Coincheck to Acquire French Crypto Brokerage Aplo in Push Beyond Japan

Coincheck, one of Japan’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, said Tuesday it plans to acquire French digital asset prime brokerage Aplo in a move designed to accelerate its expansion outside its home market. The deal, structured as a stock purchase agreement, is expected to close in October.

“As part of its business strategy, Coincheck Group is actively exploring potential opportunities to make acquisitions and strategic investments both inside and outside of Japan,” the company said in a statement.

Coincheck declined to disclose the value to the deal, which the exchange told Decrypt was its first acquisition in Europe. “We continue to evaluate opportunities in Europe and globally and consider Aplo to be an initial step leading to additional transactions in the European Market in the near term,” a spokesperson said, adding that, “We believe there are meaningful synergies with Aplo’s capabilities and Coincheck’s platform and opportunities in Japan as well as opportunities that we are currently evaluating in Europe.”

Founded in 2014, Coincheck has grown into Japan’s most downloaded crypto trading app and listed its shares on the Nasdaq in 2024. The exchange, which suffered a $534 million hack in 2018, has since rebounded, reporting a 15% increase in customer assets in its most recent annual financial report to ¥859.2 billion ($5.7 billion), alongside a 44% jump in trading volume to ¥337.5 billion ($2.25 billion).

Crypto industry consolidation

Coincheck’s planned purchase is part of a wider spree of consolidation across the global digital asset industry as regulatory clarity and institutional adoption continue to rise.

Coinbase completed its $2.9 billion acquisition of derivatives exchange Deribit last month, as well as Liquifi in July. Over the last few months, Ripple also bought Galaxy-backed stablecoin issuer Rail for $200 million, and Citi-backed Talos struck a $100 million deal for analytics firm Coin Metrics.

That said, not every attempt has succeeded. Bitcoin miner Core Scientific’s biggest shareholder recently blocked a proposed $9 billion takeover by CoreWeave.

For Coincheck, acquiring Aplo is intended to accelerate the French firm’s product roadmap, broadening financing solutions such as cross-margining and deferred settlement, expanding liquidity access across jurisdictions and supporting banks interested in deploying Aplo’s platform for their own customers.

Aplo, founded in 2019, has built a trading application and infrastructure serving over 60 institutional clients. It is registered with France’s financial regulator AMF and is pursuing a full license under the European Union’s crypto framework, MiCA. All four founders will remain with the firm after the deal closes.

“Aplo brings us proven technology, expertise recognized by institutional clients in Europe, and a high performance team with an entrepreneurial culture,” said Coincheck CEO Gary Simanson.

He added that the deal would leave the firms “better positioned to meet the needs of institutional crypto investors,” including plans to provide a B2B2C offering to “banks looking to make crypto investing available to their customers.”

This article has been updated with additional comments from Coincheck.