Crypto exchange Coinbase has acquired Spindl, an onchain advertising and attribution platform, as part of a broader push to expand the reach for projects built on its Ethereum layer-2 network Base.
“Coinbase has acquired Spindl, an onchain ads and attribution platform (re)building the ad tech stack onchain, to improve the onchain discovery problem for onchain builders,” Coinbase said in a Jan. 31 statement.
Aiming to replicate Facebook ads success, but onchain
In a Jan. 31 X video, Base creator Jesse Pollak said Spindl’s founder, Antonio García Martínez, was part of the team behind Facebook’s original ads platform, which played an important role in scaling the platform and helping small businesses and “other folks” go viral online.
“Now they’re coming to do it again onchain, and they’ve built it from the ground up in smart contracts all onchain, and they’re helping builders right now go viral,” Pollak said.
Pollak explained that Spindl will give builders “the resources they need” to reach more customers.
Source: Antonio García Martínez
Echoing a similar sentiment, Coinbase head of business development Shan Aggarwal said in a Jan. 31 X post that the acquisition was “to help builders go viral and find their power users.”
“Spindl’s built the first truly robust onchain advertising protocol that helps builders find their audience and users find more compelling things to do onchain. Win-win,” Aggarwal said.
Eric Seufert, an investor at Heracles Capital and one of Spindl’s early backers, said in an X post on the same day that he first met Garcia-Martinez when he visited Austin to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Moving ‘advertising forward’ is the goal
Seufert decided to invest in Spindl after García Martínez explained his vision for “onchain attribution and measurement.”
“I committed to investing. I’m excited to see how the Spindl team moves advertising forward in partnership with Coinbase,” Seufert said.
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Meanwhile, it was only recently that Pollak said that Coinbase is considering making tokenized shares of its stock available to US users of Base.
Pollak said on Jan. 3 that while tokenized COIN shares are already available to non-US users through protocols like Backed, a tokenized real-world assets (RWA) platform, COIN on Base is “something we are looking into in the new year.”
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