Blockchain mergers and acquisitions accelerated in 2025. Research firm The Block reported about $8.6 billion in disclosed deal value across more than 265 transactions, nearly four times 2024’s tally.

Compared with the token-driven activity that marked 2021, buyers in 2024-2025 focused on operational assets: regulated licenses, established liquidity venues, and audited security and compliance stacks. That shift changed which companies attracted attention and what founders needed to build for an eventual exit.

Executive Summary


  • Crypto and blockchain M&A reached about $8.6 billion across more than 265 deals in 2025, nearly quadrupling 2024, according to The Block.
  • Acquirers paid premiums for scarce regulatory licenses such as CFTC-regulated Designated Contract Markets, New York trust charters, and multi-country VASP registrations.
  • High-volume derivatives venues, institutional prime brokerage workflows, and stablecoin payment APIs ranked high on buyers’ priority lists.
  • User-facing wallets, onboarding tools, and security or fraud-prevention stacks were acquired for distribution and risk controls rather than speculative token exposure.
  • Several prospective deals, including Coinbase’s planned $2 billion purchase of BVNK, did not close after late-stage diligence, showing that valuation and legal fit still constrain large transactions.

Regulatory Licenses as Strategic Assets


A Designated Contract Market (DCM) is a U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission license that allows an exchange to list standardized futures and other derivatives. Kraken’s purchase of Small Exchange secured a CFTC-regulated Designated Contract Market license and positioned the firm to offer U.S.-regulated derivatives, according to Kraken’s blog and coverage from The Block.

Ripple agreed in 2024 to acquire Standard Custody & Trust Company, a regulated platform for digital assets that holds a limited-purpose New York trust charter and money-transmitter licenses, as reported by The Block. Ripple described the transaction as adding to its portfolio of regulatory licenses for institutional custody.

In Europe, many acquisition targets operated as virtual asset service providers, or VASPs, registered with local regulators. Robinhood’s takeover of Bitstamp, which closed in June 2025, added more than 50 licenses and registrations at once and gave the brokerage an immediate multi-jurisdiction footprint, according to company statements and reporting summarized by The Block.

Across these examples, the license itself was central to deal rationale. Acquiring a firm with an existing regulatory chassis shortened time to market and reduced uncertainty around approvals compared with applying for new permissions.

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Derivatives and Liquidity Venues


Liquidity and derivatives capabilities became premium categories. Coinbase agreed in 2025 to acquire Deribit for $2.9 billion in cash and stock, a deal that CNBC described as positioning Coinbase as a leading global crypto derivatives platform by open interest and options volume.

Kraken followed a related strategy by agreeing to acquire NinjaTrader for $1.5 billion, combining an established futures platform and client base with its crypto exchange, according to analysis from Galaxy Research.

Instead of building new venues and order books from scratch, these buyers chose to purchase market structure that already processed significant volume. These acquisitions addressed a common problem for new trading platforms: attracting sufficient order flow and depth to make markets usable for institutional and active traders.

Buying an active venue brought existing traders, clearing connections, risk engines, and fee streams into the acquirer’s product stack.

Institutional Prime Brokerage and Market Infrastructure


Prime brokerage for large traders typically bundles credit, margin, clearing, and collateral management, and it depends on capital, long-standing relationships, and regulatory approvals. In 2025 Ripple agreed to acquire prime broker Hidden Road for $1.25 billion, a transaction Reuters and other outlets reported as one of the largest in the digital-asset sector.

Hidden Road handled more than $3 trillion in multi-asset flow each year for over 300 institutional clients, according to CNBC’s reporting. Replicating those risk models, margin frameworks, and legal agreements internally would likely have delayed Ripple’s institutional roadmap by several years.

The Hidden Road agreement illustrated a broader pattern: infrastructure that sits at the core of settlement, collateral, and financing is expensive and time-consuming to reproduce, yet becomes revenue-accretive quickly once integrated into a larger product suite.

Payments and Stablecoin Infrastructure


Stablecoins became a mainstream tool for cross-border settlement, and acquirers targeted firms that already served merchants and platforms. Stripe closed its $1.1 billion purchase of Bridge in February 2025, with CNBC describing Bridge’s stablecoin infrastructure and APIs as a way to shorten settlement times for global payouts.

MoonPay acquired Iron, an API-first stablecoin infrastructure platform, in a deal worth at least $100 million, according to reporting from The Block.

Both transactions showed that payments firms were willing to pay significant premiums for infrastructure that connects digital assets to existing card and banking networks. Executives involved in the Stripe and MoonPay transactions told Galaxy Research that API documentation and existing compliance audits featured prominently in due diligence.

Buyers favored products that could be integrated into production systems quickly over early-stage roadmaps that still required substantial build-out.

Wallets, Onboarding, and Embedded Distribution


User onboarding is a natural control point between end users and onchain activity, and acquirers targeted teams that controlled this layer. Wallets with strong distribution and developer adoption could influence where users traded, bridged, and interacted with applications.

Phantom acquired Bitski in May 2024, bringing an embedded wallet platform and team into its organization, according to CoinDesk and the companies’ own announcements. Bitski’s technology allows users to sign in with familiar credentials such as email or major identity providers, which simplifies onboarding for consumer applications.

Phantom also acquired Blowfish, a fraud-detection and transaction analysis provider, to integrate advanced risk checks into wallet transaction flows, as the firm explained on its blog. The combined stack enabled Phantom to present clearer transaction previews and to block or warn about suspicious interactions before users signed them.

By integrating onboarding, transaction approval, and risk checks, wallet providers turned themselves into distribution channels that exchanges and fintechs needed to consider in their own growth and acquisition strategies.

Security, Fraud Prevention, and Compliance Layers


Risk and compliance tooling moved from optional add-ons to central elements of acquisition theses. Chainalysis acquired Alterya, an AI-driven fraud detection startup, in early 2025. Chainalysis said on its company blog that Alterya’s technology identifies scammers before they meet victims and monitors billions of dollars in transactions each month.

Consensys made a thematically similar move by purchasing Wallet Guard to strengthen MetaMask against phishing and authorization scams, as reported by CoinDesk. Consensys stated that Wallet Guard’s browser extension and security engine would be integrated to improve scam and "drainer" detection for MetaMask users.

Heightened supervisory expectations around sanctions screening, transaction monitoring, and fraud prevention meant that platforms lacking automated controls faced higher operational risk and slower institutional adoption. Acquirers used M&A to add these layers rather than developing them from first principles.

Geographic Expansion via Regional Footprints


Geographic expansion and licensing footprints were also frequent deal rationales. Kraken’s acquisition of Dutch broker Coin Meester B.V. (BCM) added one of the oldest registered brokers in the Netherlands and expanded Kraken’s ability to operate as a virtual asset service provider in several European countries, according to The Block and Kraken’s own disclosures.

Robinhood’s acquisition of Bitstamp gave the U.S.-listed brokerage an institutional desk in Luxembourg, additional international offices, and a large set of active licenses and registrations across the EU, UK, US, and Asia, as described in Robinhood and Bitstamp’s public statements. For Robinhood, the transaction marked an entry into institutional crypto services rather than only retail trading.

These kinds of regional roll-ups allowed exchanges to diversify policy risk. If one jurisdiction limited products such as staking or leverage, revenue from other licensed hubs could mitigate the impact.

Deals That Never Closed


Not every announced or rumored transaction reached completion. In November 2025, Fortune reported that Coinbase and U.K.-based stablecoin startup BVNK had ended exclusive talks over a proposed acquisition valued at around $2 billion.

Fortune’s account noted that the parties had progressed to due diligence and exclusivity but did not disclose specific reasons for the decision not to proceed. Other outlets that cited people familiar with the matter also did not attribute the outcome to a single factor.

Galaxy Research observed that several smaller deals lapsed in 2025 after diligence uncovered issues around ownership, technology, or licensing. The pattern reinforced that clear intellectual-property rights, audited financials, and clean regulatory records are as important to closing an acquisition as product-market fit.

Implications for Aspiring Founders


Across the closed and canceled deals of 2024-2025, one constant appeared: acquirers prioritized assets that shortened regulatory or operational lead times. Licenses, audited security, existing institutional workflows, and real distribution channels carried more weight than experimental protocol design on its own.

For founders, the most attractive targets tended to hold something scarce. That included regulated positions such as trust charters or DCM licenses, user access points such as wallets and embedded onboarding, high-volume liquidity venues and prime brokerage services, merchant-facing payments APIs, or security and compliance layers that made institutional adoption more practical.

Founders cannot control macro conditions, but they can build diligence-ready companies. Maintaining a simple cap table, clear IP ownership, independent security audits, and integration-ready APIs and documentation all lower friction when exchanges or fintechs evaluate a potential acquisition.

With large exchanges and payment firms still filling gaps in their product stacks, industry analysts at Galaxy Research have suggested that infrastructure-focused M&A could continue. Companies that sell next are likely to resemble turnkey service providers with regulated footprints and tested workflows rather than purely experimental onchain projects.

Sources


Article Credits

Portrait of Michael LeSane
Michael LeSane
Editor