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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

Ripple Acquires Metaco

Arjun Mehra & Michael S. Klena
May 17, 2023
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Ripple Acquires Metaco For $250M

Transaction Overview

On May 17th, 2023 Ripple announced the acquisition of the digital asset custody technology provider, Metaco for $250M. 

 

Target: Metaco

Metaco provides digital asset custody infrastructure to global banks, fintechs, regulated exchanges, and large corporations. Metaco’s suite of products, branded Harmonize, is used by large financial institutions such as Citibank, GazpromBank, BBVA, and BNP Paribas, allowing their clients to trade, settle, transfer, and custody digital assets. Metaco’s technology uses a combination of Hardware Security Modules (HSM) and Multi-Party Computation (MPC) technologies, allowing for a mix of hot, warm, and cold digital asset storage. 

 

Metaco’s closest competitors include PolySign, Fireblocks, Copper, HexTrust, Anchorage Digital, Zodia Custody, Etana, and Komainu. 

 

The company was founded in 2015 in Switzerland by Adrien Treccani, CEO, and Nicolas Dorier, CTO and now has over 100 employees.  Metaco has raised a total of $21M in capital over three rounds, with their latest round taking place in June 2020 at a $46M post-money valuation, where they raised $17M in a Series A. Investors include Giesecke+Devrient Ventures (lead), Standard Chartered Ventures, Swisscom, Avaloq, FiveT Fintech, Zürcher Kantonalbank, and SIPCA Holdings. 

 

Buyer: Ripple

Ripple specializes in blockchain-based international payments. Their cross-border payment solution, RippleNet, has processed nearly $30B worth of volume and 20M transactions since it was first launched. Clients of Ripple include large institutions and governments including SBI, Nium, Tranglo, Siam Commercial Bank, and the Monetary Authority of Bhutan. 

 

Investors in Ripple include GV, Accenture Venture, a16z, Founders Fund, and Lightspeed, with a total of over 86 investors. Ripple’s last disclosed equity valuation was $15B in January 2022’s secondary sale of equity. XRP, the native cryptocurrency of the Ripple ecosystem, has a token market capitalization of $23B, making them the 6th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization globally as of May 17, 2023.

 

Ripple is currently undergoing a lawsuit with the SEC that was filed, in 2020, against Ripple alleging that they raised over $1.3 billion through an unregistered, ongoing digital asset securities offering. According to CEO Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple has over $1 billion of cash on its balance sheet. 

 

Ripple was founded in 2012 by Chris Larsen, Executive Chairman, and Jed McCaleb. Brad Garlinghouse has been the CEO since 2017 and leads the firm’s ~900 employees. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

 

This is the first major acquisition by Ripple and the firm is an active strategic investor, having invested in 15+ private firms since 2021.

 

Transaction Parameters

Ripple acquired Metaco for $250M, consisting of 50% cash and 50% equity, in its first major acquisition. Metaco will become a wholly-owned, independent unit under Ripple, led by the current Metaco CEO, Adrien Treccani.

 

Comparable digital asset custodian acquisitions include Galaxy Digital | GK8 ($44M, M&A Alert), Bitpanda | Trustology (ND, M&A Alert), Celsius | GK8 ($115M, M&A Alert), Genesis | Vo1t (ND), PayPal | Curv (~$200M, M&A Alert), Voyager Digital | Ethos.io ($4M), Binance | Trust Wallet (ND), and Coinbase | Xapo ($68M).

 

Strategic Rationale

Ripple seeks to transform the $156T cross-border payment market, has initiatives focused on the emerging opportunity for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and has aspirations to allow the issuance and settlement of any type of tokenized asset as that market develops.  A common theme among each of these capabilities is ensuring the safekeeping and security of these payments and digital assets. Metaco’s custody technology and related products allow Ripple to protect client assets, control the evolution of the technology and related services as needs dictate and represents a potentially attractive new revenue stream as assets under custody scale.

 

Architect Partners’ Observations

There are several dynamics within the custody market that suggest further strategic transactions will likely occur.

 

The first is regulatory guidance, particularly in the US.  Recent regulator announcements suggest that only registered Qualified Custodians (QCs) are allowed to custody digital and crypto assets.  Few QCs exist today.   Further, regulators have guided that the function of custody needs to be separated from execution venues, which while consistent with how traditional assets like equities are handled, flies in the face of current common practice for crypto assets.

 

Second, companies like Northern Trust, BNY Mellon, State Street, JP Morgan, and Euroclear have built substantial custody businesses protecting traditional assets over the past 100 years. Many of these businesses have been inhibited, by both regulatory uncertainty and brand risk, from aggressively entering the crypto and digital asset custody markets. This will change and represents both a threat and an opportunity for those building specialized digital and crypto asset custody businesses.

 

Third, the crypto winter we’ve experienced has effectively put a pause on assets under custody (AUC) growth which has meant flat or declining revenue for many existing crypto custody specialists, requiring financial staying power and conviction that an upturn is coming.

Ripple acquires Metaco Ripple acquires Metaco