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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

Zodia Custody Raises $36 Million

Steve Payne
April 27, 2023
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The company has now raised a total of $44M over two funding rounds, with their previous Seed funding of ~$8M taking place in August 2021 at a $75M post-money valuation.

Transaction Overview

On April 27, 2023, Zodia Custody raised $36 million in equity capital led by new investor SBI Holdings with participation from follow-on investor Standard Chartered Ventures and other unnamed smaller investors.

 

Company Description

Zodia Custody offers custody services to institutions for digital assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, ChainLink, Bitcoin Cash, USD, Uniswap token, and Ripple. The firm leverages infrastructure used by Northern Trust and Standard Chartered, and is registered with FCA in the UK, consistent with its compliance-centric positioning. In addition, Zodia Custody expanded to Japan via a partnership with SBI Digital Holdings in February of this year; this partnership is focused on being a custodian for the Japanese institutional market. Other clients of Zodia include Invesco and their Bitcoin Exchange Traded Product, BTIC. 

 

Zodia stated that the funding will be used to boost geographic expansion and increase the firm’s token coverage, as well as to improve its interchange and off-exchange settlement services.  

 

Zodia was founded in 2020 by a joint venture between Northern Trust and Standard Chartered’s innovation hub, Standard Chartered Ventures. The firm is headed by CEO Julian Sawyer, who leads the company’s ~50 employees.

 

Funding

The company has now raised a total of $44M over two funding rounds, with their previous Seed funding of ~$8M taking place in August 2021 at a $75M post-money valuation. This round’s valuation was not disclosed.

 

Competition

Zodia Custody competes with other crypto custody companies largely focused on institutions, neobanks, and fintechs. Some examples include Fireblocks, Hex Trust, PolySign, Copper, and BitGo. 

 

Architect Partners’ Perspective

Zodia Custody’s primary differentiator is their support and backing from high-quality, traditional financial institutions. The company was formed in 2020 as a joint venture between Standard Chartered (who reportedly had a 90% stake at that time, and remains the largest investor) and Northern Trust, two highly reputable institutions. The addition of Tokyo-based SBI Holdings, another high-quality financial services provider, shows the value of “trusted” providers – TradFi players are more comfortable with crypto infrastructure services when provided by players they know and trust. Zodia Custody is focused almost exclusively on serving traditional financial institutions that have been historically underrepresented in the crypto space, mostly due to internal sensitivities towards the crypto sector after recent market events. 

 

The involvement of SBI Holdings in the latest funding round is notable, as the large Japanese conglomerate (which spun out from Softbank in 2006) has been a major player in the crypto space for several years. SBI Holdings operates a number of cryptocurrency-related businesses, including a mining business, an overseas remittance business, and a crypto exchange. SBI is generally known for its bullish stance on the crypto sector.

 

The lack of crypto-centric venture capital funds in the round is indicative of the overall market tone.  As we discussed in our recent Q1 2023 Crypto Market Report, financings have slowed measurably versus a year ago, and the big crypto venture funds that topped the tables last year are much quieter.  In that regard, it is probably a healthy sign that financial services strategic investors are active.

 

Another healthy sign is that most of the top 30 banks are now making moves to provide services for holding crypto for their large customers, an indication that digital assets are (slowly) becoming another mainstream asset class.

 

Sources 

PitchBook, Company Website