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🐳 Daily Edition: Market Pulls Back Amidst China Conflict, Coinbase Buys Echo for $375M

🐳 Daily Edition: Market Pulls Back Amidst China Conflict, Coinbase Buys Echo for $375M

Coinbase has officially entered the ICO and equity sale space with their acquisition of Cobie's Echo, with the first ICO under their ownership set to go live on Monday

Will McKinnon & Beluga
October 22, 2025

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Tough day for “stores of value” in the physical and digital world, as Bitcoin is back to trading near the bottom of the wick from the October 10th liquidations and Gold lost 9% in 48 hours at its lowest point today. The market is in a weird spot at the moment, as we’ve found ourselves at the tail end of the Digital Asset Treasury “meta” while the US conflict with China continues to be stoked by President Trump’s ever-changing stance on the matter. Most Fear and Greed indices are inching closer to extreme fear, which normally would mean we see risk assets like crypto feel some pain. As the main source of this fear is lack of trust in the stability of the US Government and its monetary system, however, crypto may actually see strength during this time. This is not to say we should expect to see mid cap altcoins running, but Bitcoin and Ethereum have both proven themselves to be powerful hedges to a weakening dollar.

The massive $25M NFT purchase by Coinbase that we reported in Monday’s Beluga Brief appears to have more to the story, as less than 24 hours later it was announced that Coinbase had acquired Cobie’s Echo platform for $375M. Echo is a platform that helps facillitate equity raises for crypto startup, with a matching platform built specifically for ICO’s called Sonar. With the launch of MegaETH’s ICO on Monday, I believe we’ll have the first official ICO done via a Coinbase-owned platform. Speaking of MegaETH, the ICO will be done in an English auction format with a max FDV of $1B; with Hyperliquid’s MEGA premarket trading at an implied $5B FDV, we should expect to see their Sonar round fill up nearly instantly. Monad’s premarket is trading at a similar valuation, meaning we have two very significant airdrops in the near future, with both likely offering hundreds of millions to users. Will that money flow to our favorite altcoins? We’ll find out soon.