NEXON, a South Korean video game company, recently acquired Korbit, one of the three largest virtual currency exchanges in South Korea. This marks the first M&A case in the virtual currency industry.
NEXON announced on September 26 that its holding company, NXC, will acquire 125,000 shares of Korbit for USD 80.3 million. This corresponds to 65.19% of the shares held by Korbit’s founder, Young-Suk (Tony) Lyu, and investors such as Korea Investment Partners and other venture capital firms.
This M&A deal is ranked at the top in terms of the value of the acquisition. Previously, Kakao’s acquisition of LOC&ALL was marked the highest at USD 60 million. Korbit is an online virtual currency exchange established in 2013 by the current CEO Young-Suk (Tony) Lyu and Jin-Hwa Kim, the co-president of Korea Blockchain Association.
Korbit started as the world’s first Bitcoin exchange with Korean currency (WON) and is now considered one of the top three virtual currency exchanges in Korea. NEXON stated that they have acquired Korbit to diversify its business areas. NEXON’s official position is that they do not have any specific business plan regarding virtual currency.
(Top photo from Pixabay)
————————————————————————————-
This article, entitled “NEXON acquires virtual currency exchange Korbit for USD 80.3M”, was written in Korean by Minjung Kim of Platum, edited by AllTechAsia.