Mergers. They're a tricky business at the best of times, but when conducted in a nascent industry in which regulations, guidelines and best practice haven't been firmly established, they can be absolutely perilous. Just ask Coinbase, which acquired blockchain analytics startup Neutrino in February for what turned out to be a fee of $13.5 million. This seemed all fine and dandy at the time, but it soon emerged that founding members of Neutrino's staff had links to Hacking Team, an Italian software firm that had controversially sold surveillance tools to international law enforcement agencies and even to authoritarian governments (e.g., the United Arab Emirates).
Given that crypto prides itself on helping individuals escape the overbearing control of centralized institutions, it would be an understatement to affirm that this merger — once the above details were made public — didn't go down too well with the wider community. Indeed, the merger created a public relations nightmare for Coinbase, which hurried doggedly to wash its soiled image (largely by affirming that ex-Hacking Team staff will "transition" out of their new roles at the exchange giant).
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