‍Got that coin? If you're talking about the Philippine e-wallet and digital currency exchange Coins.ph, Gojek's got some news for you. They don't own it anymore!

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🤑 What's the deal?

Back in 2019, Gojek acquired Coins for $95M. We hear the new deal's around double that number, putting it at nearly $200M.

The buyer. Coins has been sold to Wei Zhou, who was CFO of crypto exchange giant Binance from Aug 2018 to May 2021.

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⏪  Hitting rewind

At time of the Gojek acquisition, Coins had about 5M users in the country. The e-wallet started off as a crypto exchange. It later added traditional fintech solutions like mobile payments, mobile top-ups and bill payments.

• After the acquisition, Coins continued to run as usual, just tapping into the Gojek network for resources and experience.

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🤔  Back to start?

Especially with a crypto-savvy ex-CFO taking charge, it might be going back to focus on crypto. Here's why that's exciting:

Traditional vs crypto. Its rival e-wallets, GCash and PayMaya are now much more popular and widely used both online and offline all over the country. While Coins has been focusing more on traditional consumer finance services, crypto's a game GCash and PayMaya haven't figured out yet.

• GCash has over 51M users, while PayMaya has over 28M.
• Coins carries multiple cryptocurrencies, including the AXS and SLP tokens from Axie Infinity.

Crypto lovin'. Crypto adoption has been skyrocketing in the Philippines. The local central bank has shown that crypto transactions grew 362% year-on-year to almost 20M in the first half of 2021.

• Local crypto firms are feeling the rush. Tiger Global-backed crypto exchange PDAX saw a 70x increase in transactions and 15x increase in customers in less than a year.