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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

Insights

Week of September 25 – October 1

J. Todd White
October 4, 2023
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17 Crypto Private Financings Raised ~$92M

17 Crypto Private Financings Raised ~$92M

 

Rolling 3-Month-Average: $145M

 

Rolling 52-Week Average: $188M

Private financings continue their subdued pace, with both deal count and capital raised trending down this week from already muted volumes. Seven of our top 10 transactions were infrastructure deals, with half in early-stage investing and trading, showing continued investor appetite to build the plumbing during an extended sector down-cycle.

 

Selected Highlights 

 

SupraOracle announced a total of $24M in private investments completed, including support from some of the largest digital asset investors such as Animoca Brands, Coinbase Ventures and Valor Equity Partners. Supra is a developer of low-latency infrastructure for cross-chain interoperability and security to enable migration of Web2 to Web3 with powerful oracles, cross-chain communication protocols and consensus mechanisms

 

Why Notable?   Supra is building the critical interoperability infrastructure that is essential for the adoption and scaling of Web 3 initiatives. The large number of high-profile strategic investors providing private financing, co-developing white papers and collaborative R&D suggest that Supra’s “academic approach” to cross-chain oracles and bridgeless communication is resonating with key market players.

 

Rated Labs secured a $12.9M Series A round led by crypto venture investor Archetype, who also took a board seat. The UK-based oracle and dataset provider, which currently offers Ethereum-based node and node-operator ratings, data pipelines and comprehensive datasets, will use the new funds to extend into Layer 2 networks and additional blockchains including Polygon, Cosmos and Solana.

 

Why Notable? As we have seen in several infrastructure deals, simplifying access to Web3 continues to attract capital. This round is also notable for the sizeable participation from previous investors such as Placeholder, Cherry and Semantic who are showing continued financial support.

 

AnchorWatch secured $3M in funding led by Ten31 in order to meet the regulatory and capital requirements necessary to bring to market a regulated insurance product embedded in its secure custody vault, Trident Vault. The solution is an example of combined technical and financial infrastructure to meet the needs of commercial institutions as well as financial advisors with clients seeking secure and insured custody for Bitcoin.

 

Why Notable? We view appropriately scoped insurance solutions to be essential financial infrastructure for the Web3 and digital assets space in general.  While not yet offering products in the market, AnchorWatch was formed to specifically fill a void identified by the founders, in this case commercial coverage for cold-storage Bitcoin. Investor support for their approach – combining secure technology with credentialed insurance – is encouraging as the broad insurance needs of the sector continue to be underserved.

 

Patterns  

Infrastructure continues to dominate the private financing landscape, with cross-chain interoperability being a recurring theme. And we expect the often overlooked financial infrastructure – notably the underserved insurance and risk management needs of the sector – to attract increased investor interest as digital markets mature.