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Coinme Acquired by Polygon Labs to Build its Open Money Stack
Coinme Acquired by Polygon Labs to Build its Open Money Stack

Transaction Overview
On January 13th, 2026, Polygon Labs announced it intends to acquire Coinme, a regulated crypto-as-a-service provider. Simultaneously, Polygon also announced the acquisition of Sequence, enabling payment flows across blockchain networks. Both acquisitions help build a fully integrated, rules-compliant stablecoin payments system – Poygon’s Open Money Stack.

Target: Coinme
Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Seattle, Coinme is a U.S.-regulated digital asset payments company offering crypto-as-a-service and stablecoin and crypto payment infrastructure for enterprises, fintechs, wallets, and payment applications.

Coinme is licensed and operates in 48 U.S. states, as well as Puerto Rico, and has built systems designed to handle fiat-to-crypto and stablecoin payments at scale while meeting U.S. regulatory requirements.

Coinme provides capabilities that partners integrate into their products. These capabilities, delivered as a set of APIs or SDKs, include KYC, payments by debit card, bank transfer, or cash, converting between fiat and crypto, trading, and custody, so partners can offer end-to-end crypto and stablecoin features embedded in their own applications.

Coinme also supports a large cash-to-crypto network through partnerships, providing the software and compliance layer that enables cash on-ramps and off-ramps at 50,000+ locations across the U.S.

Coinme serves more than one million users and has processed more than $1.3 billion in total transactions since it launched. Its enterprise customers include Coinstar, Exodus, Mercuryo, Baanx, and Breeze.

Coinme was co-founded by CEO Neil Bergquist and has raised $41M in equity funding from Pantera, Digital Currency Group, Coinstar, Circle, and MoneyGram.

Coinme competitors include: ZeroHash, MoonPay, Bridge | Stripe, Banxa | OSL, and Paxos.

Buyer: Polygon Labs
Polygon was founded in 2017 as Matic Network and is actively undergoing an evolution in its product offering. Polygon Labs, formed in 2023, is responsible for supporting the development of the Polygon ecosystem, with a focus on fast, low-cost blockchain infrastructure for payments.

Polygon is now building the Open Money Stack, an integrated set of services designed to move money instantly and reliably, globally. It combines blockchain settlement on the Polygon network with core payment components like wallets, stablecoin integrations, cross-chain connectivity, and compliance tooling, to keep funds on-chain so they can be used across on-chain financial applications.

To make this work across many different blockchains, Polygon Labs is building AggLayer, a settlement layer meant to help different blockchains connect and exchange value with each other quickly and at low cost, reducing the need for separate, disconnected systems.

Polygon is a listed token with a current fully diluted value of $1.6B. Polygonscan shows more than 6.2 billion total transactions on Polygon. Polygon’s website also points to scale indicators like billions of dollars of stablecoins on the network, millions of transactions per day on average, and monthly payment volume, and describes Polygon as infrastructure that can support “trillions” of value moving through it.

The company was co-founded by Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal, Mihailo Bjelic, and Anurag Arjun, and is currently led by CEO Marc Boiron, who was appointed in 2023.

Historically, in 2021, Polygon acquired zero-knowledge cryptography companies Mir and Hermez for $400M and $250M, respectively, but these are no longer aligned with the company’s Open Money Stack vision.

Transaction Parameters
Polygon Labs is acquiring Coinme for an undisclosed amount. In combination with another acquisition, Sequence, simultaneously announced by Polygon today. The combined acquisition value is around $250M. This marks one of the first examples of a protocol acquiring an operating business. The Coinme transaction is expected to close in Q2 2026.

Architect Partners served as the exclusive financial advisor to Coinme.

Notable comparable transactions include OSL | Banxa for $62M (M&A Alert), Nuvei | Simplex for $250M (M&A Alert), Ripple | Rail for $200M (M&A Alert), Stripe | Bridge for $1.1B (M&A Alert), MoonPay | Iron for $100M (M&A Alert), and MoonPay | Helio for $175M (M&A Alert).

Strategic Rationale
Polygon is acquiring Coinme and Sequence to move from being a settlement rail to owning the full experience of how money comes on-chain, moves on-chain, and settles back into the real world. The combination of Coinme’s licensed payments offering with Sequence’s wallet and payments orchestration stack gives Polygon an end‑to‑end, regulated crypto payments platform that spans physical kiosks, embedded wallets, and cross‑chain routing.

On Day 1, Polygon can take this integrated “crypto‑as‑a‑service” solution to banks, PSPs, neobanks, and fintechs who want compliant, turnkey stablecoin and token payments without building their own licensing, infrastructure, or user experience.

Architect Partners’ Observations
This acquisition(s) underscores a broader inflection point in the blockchain protocol market: technological performance and scalability alone will not win. The integration of real-world rails and the ability to deliver end-to-end value for mainstream users are becoming table stakes. As the market matures, competitive advantage is shifting toward owning the commercialization layer, including regulated fiat access, compliance operations, distribution channels, partner integrations, and strong product integration.

Networks that rely entirely on third-party providers risk commoditization, margin leakage, inconsistent user experience, and strategic dependency, just as stablecoins and tokenized products begin to drive meaningful transaction volume and the corresponding revenue opportunities.
Polygon’s actions show they fully understand the importance of this approach.

Sources
Polygon Press Release
Architect Partner M&A Tracker
PitchBook

Alerts

HashKey Raises $100M

Eric F. Risley
February 1, 2024
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On January 15, 2024, Hong Kong-based digital asset financial services firm, HashKey Group, raised $100 million in a Series A funding round, valuing the company at over $1.3 billion.

Transaction Overview

On January 15, 2024, Hong Kong-based digital asset financial services firm, HashKey Group, raised $100 million in a Series A funding round, valuing the company at over $1.3 billion, with investments from undisclosed strategic partners, institutional backers, and Web3 entities which include OKX Ventures.

 

Company Description

HashKey Group, based in Hong Kong with 120 employees, is an institutional-focused exchange and venture capital investor. 

 

Founded in 2018, HashKey Exchange & Custody offers a suite of crypto capabilities to Asian institutional investors including brokerage services, trading services, staking infrastructure that supports over 40 chains, and Multi-Party Computation (MPC) based custody capabilities. HashKey Exchange, their largest business, is a crypto asset exchange regulated by the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, with 155,000 registered users and a daily trading volume of $630 million for the past month. HashKey Exchange also offers a brokerage service for accredited investors, providing secure crypto asset trading with a minimum size of $100,000, such as USDT/USD and BTC/USD pairs.

 

HashKey has also announced several products intended to support the emergence of so-called Web 3.0 DApps.  These include HashKey DID (Digital Identify), a digital wallet named HashKey Me, and a software developer support effort named HashKey Hub.

 

Founded in 2015, HashKey Capital manages venture capital fund investing in blockchain projects, including tokens and equity, from pre-seed to Series B. They have $1B+ assets under management across 3 funds. Significant investments include dYdX, FalconX, Animoca Brands, Polkadot, and many others, totaling 268 total investments according to PitchBook.

 

Funding

HashKey’s first publicly disclosed funding is this Series A financing although prior funding is implied.  HashKey failed to disclose specific investors, rather opting for more generic descriptions of types of institutions, other than OKX Ventures.  OKX Ventures is a $100M fund owned by OKX, the large crypto exchange.  They have 142 active companies in their portfolio today, according to Pitchbook.  Post-money valuation of this financing is over $1.3B.

 

The new capital will be used to enhance HashKey’s Web3 ecosystem, expand its Hong Kong-licensed business products, and support global growth in compliance with regulations. This follows the company’s acquisition of a Capital Markets Services (CMS) license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).

 

Competition

HashKey Group competes with a broad array of other crypto brokers and exchanges such as OKX, Bithumb, Binance, Kucoin, Bitstamp, and Crypto.com among others.  HashKey’s Web 3.0 DApp efforts are designed to complement building products on a variety of blockchains, complementing those efforts more than competing directly.

 

Architect Partners’ Perspective

Can you say Deja Vu?

 

Crypto asset investment platforms bear a striking resemblance to traditional investment platforms and asset managers.  One may reasonably conclude that they are fundamentally a crypto assets specialized version of Robinhood, TD Ameritrade, Fidelity, and others of that ilk.

 

Growth will driven by regulatory clarity, the evolution and maturation of the investment theses for specific individual crypto assets (also referred to as tokens), new products like the recent Bitcoin ETFs and futures markets, the broadening of investor participation, and perhaps most importantly, the building of trust and confidence in the legitimacy of both the asset class and the companies and projects that support the industry.

  

Sources 

PitchBook, Company Website, Press Release