Author: Gu Yu, ChainCatcher
A rare signal is emerging in the crypto primary market: M&A deals are approaching half the volume of financing deals.
According to RootData statistics, the number of M&A cases in the crypto industry this month has reached 10, while the number of financing rounds in the same period is only 14. Calculated as a proportion of total primary market transaction volume, M&A deals now account for approximately 42%, the highest level in history.
The implication of this data is straightforward: In the past, the main driver in the crypto primary market was financing; now, more and more deals are becoming acquisitions.
This does not mean the industry has suddenly entered a boom cycle. On the contrary, the rapid rise in the proportion of M&A deals primarily reflects the continued downturn in the financing market. Since November 2024, the monthly number of M&A deals in the crypto industry has remained basically between 10 and 20, while the number of financing deals has dropped sharply from around 100 to around 50, potentially hitting a new low this month.
In other words, M&A deals have not truly replaced the heat of the financing market; rather, they have become the most stable form of transaction in the primary market after its contraction.
For projects, this means the old path of relying on narratives for financing, token expectations, and ecosystem subsidies to maintain valuations is narrowing. For leading companies, it signifies a rare window: using lower prices, less competition, and stronger bargaining power to acquire teams, licenses, technology, liquidity, and market access.
After the financing tide recedes, the crypto primary market has not stopped functioning; it's just that pricing power is shifting from the hands of VCs to those of the buyer giants.
I. Why Are M&A Numbers Consistently High?
Over the past year, frequent buyers have included Coinbase, Kraken, Ripple, MoonPay, Polymarket, Kaiko, Sol Strategies, GSR, Keyrock, Jupiter, Paxos, Ondo Finance, etc.
These companies operate in different sectors—exchanges, payment companies, market makers, data service providers, prediction markets, RWA platforms, Solana treasury companies, as well as stablecoin and financial infrastructure firms. However, their M&A logic is highly consistent: to complement key capabilities at a lower cost during the industry's downturn.
First, valuations are cheap enough.
When financing conditions tighten, many projects cannot raise further capital at their previous round valuations. For buyers, this means better acquisition prices, fewer competing bidders, and stronger bargaining power. For sellers, even if the price isn't ideal, being acquired by a leading company may offer more certainty than continued dilution, layoffs, or pivots.
Take the recently acquired Messari as an example. The project once reached a peak valuation of $300 million, with cumulative funding exceeding $70 million. However, due to severe impacts on its core research business from AI and competitors, leading to repeated layoffs and business contractions, the final acquisition price by Blockworks was only a little over ten million dollars.
Second, saving time and trial-and-error costs.
Windows of opportunity in the crypto industry are often short. When a regulatory opening emerges, a new product model proves viable, or an asset category heats up, the market doesn't give companies two to three years to build a team from scratch. Acquiring a mature team is often faster than internal incubation and avoids unnecessary trial-and-error costs.
Coinbase's acquisition of Deribit for $2.9 billion is a classic case. Deribit is one of the world's leading crypto options platforms, with trading volume reaching about $1.2 trillion in 2024. Through this deal, Coinbase directly entered the core global crypto derivatives market, instead of building an options trading platform from scratch.
Third, acquiring licenses and compliance resources.
As regulatory frameworks gradually clarify in the US, EU, Hong Kong, Singapore, and elsewhere, licenses are becoming core assets for crypto companies. Trading, custody, payments, stablecoins, brokerage, clearing, derivatives—every link requires a compliant entry point.
Kraken's acquisition of NinjaTrader follows precisely this logic. NinjaTrader is a futures trading platform for retail users, with trading volume of $1.5 billion; this deal helps Kraken expand into multi-asset trading and regulated derivatives business.
Fourth, integrating industry chain verticals.
Crypto giants are evolving from single-point products into financial groups. Exchanges don't just do matching; they want to handle derivatives, wallets, custody, payments, RWA, token issuance, data, and institutional services. Stablecoin companies don't just issue tokens; they want to build payment networks, AI Agents, and financial infrastructure. RWA platforms don't just issue assets; they need to master compliance, distribution, liquidity, and data entry points.
The M&A path of crypto payment giant MoonPay is typical. In 2025, MoonPay acquired crypto payment startup Helio for about $175 million; it subsequently announced the acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure platform Iron to expand its enterprise payment and stablecoin capabilities.
II. Which Directions Are the Focus of M&A?
Judging from recent M&A directions, the areas crypto giants are most willing to spend money on are concentrated in four categories: trading infrastructure, payments & stablecoins, compliance licenses, and asset issuance & distribution.
Trading infrastructure remains the largest battleground.
Coinbase's acquisition of Deribit and Kraken's acquisition of NinjaTrader are driven by the same judgment: growth in spot trading is limited, while derivatives, options, futures, multi-asset trading, and institutional services represent higher-value profit pools. Especially with the gradual rise of ETFs, RWA, tokenized stocks, and prediction markets, the boundaries of trading platforms are expanding from "crypto-crypto exchanges" to "global asset trading gateways."
Payments and stablecoins are the second main line.
Companies like MoonPay, Ripple, Paxos, and Tether are all expanding around payments, stablecoin clearing, merchant acquiring, enterprise settlement, and cross-border transfers. Ripple's acquisition moves in recent years have been particularly aggressive, including the $250 million acquisition of custody company Metaco in 2023, followed by expansions around stablecoin payments, prime brokerage, and enterprise treasury management.
This indicates that the stablecoin war is no longer just about issuance scale, but about payment networks, compliant channels, institutional clients, and scenario gateways.
RWA and asset issuance are also becoming new M&A hotspots.
Companies like Ondo Finance, Jupiter, Polymarket, and Coinbase are expanding their asset issuance, liquidity distribution, and trading gateways through acquisitions or integrations. Coinbase's acquisitions of Liquifi and Echo are centered on building capabilities for token issuance and on-chain financing. The Echo deal, worth $375 million, helps Coinbase expand into an on-chain capital formation platform; Liquifi provides token distribution and management tools, aligning with Coinbase's bet on compliant token issuance paths.
The strategic significance of such M&A lies in this: whoever masters asset issuance controls the source of transactions.In the past, exchanges mainly earned fees from trading existing assets. In the future, leading platforms want to profit from the entire chain: asset creation, financing, listing, distribution, market making, custody, and trading. M&A is the fastest way to connect this chain.
III. M&A is Rewriting the Primary Market Exit Logic
The warming of M&A is not necessarily bad for entrepreneurs.
In the past, the exit path for crypto projects relied too heavily on tokens. A project's success often depended on whether it could launch a token, list on exchanges, maintain market cap, and create liquidity. But this mechanism created numerous problems in recent years: projects exiting early, VCs unlocking and selling, retail investors taking the bag, high valuations with low float, while real business was held hostage by token prices.
M&A provides another path. Even if a team cannot independently grow into a giant, as long as it builds genuine capabilities in a certain link—like licensing, technology, liquidity, compliance, users, data, risk control, market making, or payment networks—it has a chance to be acquired by a larger platform.
This will change how entrepreneurs behave. In the past, many projects issued tokens just to issue tokens and crafted narratives just to raise funds; in the future, more teams may refocus on product, revenue, customers, and strategic value that can be integrated.
This is also why active M&A can, to some extent, inject a stimulant into the primary market. It shows that the crypto industry still has asset buyers, still has value re-ratings, and still has exit possibilities.
It's just that the market is screening value in a more stringent way. What can be bought is no longer the grand narrative on a PowerPoint, but the real capabilities that can be directly integrated into a business map.
IV: The Crypto Industry is Becoming More Centralized
Behind the warming of M&A lies a depressed financing market, falling project valuations, and increased exit pressure for entrepreneurial teams. But it also shows that the crypto industry has not lost capital vitality; it is just completing resource reorganization in another way.
Another issue that must be seen is: the crypto industry is becoming more centralized.
As asset issuance, trading, market making, custody, payments, and data gradually concentrate in the hands of a few companies, the openness and anti-monopoly nature initially emphasized by the crypto industry may be reshaped by real business logic.
Especially when compliance becomes a core barrier, the difficulty for new entrepreneurs to enter the market will further increase. The future crypto industry may see a landscape similar to traditional finance: a few large platforms control licenses, clients, and liquidity, while small and medium-sized teams can only become technology suppliers, ecosystem plugins, or potential acquisition targets.
Therefore, another implication of the rising proportion of M&A is: the crypto industry is bidding farewell to the era of low-barrier entrepreneurship.
Future entrepreneurs will not only face market competition but also the ecosystem boundaries and regulatory barriers of giants.
