Bitcoin Exchange Bitstamp Acquired by NXMH

The Luxembourg-based bitcoin exchange, Bitstamp, has been acquired by the Belgium investment firm NXMH, which also owns Korbit, a South Korean cryptocurrency exchange. The official terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

Fortune notes that the rumored amount is a $400 million dollar acquisition. The same article quotes Bitstamp founder, Nejc Kodric, as stating to customers and employees to not expect much change: “We have kind of the same opinion as NXMH—why change something if it works perfectly well?…[Bitstamp] has been profitable from almost day one.”

Further comments by Kodric were provided by Coindesk. He believes the Bitstamp and NXMH partnership will work to “bridge the gap between traditional finance and crypto.”

He states: “Unlike some of our competitors who take more of a lax approach, we want to [set standards] … We’ve already taken the regulatory framework seriously starting back in 2014, we started doing [know-your-customer] before it was an industry standard. All of it comes down to us viewing crypto as being a spark of everyday life.”

Concerning the possibility of a Bitstamp and Korbit merger, Kodric said: “We’ve talked about it, but we decided to keep the companies running separately.” The exchanges do plan to share technology, research, and development resources, however.