the option for employees to wfh. Then was later revealed that she had consecutive bad performance reviews at Google and was not going to get further promotions there before she jumped ship.

  Edit: I'm just bringing up Marissa Mayer as an example and maybe misremembering the specifics since this was 8 years ago at this point. There are plenty of other examples of executives doing weird stuff that seem nonsensical from the outside. Jamie Dimond proclaiming bitcoin is a fraud while consecutively JPM buys a hefty investment in bitcoin. Or Bill Ackmann crying on CNBC while financially positioned for the exact opposite.

• by qeternity on 3/3/21, 4:36 PM

  $500m to hedge a $300b business. Could it be done cheaper? Perhaps. But this seems like a pretty obvious transaction. In 5 years if crypto is just a flash in the pan, nobody will even remember $500m. If however crypto is the future, then Paypal remain relevant and $300b of market cap is defended.

• by staticelf on 3/3/21, 4:08 PM

  Cool, never heard of it and visiting their website it is not exactly clear to me what their product is.

  I have never quite understood how companies just have a single landing page with no publically available product or service (as it seems) and still get bought for several hundred millions.

• by PragmaticPulp on 3/3/21, 4:51 PM

  This seems like a clear “sell picks and shovels” play. With more and more companies rushing to add crypto to their services offering to capture some of the highly profitable exchange rate and other fees, it makes sense to provide services to securely hold crypto for these companies.

• by NorwegianDude on 3/3/21, 6:07 PM

  Can we just take a moment to appreciate how insanely garbage the linked to site is?

  The first thing you see is a large floating ad in the middle of the screen. Then there's a huge banner at the bottom of the screen asking for permission to send you notifications. Then there's a large banner at the top asking you to subscribe to a newsletter, and right under that there's an ad asking you to download (in my situation) curve. Once you close all that out, there are more banners underneath telling you that the site uses cookies.

  A perfect example of how not to do things.

• by mattfrommars on 3/3/21, 6:55 PM

  With Coinbase going public and another crypto start up to be acquired. Anyone else here believes that "dumb people buy crypto, smart people make marketplace"?

  To me, it seems that is the main money maker and not 'day trading bitcoin/eth/ and alt-coins'? Unless you the founder of a brand new coin and make truck load of money from ICO only - which has been the case so far.

• by justjonathan on 3/3/21, 5:16 PM

  In case you were confused by the headline... no relation to curve.fi

• by distribot on 3/3/21, 5:54 PM

  I've recently been reading a bit about the history of Israel and the prolific tech industry there. Funny enough the founders are Israeli (company was in NYC), and one of them had a leadership role in the Talpiot program--something akin to the Navy seals for science and technology in the IDF.

  Really remarkable country, seemingly overflowing with human capital. A population smaller than New Jersey but so much innovation and startups.

• by bobkrusty on 3/3/21, 5:32 PM

  Companies Buying bitcoin is a trend. As people bought btc. I think this is kind of marketing. Haha

• by flibberaloo on 3/3/21, 6:08 PM

  BTC is the energy saviour to the USD. USD is the largest energy suck of any currency ever known when you actually start adding up the system to keep it's value in place (i.e. militaries, central banking system, wars, oil, etc.)

• by hahla on 3/3/21, 4:10 PM

  $500m for what I understand to be a crypto bank account?