133 Deals, $8.6 Billion: Who Bought Up the Crypto Industry in 2025?

The crypto market in 2025 is highly fragmented.

BTC has pulled back more than 30% this year, altcoins are in free fall, and “crypto is dead” laments echo throughout the industry. Many newcomers who bought at the highs early in the year have seen their portfolios shrink by more than half. Some have already deleted their exchange apps, while others are stubbornly holding on, hoping to recover. Sentiment in the crypto community has plunged to its lowest since the FTX collapse in 2022.

Yet amid this chaos, another group is on a buying spree.

PitchBook data shows that total crypto industry M&A in 2025 reached $8.6 billion across 267 transactions, up 18% year-over-year. That’s nearly four times 2024’s total and exceeds the combined sum of the past four years. Using Architect Partners’ broader criteria, the total reaches $12.9 billion.

The scale of leading deals is remarkable: Coinbase spent $2.9 billion to acquire options giant Deribit, setting a new record for the largest acquisition in crypto history. Kraken paid $1.5 billion for traditional futures platform NinjaTrader, marking the largest TradFi–crypto integration deal ever. Ripple bought Wall Street prime broker Hidden Road for $1.25 billion, making a decisive move into institutional finance.

Retail investors are panic selling and exiting, while institutions are building major positions in the aftermath.

What’s interesting is that these institutions aren’t buying tokens. If they were bullish on token prices, they could just buy BTC directly—why spend billions to acquire companies?

They’re acquiring exchanges, licenses, custodians, payment rails, and clearing systems.

They’re bottom-fishing for the industry’s core infrastructure.

This is reminiscent of Wall Street after the 2008 financial crisis. Lehman Brothers collapsed, Bear Stearns disappeared, but JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs survived and scooped up assets. After the crisis, the strong grew stronger, and industry concentration surged.

The crypto industry in 2025 is following a similar script.

Why Is TradFi “Bottom-Fishing”?

Why 2025? Because three keys turned at once.

The first key: an SEC transition.

Under Gary Gensler, crypto lived in a state of “Schrödinger’s compliance”: you never knew if your token was a security, if your exchange might be deemed illegal, or if your business would still exist tomorrow.

Nearly every major company—Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, Ripple, Uniswap, OpenSea—received SEC subpoenas or Wells Notices.

This uncertainty is poison for M&A. No reputable financial institution would spend $1 billion on a company that regulators could shut down at any moment. How do you conduct due diligence? Build a valuation model? Price legal risk? All up in the air.

In January 2025, the Trump administration took office, and the SEC’s position flipped 180 degrees. New Acting Chair Mark Uyeda created a Crypto Task Force on his first day, announcing a shift from “enforcement” to “dialogue.”

In the following months, the SEC dropped 60% of crypto-related lawsuits at a near fire-sale pace: the Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken cases were all dropped, and even Ripple’s four-year legal battle ended in a settlement.

The key detail: cases were dropped “with prejudice”—meaning they can’t be refiled. This gave the market real confidence: the chapter is closed.

The second key: licensing opened up.

On December 12, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) approved national trust bank charters for five crypto companies: BitGo, Circle, Fidelity Digital Assets, Paxos, and Ripple. This allows them direct access to the Fed system, enabling custody, payments, and clearing services with the same privileges as traditional banks.

One number tells the story: in all of 2025, the OCC received 18 bank charter applications; only 1 in 2024. Once the gate opened, everyone rushed in.

The third key: the GENIUS Act.

On July 18, the first US federal crypto bill was signed into law. It set rules for stablecoins: 1:1 reserves, monthly disclosures, and bankruptcy priority. More importantly, it clarified that compliant stablecoins are neither securities nor commodities, and are outside SEC and CFTC jurisdiction.

This effectively gave stablecoins a “clean bill of health”: banks can safely offer stablecoin services, payment companies can integrate without fear, and retroactive penalties are off the table.

The SEC’s case withdrawals eliminated legal risk; OCC licensing enabled banking capabilities; the GENIUS Act made stablecoins compliant financial products. With all three keys turned, a door closed for a decade swung wide open.

A crowd stands outside, checks in hand.

The Three-Way M&A Arms Race

For ambition and scale in 2025’s M&A, Ripple is the undisputed MVP.

Many crypto veterans still see Ripple as “the XRP company”—sued by the SEC in 2020 and embroiled in a four-year regulatory battle. But after 2024, Ripple is a different animal.

With the lawsuit nearly settled (the final ruling in August 2024 cut the fine from $2 billion to $125 million), Ripple is flush with cash and expanding rapidly. Its core business has shifted: custody, stablecoins, compliance channels—whatever is profitable, they pursue.

This year, Ripple spent $2.7 billion on acquisitions, becoming the third US financial firm after Morgan Stanley and New York Community Bank to complete two $1 billion-plus deals in a single year. The last time Morgan Stanley achieved this was in 2020: $13 billion for E-Trade and $7 billion for Eaton Vance.

Ripple now stands alongside Morgan Stanley, and its two core deals are worth a closer look.

First: a $1.25 billion acquisition of Hidden Road, a leading global non-bank prime broker serving hedge funds, asset managers, and proprietary trading firms across FX, derivatives, fixed income, and digital assets.

What’s a prime broker? In short, it’s a company providing “one-stop back-office services” for institutional investors: clearing trades, providing leverage, and safeguarding assets. Prime brokerage is a cash cow for Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

After the deal, Hidden Road was renamed Ripple Prime. Ripple made a direct leap into Wall Street’s core circle.

Second: a $1 billion acquisition of GTreasury, a 40-year-old enterprise treasury management system provider. Not flashy, but its client list is formidable: American Airlines, Goodyear, Volvo—all Fortune 500 companies. GTreasury processes over $12.5 trillion in annual payments.

Viewed together, these two deals reveal Ripple’s strategy.

Ripple no longer wants to be just a cross-border payments company. It’s building an “end-to-end institutional finance stack”: GTreasury for enterprise treasury management, Ripple Prime for prime brokerage, Ripple’s network for cross-border payments, and XRP as the bridge. From the CFO’s desktop to the hedge fund trading desk, the entire chain is connected.

At Ripple Swell, CEO Brad Garlinghouse put it bluntly: “Most of our acquisitions focus on traditional finance, aiming to bring crypto solutions in.”

In other words: crypto companies are devouring traditional finance.

Coinbase’s strategy is different. It aims to be the crypto world’s “super app”—a platform where anything can be traded.

The $2.9 billion acquisition of Deribit was the year’s biggest deal. Deribit is the world’s largest crypto options exchange, with annual trading volume above $1 trillion and open interest consistently above $30 billion.

The options market is the main battlefield for institutions: hedge funds hedge risk, market makers manage positions, and asset managers build structured products. Acquiring Deribit is a ticket to the institutional market.

Beyond Deribit, Coinbase also acquired on-chain ad platform Spindl, token management firm Liquifi, DeFi options protocol Opyn, meme coin exchange Vector.fun, and prediction market company The Clearing Company.

Ten acquisitions throughout the year, spanning derivatives, DeFi, prediction markets, and meme coin trading. CEO Brian Armstrong’s ambition is an “Everything Exchange”: if it can be traded, it can be traded on Coinbase.

Kraken’s approach is more direct: buy the license first, then the business.

Spending $1.5 billion on NinjaTrader was about acquiring a CFTC futures license. NinjaTrader, with a 20-year history, is a veteran in US retail futures trading. In the US, to legally offer futures and derivatives trading to retail investors, a CFTC license is required.

Apply yourself? The queue is at least three years, with no guarantee of approval. Buy a licensed company? Go live immediately. Even a 50% premium is a bargain.

After securing the license, Kraken filed for an IPO in November, targeting a Q1 2026 listing at a $20 billion valuation. It’s no longer just a crypto exchange—it’s a licensed multi-asset trading platform.

The Stripe Playbook

Crypto companies are devouring traditional finance, but traditional finance is also moving into crypto.

The most notable example is Stripe’s acquisition of Bridge.

In February 2025, the payments giant acquired Bridge—a stablecoin infrastructure company with only 58 employees and a Series A valuation of just $200 million—for $1.1 billion. Stripe paid a 5.5x premium, marking its largest acquisition ever.

Why is a 58-person startup worth $1.1 billion?

Because Bridge has what money and time can’t easily buy: the most mature API platform in stablecoins, with clients like Coinbase and SpaceX, enabling enterprises to use stablecoins as easily as any payment API. The founders come from Coinbase and Square, with deep experience in payments and crypto.

Could Stripe build it themselves? It would take at least two years. Buy Bridge? The product launches next month.

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison called stablecoins “the room-temperature superconductor for financial services.” The analogy is spot on: stablecoins let money flow like information—24/7, across borders, at near-zero cost. Traditional cross-border remittances take 3–5 days and charge 3–5% in fees; stablecoin transfers settle in seconds for less than a cent.

After the acquisition, Stripe launched three products in six months: Stablecoin Financial Accounts covering 101 countries, a stablecoin spending card with Visa, and the Open Issuance platform that lets any company issue its own stablecoin.

Stripe’s ambition is clear: to redefine cross-border payments with stablecoins.

Old money on Wall Street is also moving.

In October, JPMorgan announced it would accept BTC and ETH as collateral, starting with ETF shares and later expanding to spot. This is the first time the largest Wall Street bank has formally included crypto as eligible collateral. Bloomberg reports a consortium of 10 major banks is exploring a joint G7 currency stablecoin issuance.

Paxos acquired institutional-grade MPC wallet platform Fordefi for over $100 million. Fordefi serves more than 300 institutions, with monthly trading volume of $12 billion.

With the deal, Paxos can now offer one-stop “stablecoin issuance + asset tokenization + DeFi custody” services.

Five years ago, Wall Street and crypto circles looked down on each other. Wall Street saw crypto as a scam and a bubble; crypto circles saw Wall Street as outdated and protectionist. Now, they’re at the same negotiating table, pricing each other’s assets with real money.

The boundaries are blurring. The definitions of “crypto company” and “financial company” are being rewritten.

Epilogue

But everyone is racing against the clock.

On June 5, 2025, Circle went public on the NYSE, soaring 168% on its first day and 247% in two days. It was the best first-day performance among IPOs raising over $500 million since 1980. The market valued the USDC issuer at $16.7 billion, raising $1.1 billion.

One investment bank analyst calculated that, based on the offering price, Circle “left $1.76 billion on the table”—the seventh-largest IPO pricing miss in history. In other words, market enthusiasm for stablecoins far exceeded underwriters’ expectations.

After Circle, Bullish and eToro also went public. In 2025, 11 crypto companies completed IPOs, raising a combined $14.6 billion. For comparison, there were only four in 2024, raising $310 million.

The 2026 IPO pipeline is even more crowded. Kraken is valued at $20 billion and aims to list in Q1; BitGo’s revenue has quadrupled and it’s already filed confidentially; Gemini and Grayscale are also in line. Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley predicts this IPO wave could create nearly $100 billion in market value.

But 2026 is also a US midterm election year.

History is clear: the president’s party usually loses congressional seats in the midterms. If Republicans lose their House or Senate majority, the crypto-friendly policy window could narrow or close. The SEC chair might change, legislative progress could stall, and the regulatory climate could shift again.

This explains why everyone is in a rush. M&A must close before the window shuts, IPOs must price before sentiment turns, and licenses must be secured before policy tightens.

The window may only be open for 18 months.

Back to the original question: what is Wall Street betting on?

They’re betting on the dawn of the “two-way acquisition” era. Crypto companies are buying traditional finance’s licenses, clients, and compliance capabilities; traditional finance is buying crypto’s technology, channels, and innovation. Both sides are converging, and the boundaries are fading. In three to five years, there may be no distinction between “crypto companies” and “traditional financial companies”—only “financial companies.”

The $8.6 billion M&A wave of 2025 is, at its core, an arms race for compliant infrastructure. The winners won’t be those chasing price charts, but those who secure positions early, obtain licenses, and build full-stack capabilities for the long term.

Retail investors are still guessing tops and bottoms; institutions are buying entire sectors.

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