GlobeNewswire

• 1. Introduction

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  GlobeNewswire was built on a specific frustration: a 15-minute delay. When the company was established in 1998, financial news had a structural lag baked into its delivery. Markets moved, decisions were made, and some people got information before others, simply because the infrastructure for distributing financial disclosures had not caught up with the speed of commerce. The founders set out to close that gap.

  What grew from that founding mission was a global press release distribution network spanning North America, Europe, and Asia. The company would change its name, change its owners, and eventually land at the center of one of the more unusual incidents in the short history of cryptocurrency. How did a service built to make financial information more reliable end up publishing a fake news story that wiped out millions of dollars in crypto markets?

• 2. A Name Built for the World

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  PrimeNewswire was the company's original name, and it carried a certain domestic register. By 2008, the business had expanded well beyond any single market, and the name no longer fit. The rebrand to GlobeNewswire was a deliberate signal of international ambition, chosen to reflect a scope that now stretched across continents.

  The timing of that name change also coincided with a period of significant ownership history. Nasdaq, Inc. had held GlobeNewswire as a subsidiary since September 2006. That arrangement lasted until April 2018, when West Corporation, later rebranded as Notified, acquired GlobeNewswire along with a broader bundle of Public Relations Solutions and Digital Media Services businesses.

• 3. The Tools of Modern PR

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  In 2012, GlobeNewswire introduced its Streaming Media Player, a tool that let users toggle between videos and slides while watching multiple news sources simultaneously. The feature reflected how press releases were evolving from text documents into multimedia experiences.

  That evolution accelerated in June 2018, when GlobeNewswire launched Media Snippets. Organizations publishing press releases could now embed a carousel of images, audio, video, and live streaming directly into their releases and web pages. The goal was to help companies reach media, investors, and customers with a fuller brand story in a single package. Beyond press releases, the platform also offered Investor Relations website management, online customer service hosting, and HTML email news delivery, all stemming from the original 1998 vision of comprehensive financial communication.

• 4. The Walmart-Litecoin Incident

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  In September 2021, a press release appeared on GlobeNewswire claiming that Walmart would begin accepting Litecoin as a payment method. The article was not confirmed. It was fake.

  Before GlobeNewswire deleted the article, it had already moved markets. Millions of dollars in cryptocurrency positions were liquidated as traders reacted to what appeared to be a major retail announcement. The article's origins pointed toward a possibly hacked Litecoin Twitter account as the primary launch point for the story, though investigators also considered whether active market manipulation had been involved. The damage proved irreversible; the liquidations could not be unwound after the deletion. The incident drew attention to the vulnerabilities in press release infrastructure, where a convincing fake submission could reach a global audience before verification caught up.

• 5. Changing Hands Again

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  Notified, which had acquired GlobeNewswire from Nasdaq in 2018, itself became the subject of an acquisition agreement in 2025. The buyer was Equiniti, a financial services company. The deal represented the third major ownership transition in GlobeNewswire's history, following its time under Nasdaq and then under West Corporation-turned-Notified.

  Each ownership shift brought GlobeNewswire under a different corporate umbrella while the underlying service, distributing corporate and financial information to media, investors, and the public, remained the constant thread. The Equiniti agreement extended that thread into a new chapter, connecting a press release company born from a 15-minute delay in 1998 to a financial services group with its own set of global operations.