Bird & Bird advises Blockdaemon on acquisition of Anyblock Analytics

Munich, Germany — Bird & Bird LLP has advi­sed Block­dae­mon, the world’s largest block­chain infra­struc­ture company for node manage­ment (NFT) and staking, on its acqui­si­tion of German company Anyblock Analy­tics to expand its NFT offe­ring and grow its Euro­pean presence.

Anyblock is an infra­struc­ture plat­form that provi­des API, on-chain analy­tics tools, moni­to­ring and node hosting services for various block­chain networks. As part of the acqui­si­tion, the Anyblock team joins Block­dae­mon, and the estab­lish­ment of a local presence in Germany conti­nues Blockdaemon’s expan­sion in Europe.

The acqui­si­tion signi­fi­cantly streng­thens Blockdaemon’s port­fo­lio of offe­rings, parti­cu­larly through the expan­sion of its multi-chain API suite, Ubiquity. As Block­dae­mon also deepens its infra­struc­ture support for the NFT space, Anyblock’s team and tools will help support tran­sac­tions behind the NFT ecosystem.

Consul­tant Block­dae­mon: Bird & Bird
Part­ner Stefan Münch, Corporate/M&A, Coun­sel Michael Gass­ner and Asso­ciate Marcel Nurk, all Corporate/M&A, Munich, Part­ner Dr. Michael Jüne­mann and Asso­ciate Timo Förs­ter, both Finan­cing & Finan­cial Regu­la­tion, Frank­furt, Part­ner Dr. Alex­an­der Duis­berg and Asso­ciate Goek­han Kosak, both Tech & Comms/Commercial, Part­ner Dr. Ralph Panzer, Coun­sel Sandy Gerlach and Asso­cia­tes Gizem Erdo­gan and Sven Fischer, all Labor Law, Asso­ciate Domi­nic Igel, IP, all Munich, Part­ner Dr. Stephan Wald­heim and Asso­ciate Tamy Tietze, both Anti­trust, Düsseldorf.

Back­ground:
A parti­cu­lar chall­enge in the tran­sac­tion was the regu­la­tory analy­sis of the busi­ness, which includes both services and tran­sac­tions rela­ted to tokens. Most tokens have been trea­ted as finan­cial instru­ments by the German regu­la­tor BaFin since 2013 and conse­quently most services rela­ted to them are also regu­la­ted finan­cial services. With over eight years of expe­ri­ence in the field of crypto-assets and crypto-regu­la­­tion, the Bird & Bird team was able to bring this tran­sac­tion to a close without delay.

Block­dae­mon has grown stron­gly in the past year, incre­asing its valua­tion by 70 times. The company has also deployed more than 25,000 nodes, aver­a­ged more than $10 billion in deployed assets per month, and greatly expan­ded its global foot­print in cloud regi­ons and diver­si­fied data centers. The addi­tion of two new stra­te­gic inves­tors — Tiger Global Manage­ment and JPMor­gan — to Block­dae­mon demons­tra­tes the respec­ted firms’ confi­dence in the company’s deve­lo­p­ment and growth, and their incre­asing inte­rest in cryp­to­cur­ren­cies and block­chain as they become more mainstream.