- DefiLlama has acquired OTC data provider Bulletin.
- Over-the-counter deals allow early investors to cash out before a company goes public.
- “It’s a bit like truffle hunting,” Bulletin’s founder said. “Even one ask or bid is quite precious.”
DefiLlama has acquired Bulletin, a data provider specialising in the obscure world of over-the-counter dealmaking.
The acquisition will allow blockchain data aggregator DefiLlama to provide more granular data on the valuation of private crypto companies, the team involved in the deal told DL News.
Patrick Scott, head of revenue and growth at DefiLlama, said Bulletin’s data would complement existing DefiLlama data on the amount of money raised by crypto startups.
“Bringing in OTC deals actually gives some color to what the valuations of private companies are in the secondary market,” Scott told DL News, a DefiLlama sister company.
It is DefiLlama’s first acquisition, said pseudonymous DefiLlama head 0xngmi.
“In terms of total additional data, it’s not that much,” 0xngmi said. “But the big difference will be that this introduces proprietary data, which we didn’t have before.”
It’s a bit like truffle hunting. Even one ask or bid is quite precious for a company that’s new.
— Bulletin founder David Mirzadeh
Venture investors can wait years to see a return on their investments. Over-the-counter deals allow those investors to cash out before a company goes public, by allowing them to sell their shares or tokens in one-off deals to other accredited investors.
David Mirzadeh, the chief of staff at the NEAR Foundation, founded Bulletin in 2023 as a platform to connect buyers and sellers of private companies’ shares and tokens. But he realised that most users were more interested in the bids and asks than in closing deals — in other words, they wanted to know what private companies might be worth.
A second version of the platform incorporated data from other OTC brokers — “all the bids, asks, secondary sales I could get my hands on,” he told DL News. “As far as I’m aware [it’s] the only public database that is gathered on this. Of course, brokers have their own, but no one was aggregating, sharing it.”
It’s been a one-man operation. Mirzadeh, a new father, said he began looking for buyers last year so he could better focus on his full-time job and his family.
DefiLlama tracks more than 5,600 protocols spread across 504 blockchains. While most of its data remains free, OTC data from Bulletin, as well as advanced analytics tools such as LlamaAI, are only available to LlamaPro subscribers.
Scott sees the acquisition as furthering DefiLlama’s mission of “taking data that would normally only be available to a small select group of investors and making it more widely available.”
He likened the data to seeing the price history of a house on Zillow, albeit much harder to find than real estate values.
“It is opaque,” Mirzadeh said. “It’s a bit like truffle hunting. Even one ask or bid is quite precious for a company that’s new and doesn’t have that many. Because it gives you something. It’s a light in the darkness.”
That data will become increasingly valuable, he added
“If you look at the growth of private markets in traditional, non-crypto industries, it’s been explosive, [with] companies staying private for longer,” Mirzadeh said. “That kind of trend, there’s no reason why that wouldn’t hold to crypto.”
Mirzadeh said he would stay on as an advisor to DefiLlama as it seeks to expand the data set by partnering with additional OTC brokers.
As to whether DefiLlama would purchase other companies, Scott said it wasn’t the first acquisition DefiLlama had considered — and it wouldn’t necessarily be the last.
“If there [are] features that for some reason we can’t build in-house, or it would be cheaper or faster to acquire, then that’s definitely on the table,” Scott said.
“Hopefully it’s the first of many big moves that we’re making this year. We are really intending to take things to the next level.”
Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.