Top of financial market news this Monday morning: eBay has just announced making a whopping $2.4 billion acquisition of commerce and interactive marketing behemoth, GSI Commerce. GSI is the parent company behind Boston-based Rue La La and Smartbargains.com.

GSI Commerce boasts 180 customers across the globe, mainly big brands, and eBay hopes to take their Marketplaces and PayPal products straight to these customers. Except for some of GSI’s assets — namely Boston’s flash boutique site and Gilt-competitor, Rue La La.

GSI Commerce has made $547 million in acquisitions since 2008, including e-dialog, Pepperjam, ShopRunner (their most recent acquisition, a platform with an annual membership program that allows you to enjoy free 2-day shipping across big retailers), and Retail Convergence – the Boston company that owns Rue La La and Smartbargains.com. GSI acquired Retail Convergence in October 2009 for $350 million, making it GSI’s most expensive acquisition to date.

But as part of the eBay transaction with GSI Commerce, eBay will divest (read: cease to own) 70 percent of Rue La La. eBay has stated that Rue La La, as well as ShopRunner and GSI’s licensed sports merchandise business which it will also divest, as non-core to its long-term growth strategy.

Who will eBay and GSI Commerce sell Rue La La to? A newly formed holding company led by GSI founder, president and CEO Michael Rubin – one that will be seeded with a $467 million loan from eBay and a $31 million cash injection from Rubin himself.

So what exactly is next for Rue La La, under this new ownership and almost $500 million in cash? With LivingSocial rumored to be taking on venture capital funding around just this amount to scale to Groupon status, will Rue La La’s city-specific daily deal site Rue Local be the big cash beneficiary here?

We’ve contacted the company and look forward to finding out more.