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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

Home Services Leader Porch Acquires Moving Labor Marketplace HireAHelper

Porch.com acquired the membership interests of HireAHelper, LLC. Consideration was not announced. Architect Partners was the exclusive financial advisor for HireAHelper and initiated the transaction.

Comparable transactions include IAC’s acquisition of HomeAdvisor for $150mm (3.8x trailing revenues), News Corp’s acquisition of Move.com for $950mm (4.3x trailing revenues), Home Depot’s acquisition of Red Beacon for $70-95mm, Ikea’s purchase of TaskRabbit, Angie’s List’s 2017 acquisition by IAC/HomeAdvisor for $500mm, and IAC/HomeAdvisor’s subsequent 2018 acquisition of Handy (price not disclosed, but Pitchbook estimated Handy’s prior valuation at $360mm).

HireAHelper is an online marketplace for booking local moving labor. Founded in 2007 in San Diego, the company operates nationally and describes themselves as the easiest way to compare and book movers. HireAHelper’s platform lets consumers input the date and destination for their move, compare movers and prices against tens of thousands of reviews, and book and pay online. HireAHelper operates as a payment processor for booked jobs, also providing insurance, background checks and customer service.
HireAHelper works with several thousand independent professional moving companies across the country, and has movers in all 50 states. The company focuses on high levels of customer service, and their movers on average are rated 4.7 out of 5 stars. The company was founded in 2007 by CEO Mike Glanz and COO Pete Johnson. Mike and Pete were college friends and began a moving business as undergraduates.

Early on, the company raised some modest financing from friends and family, but they mainly bootstrapped their way to profitability. HireAHelper has 60 employees, almost all located in Oceanside, California just north of San Diego. The company will continue to operate as a standalone division at least initially, although marketing and operations will be integrated with Porch.

Porch.com is an online marketplace for booking home service professionals from contractors to plumbers to painters to handymen. The company started in 2013 with 1.5 million professionals in their network. In 2014 they partnered with Lowes home stores to provide services to homeowners. Since then, they have added additional partners such as Walmart, Pottery Barn and Overstock.com and have grown their service provider directory to 3 million professionals, of which some 140,000 are viewed as “active”. Porch had acquired three complementary businesses before HireAHelper.
Porch was founded in 2012 by CEO Matt Ehrlichman, Ronnie Castro, Scott Austin, Ha Phan and Eric Schliecher. The company has raised over $100 million in equity financing. Lowes led the Series A round of $28mm in 2014 and Valor Equity led the Series B round of $67mm in 2015. Panorama Point, FJ Partners, Founders Fund, Capricorn Investment Partners, and Battery Ventures also participated in the most recent round, which was said to be at a valuation of around $500 million. Porch has over 600 employees and is headquartered in Seattle.

This is not a gig economy transaction – both companies primarily work with professional service providers, unlike gig Uber drivers, TaskRabbit helpers or Lugg movers.

It’s all about CAC (customer acquisition cost). Porch has been very strategic in monetizing as many homeowner contacts as possible, via expansion both horizontally (adding more service categories) and vertically (offering company owned, contracted, and lead gen tiers of service providers) to be able to meet any need. For a given marketing spend, successfully boosting conversion of more inquiries into booked jobs means lower marketing spend (and higher margin) per job.

This whole sector has seen lots of investment and consolidation over the past handful of years (see comparable transactions, above), with most recent activity at the professional level rather than the gig level. IAC has become the home services juggernaut, with the acquisitions of HomeAdvisor, Angie’s List and Handy, but players like Amazon, Facebook and Yelp are also entering the market.

Porch gets at least three things from this acquisition:

1. Another complementary, high-margin service to monetize across the millions of homeowners that visit Porch.com, without spending more on customer acquisition. (Conversely, HireAHelper gets thousands of jobs passed from Porch)

2. HireAHelper’s mobile app for letting helpers schedule their jobs, and other SaaS tools for helping service professionals to run their businesses and keeping them on the Porch platform.

3. HireAHelper’s management team, which pairs a tight focus on operations with sophisticated systems for tracking and measuring every homeowner and mover transaction, and has admirably delivered on both growth and profitability.