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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 Acquiring HiddenRoad for $1.25B

John Kennick
April 11th, 2025
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Transaction Overview

On April 8th, 2025, Ripple, a crypto-payments infrastructure business, announced the acquisition of HiddenRoad, a multi-digital asset prime broker, for $1.25B.

 

Target: HiddenRoad

HiddenRoad, founded in 2018 and headquartered in New York, NY, is a technology-driven prime brokerage firm that offers 300+ institutional clients comprehensive services in clearing, financing, and execution across both traditional and digital asset markets. Their offerings include: 1) Prime Brokerage services in foreign exchange (FX), precious metals, digital assets, and over-the-counter (OTC) swaps across various asset classes, 2) clearing solutions for derivatives, including futures and options, as well as sponsored access and direct market access and 3) margin financing for derivatives and digital assets.

 

Relevant investors include Greycroft, which holds a board seat, Foresight Ventures, IMC Strategic Investments, Castle Island Ventures, Citadel, Coinbase Ventures, Corner Capital, Fasanara Capital, Global Founders Capital, Humla Ventures, Optiver, Profluent Trading, SLN Capital, Uncorrelated Ventures and Wintermute Ventures. 

 

Buyer: Ripple

Ripple, founded in 2012 and headquartered in San Francisco, CA, is a blockchain-based payments infrastructure company focused on enabling money transfers using its native digital asset XRP and the XRP Ledger (XRPL). It primarily works with financial institutions, providing them with tools to settle international transactions efficiently through its RippleNet network 

 

In December 2024, Ripple launched its Ripple USD stablecoin, focused on institutions.The coin would use XRP to help add liquidity. Furthermore, in 2025, the first-ever spot XRP ETF was launched in the U.S. which can further boost institutional interest.

 

Ripple was last valued at $11.3 billion following a $285M share buy-back in January 2024. Notable investors include RRE Ventures, Core Innovation Capital, IDG Capital, and Vast Ventures who are board members and 107 other investors including Pantera Capital, Lightspeed, IDG, GV, and Fidelity International Strategic Ventures

 

Transaction Parameters

Ripple announced the acquisition for $1.25B. Greycroft announced in their discussion on the investment that HiddenRoad had $100M in revenue in 2024, which makes the EV / Revenue multiple 12.5x. 

 

Notable similar transactions in the last twelve months include Arbelos Markets | FalconX (M&A Alert) NinjaTrader | Kraken for $1.5B (M&A Alert), Stillman Digital | DeFi Technologies, Flovtec | STS Digital, CTF Capital | Borderless. 

 

Strategic Rationale

This transaction allows Ripple to implement its stablecoin, RLUSD, to use across HiddenRoad’s prime brokerage services, thus greatly proliferating its presence. HiddenRoads clears up to $3 Trillion annually for over 300+ financial institutions. Furthermore, this unlocks growth opportunities for HiddenRoads as the business was previously “constrained” due to balance sheet limitations, which Ripple addresses. Finally, it establishes Ripple as the first crypto firm to own and operate a global, multi-asset prime brokerage firm.

 

Architect Partners’ Observations

We consider this a quasi-reverse bridge transaction (where a crypto native buys a traditional financial services (TradFi) firm), which we love although it’s a bit nuanced. Hidden Road has feet in both worlds, but we see the bigger strategy in the TradFi world. 

 

Traditional prime brokers are usually in large banks. They can’t offer crypto services due to regulatory uncertainty. We know when it is clear, they will, but non-bank prime brokers have a window to grow and build. Hidden Road is one of the handful larger players in this space.

 

For Hidden Road, it gives the needed capital to grow particularly in the lending space. For Ripple, there are immediate and longer term plays. 

 

Ripple launched its stablecoin, but Tether & Circle are firmly entrenched, dominant players. Any financial product lives or dies by distribution. So Ripple using this as a distribution wedge makes sense not only for its stablecoin, but also for its ledger. If Hidden Road is captive to both, then their 300+ clients will also start to use it. It may help grow crypto market share, but it also opens the TradFi world where there are no entrenched players since the entire use case is nascent. TradFi products are what gets tokenized. So laying the groundwork to become the infrastructure behind it will be a fight. This acquisition helps get Ripple in the ring.

 

For deal terms, the strategic value is what drives this deal and pricing, recognizing both firms will have benefits.

 

For the larger M&A impact, we feel this will move other parties to move a bit more aggressively. We have seen a pick up not only in deals, but in general interest during our conversations with the entire ecosystem. More and more firms who were on the sidelines are now engaged. Engagement then leads to activity which we expect to grow over the next few quarters (with the caveat if the global economy craters, it will tamper activity).

 

Sources 

PitchBook, CNBC, CoinTelegraph, Greycroft, Reuters, X