Fitbit acquires “wearable payment assets” from Coin including key personnel and IP; Coin products to no longer be sold; existing Coin 2.0 cards will still work
“No plans” for integration into products in 2016, but 2017 is a whole new year. — Fitbit devices are known …
Context & Ripple Effects
Fitbit is buying Coin's wearable payment assets — key personnel and IP — while Coin itself exits the market: product sales stop immediately, and existing Coin 2.0 cards keep working on their own battery life. Fitbit explicitly says there are no plans to put the payment tech into its trackers during 2016, which makes this read less like a product acquisition and more like a team-and-IP pickup.
The move fits a pattern the related coverage makes explicit: months later Fitbit would acquire Pebble's software assets while Pebble shut down and cancelled its unreleased devices, a deal reportedly worth $34-40M against earlier offers from Citizen and Intel. In both cases an independent wearable startup's technology lands at Fitbit through an asset sale rather than a company purchase.
First-order effects
- Coin's customers face a dead-end product line: no new sales, and Fitbit has committed to nothing beyond letting current Coin 2.0 cards run out their batteries — a commitment it would later formalize by shutting Coin's product services entirely (services went dark that February).
- Fitbit gains an in-house wearable payments team and IP overnight without shipping a single payment-enabled device in 2016.
Second-order effects
- The deal sets the template for how Fitbit absorbs struggling wearable startups — buy the people and IP, wind down the hardware — a playbook it repeats within months with the Pebble software acquisition.
- Standalone payment-gadget makers lose their most obvious independent path: if even Coin's card business ends in an asset sale to a tracker maker, remaining niche wearable startups face pressure to sell capabilities rather than compete on finished products.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, wearable capabilities consolidate around platform owners who acquire teams opportunistically and integrate on their own timeline — Fitbit's 'no plans for 2016' framing shows the buyer, not the acquired tech, dictates when anything ships.
- For crowdfunded and venture-backed gadget companies, the endgame shifts from scaling a product to positioning assets for acquisition, with backers recovering value through team-and-IP deals rather than sustained hardware businesses.
The trend: Wearable hardware is consolidating through acqui-hire-style asset deals in which platform buyers like Fitbit absorb teams and IP from independent startups while the startups' own products are wound down.