Coinbase Inc. today said it has acquired Earn.com Inc., a Silicon Valley startup that offers bitcoin payments to users who respond to emails and undertake small tasks.

Although the figure on the deal was not officially disclosed, Recode pegs it at “slightly more than $100 million” while Axios prices it as “north of the $120 million it raised in total VC money.” Coinbase was first rumored to be in talks to acquire Earn.com April 6.

Founded in 2013 under the name of 21 Inc., the company originally worked on chips and hardware for cryptocurrency mining that could be implemented into various “internet of things” devices, such as the now infamous bitcoin toaster. It eventually built its own bitcoin-mining “Bitcoin Computer.”

Ascertaining that users didn’t want to mine cryptocurrency while cooking toast for breakfast, the company abandoned its earlier efforts. So it changed its focus last year with the new name of Earn.com and a new product that matched microtasks with bitcoin payments, a sort of upmarket Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Although paying people to reply to marketing surveys and emails is not even remotely a unique idea, Earn.com applied a twist to the model by allowing users to donate their bitcoin in return for having the opportunity to ask questions of prominent tech expert. They include the Winklevoss twins, investor Ben Horowitz, Google LLC machine learning guru Jeff Dean and, perhaps not surprisingly, Coinbase Chief Executive Officer Brian Armstrong.

Earn.com will continue as a standalone business under Coinbase ownership, but much of the motivation for the deal appears to be a talent acquisition in the form of Earn.com co-founder and CEO Balaji Srinivasan (pictured, left), who will become chief technology officer at Coinbase.

“Balaji has become one of the most respected technologists in the crypto field and is considered one of the technology industry’s few true originalists,” Armstrong said in a post on Medium. Before Earn.com, Balaji was a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and CTO of Counsyl. He also holds degrees in electrical engineering chemical engineering from Stanford University and has taught courses in data mining, stats, genomics and blockchain.

For Coinbase, the buy is its first serious acquisition at a time the company seeks to consolidate its leading position in the U.S. cryptocurrency market after booking more than $1 billion in revenue last year. Despite its apparent success, the company has faced some controversy along the way, including allegations of insider trading, tussles with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and a bizarre case of overcharging customers in what may or may not have been a hack.

Photo: TechCrunch/Flickr