Writing by: Lin Wanwan, Dongcha Beating
The crypto market in 2025 is highly fragmented.
BTC has retraced over 30% this year, altcoins are bleeding profusely, and the cries of “cryptocurrency is dead” are echoing continuously. The new retail investors who entered high at the beginning of the year have seen their accounts shrink by more than half; some have already uninstalled trading platform apps, while others are stubbornly holding on, waiting for a rebound. The sentiment in the crypto community has fallen to its lowest point since the FTX explosion in 2022.
But amidst this chaos, another group of people is frantically accumulating.
According to PitchBook data, the total mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the crypto industry in 2025 reached $8.6 billion across 267 deals, an 18% increase year-over-year. This figure is nearly four times that of 2024 and exceeds the total of the past four years combined. Using Architect Partners’ broader statistical scope, the total is $12.9 billion.
The size of the major deals is astonishing: Coinbase spent $2.9 billion to acquire options giant Deribit, setting the record for the largest acquisition in crypto history; Kraken invested $1.5 billion to acquire traditional futures platform NinjaTrader, dubbed “the largest TradFi and Crypto integration deal in history”; Ripple acquired Wall Street prime broker Hidden Road for $1.25 billion, officially entering the institutional finance arena.
Retail investors are cutting losses and exiting in fear, while institutions are building positions on the ruins.
Interestingly, these institutions are not buying tokens. If they believe in the token prices, they can simply buy BTC—why spend billions acquiring companies?
They are buying trading platforms, licenses, custodians, payment pipelines, and clearing systems.
They are bottom-fishing the infrastructure of the entire industry.
This reminds one of Wall Street after the 2008 financial crisis. Lehman collapsed, Bear Stearns disappeared, but JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs survived, taking the opportunity to acquire a bunch of assets. After the crisis, the strong got stronger, and industry concentration increased significantly.
In 2025, the crypto industry is playing out a similar script.
Why Traditional Finance is “Bottom-Fishing”
Why 2025? Because three key factors are turning simultaneously.
The first is the SEC leadership change.
Under Gary Gensler’s era, the crypto industry has been living in a state of “Schrödinger’s compliance”: you don’t know if your issued tokens are securities, you don’t know if trading platform operations will be deemed illegal tomorrow, and you don’t know if your company will still be around when you wake up. Nearly all well-known companies—Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, Ripple, Uniswap, OpenSea—have received subpoenas or Wells Notices from the SEC.
This uncertainty is the enemy of mergers and acquisitions. No reputable financial institution is willing to spend $1 billion on a company that could be regulated out of existence at any moment. How to conduct due diligence? How to build valuation models? How to price legal risks? All questions mark uncertainty.
In January 2025, the Trump administration took office, and the SEC’s stance shifted 180 degrees. New Acting Chair Mark Uyeda established the Crypto Task Force on his first day, announcing a shift from enforcement to dialogue. In the following months, the SEC withdrew nearly 60% of its crypto-related lawsuits at a rapid pace: the Coinbase case was dropped, the Binance case was dropped, the Kraken case was dropped, and even the four-year-long Ripple lawsuit was settled.
The key is the manner of withdrawal: “with prejudice,” a legal term meaning the case cannot be refiled. This provides the market with reassurance: the issue is finally settled.
The second key is the licensing breakthrough.
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 means they can directly access the Federal Reserve system, providing custody, payment, and clearing services, enjoying the same privileges as traditional banks.
A stark comparison: in 2025, OCC received 18 bank license applications; in 2024, only 1. The floodgates are open, and everyone is rushing in.
The third key is the GENIUS Act.
On July 18, the United States’ first federal crypto legislation was signed into law. This bill sets rules for stablecoins: 1:1 reserves, monthly disclosures, and bankruptcy priority payments. More importantly, it clarifies that compliant stablecoins are neither securities nor commodities, and are not under SEC or CFTC jurisdiction.
This is like issuing a “good citizen” certificate for stablecoins: banks can confidently engage in stablecoin activities, payment companies can boldly adopt them, without fear of regulatory crackdown.
SEC withdrawal of lawsuits clears legal risks; OCC licensing grants banking capabilities; the passage of the GENIUS Act legitimizes stablecoins as compliant financial products. The three keys turn together, opening a door that has been closed for ten years.
People are outside the door, holding checks in their hands.
The Three Major Buyers’ Arms Race
In terms of ambition and scale of M&A in 2025, MVP undoubtedly belongs to Ripple.
Talking about Ripple, many in the crypto community might still remember “XRP, that company”—the one sued by the SEC in 2020, fighting a four-year legal battle. But after 2024, Ripple is a different entity altogether.
The lawsuit is essentially settled (the final ruling in August 2024 reduced the penalty from $2 billion to $125 million), and the company is sitting on a large cash reserve, beginning to expand aggressively. Their core business has already transformed: custody, stablecoins, compliance channels—whatever makes money.
In 2025, Ripple spent $2.7 billion on acquisitions, becoming the third US financial company after Morgan Stanley and New York Community Bank to complete two $1 billion+ deals in the same year. The last time Morgan Stanley did this was in 2020: $13 billion for E-Trade, $7 billion for Eaton Vance.
Ripple has reached the same scale as Morgan Stanley, and these two core deals are worth a closer look.
The first, a $1.25 billion acquisition of Hidden Road. This is a top-tier global prime broker, serving hedge funds, asset managers, proprietary trading firms, with operations across FX, derivatives, fixed income, and digital assets.
What is a prime broker? Simply put, it’s a company providing “one-stop back-office services” for institutions: executing trades, clearing, lending leverage, custody—profit centers for Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.
After acquisition, Hidden Road was renamed Ripple Prime. Ripple has stepped into Wall Street’s core circle.
The second, a $1 billion acquisition of GTreasury. This is a 40-year-old enterprise cash management system provider. It may sound unglamorous, but its client list is impressive: American Airlines, Goodyear, Volvo—all Fortune 500 companies. GTreasury processes over $12.5 trillion in payments annually.
Looking at these two deals together, Ripple’s strategic map becomes clear.
It no longer aims to be just a cross-border payment company; it wants to build an “end-to-end institutional finance stack”: corporate treasury with GTreasury, institutional prime brokerage with Ripple Prime, cross-border payments via Ripple’s own network, bridged by XRP. From CFOs’ desktops to hedge fund trading desks, the entire chain is connected.
CEO Brad Garlinghouse said at Ripple Swell: “Most of our acquisitions focus on traditional finance, aiming to bring crypto solutions into it.”
In other words: crypto companies are swallowing traditional finance.
Coinbase’s approach is different. It aims to be the “super app” of the crypto world—a platform where everything can be traded.
Spending $2.9 billion on Deribit is the biggest deal of the year. Deribit is the world’s largest crypto options exchange, with annual trading volume exceeding $1 trillion and open interest consistently above $30 billion.
Options markets are the main battlefield for institutions: hedge funds hedge risks with options, market makers manage positions, asset managers build structured products with options. Acquiring Deribit means securing an entry ticket into the institutional market.
Besides Deribit, Coinbase also acquired on-chain advertising platform Spindl, token management firm Liquifi, DeFi options protocol Opyn, Meme coin exchange Vector.fun, and prediction market company The Clearing Company.
A total of 10 acquisitions in the year, covering derivatives, DeFi, prediction markets, Meme coins. CEO Brian Armstrong’s vision is “Everything Exchange”: everything tradable will be available on Coinbase.
Kraken’s approach is more straightforward: buy licenses first, then expand business.
Spending $1.5 billion to acquire NinjaTrader, which holds a CFTC futures license. This company has a 20-year history and is a veteran in the US retail futures trading space. In the US, to legally offer futures and derivatives trading to retail clients, a CFTC license is required.
Applying for one? It takes at least three years and isn’t guaranteed. Buying a licensed company? It’s instant. Time saved, space gained, and a 50% premium is cheap.
After obtaining the license, Kraken filed for an IPO in November, aiming to go public in Q1 2026 with a valuation of $20 billion. It’s no longer just a crypto exchange; it’s a licensed multi-asset trading platform.
Wall Street’s Strategy
Crypto companies are swallowing traditional finance, and traditional finance is also infiltrating crypto.
The most typical example is Stripe’s acquisition of Bridge.
In February 2025, this payments giant acquired Bridge for $1.1 billion: a stablecoin infrastructure company with only 58 employees, with a Series A valuation of just $200 million. Stripe paid a 5.5x premium, setting a record for the company’s largest acquisition.
Why is an 58-person startup worth $1.1 billion?
Because Bridge has something money and time can hardly buy: it’s the most mature API platform in the stablecoin space, serving clients like Coinbase and SpaceX, enabling enterprises to call stablecoin capabilities as easily as calling a regular payment API. The founding team comes from Coinbase and Square, with deep understanding of payments and crypto.
Doing it themselves? At least two years. Buying Bridge? Product can be launched next month.
Stripe CEO Patrick Collison calls stablecoins the “room-temperature superconductor of financial services.” This metaphor perfectly captures the essence of stablecoins: they enable money to flow like information—24/7, cross-border, nearly zero cost. Traditional cross-border remittances take 3-5 days and charge 3-5% fees; stablecoin transfers settle in seconds with fees less than a cent.
After the acquisition, Stripe launched three products within six months: “Stablecoin Financial Accounts” covering 101 countries, a stablecoin payment card in partnership with Visa, and the Open Issuance platform allowing any company to issue its own stablecoin.
Stripe’s clear ambition: redefine cross-border payments with stablecoins.
Wall Street’s old money is also moving.
In October, JPMorgan announced it would accept BTC and ETH as collateral, starting with ETF shares and expanding to spot assets. This is the first time Wall Street’s largest bank has officially included crypto assets as collateral. According to Bloomberg, a consortium of 10 major banks is exploring joint issuance of G7 stablecoins.
Paxos acquired institutional MPC wallet platform Fordefi for over $100 million. Fordefi serves more than 300 institutions, with monthly transaction volume of $120 billion. Post-acquisition, Paxos can offer a one-stop service of “stablecoin issuance + asset tokenization + DeFi custody.”
Five years ago, Wall Street and the crypto world looked down on each other. Wall Street saw crypto as a scam and bubble; crypto saw Wall Street as old-fashioned and vested-interest. Now, they sit at the same negotiation table, valuing 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 time.
On June 5, 2025, Circle went public on the NYSE, soaring 168% on the first day, with a two-day cumulative increase of 247%. It’s the best first-day performance among IPOs raising over $500 million since 1980. The market values USDC issuer at: a $16.7 billion market cap, raising $1.1 billion.
An investment bank analyst calculated: based on the offering price, Circle “left on the table” as much as $1.76 billion, making it the seventh-largest IPO pricing mistake in history. In other words, market enthusiasm for stablecoins far exceeded underwriters’ expectations.
Following Circle, Bullish and eToro also went public. In 2025, 11 crypto companies completed IPOs, raising a total of $14.6 billion. In comparison, only 4 in 2024, raising $310 million.
The IPO pipeline for 2026 is even more crowded. Kraken’s valuation is $20 billion, aiming to go public in Q1; BitGo’s revenue has quadrupled, and it has filed for confidentiality; Gemini and Grayscale are also in line. Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley predicts this wave of IPOs could create nearly $100 billion in market cap.
But 2026 is also the year of the US midterm elections.
Historical patterns are clear: the president’s party usually loses seats in Congress during midterms. If Republicans lose the House or Senate majority, crypto-friendly policies may narrow or even close. SEC Chair might change, legislative progress could stall, and regulatory winds may shift again.
This explains why everyone is rushing. Mergers and acquisitions need to be completed before the window closes; IPOs need to be priced before market sentiment reverses; licenses need to be obtained before policies tighten.
The time window may be only 18 months.
Returning to the initial question: what is Wall Street betting on?
They are betting on the arrival of the “dual acquisition” era. Crypto companies buy licenses, clients, and compliance capabilities from traditional finance; traditional finance buys crypto technology, pipelines, and innovation. Both sides are infiltrating each other, and boundaries are gradually disappearing. 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 in 2025 is essentially a military competition for “compliance infrastructure.” The winners won’t be those chasing price charts and jumping on trends, but long-term players who position early, secure licenses, and build full-stack capabilities.
Retail investors are still guessing tops and bottoms; institutions are already buying entire sectors.
