Over the past several months, we’ve witnessed a clear pattern in digital asset M&A:
- In October, Ripple acquired G-Treasury, Fireblocks acquired Dynamic, and Modern Treasury acquired Beam
- Paxos acquired Fordefi in November
- Fireblocks acquired TRES Finance in January
While these moves might appear as standard industry consolidation, they actually reveal something more significant about where digital asset operations are heading.
Each of these acquisitions addresses a fundamental challenge: the need for unified wallet infrastructure, liquidity management, financial reporting and customer-facing applications, all with enterprise-grade controls and visibility.
Here’s what these deals signal:
- Fragmented infrastructure is no longer optimal nor scalable, and;
- Companies that rely on stitched-together point solutions, i.e. separate systems for custody, liquidity management, treasury reporting, and wallet provisioning, are facing compounding operational costs and strategic limitations.
Let me share some examples of problems that result from patching together different solutions:
A payment company using one system for wallet infrastructure, another for treasury reporting, and a third for consumer-facing applications will spend hours every month just reconciling positions across platforms. Their product team can’t launch a new embedded wallet feature without a 6-month infrastructure integration project. Every new market entry requires evaluating whether existing systems support local compliance requirements (often they don’t).
Or say a remittance provider wants to offer receiver wallets to capture both sides of cross-border transactions, but their current infrastructure only supports business wallets for corporate treasury. Building receiver wallet functionality would require integrating an entirely new platform, which significantly delays the product launch. Meanwhile, a competitor with unified infrastructure ships the feature in weeks and starts capturing market share. The infrastructure constraint didn’t just cost money, it also cost competitive positioning.
As digital assets transition from moving mainstream to mass adoption, the market is consolidating around platforms that can deliver the same level of sophistication, control, and integration as expected from traditional financial systems.
What each acquisition move reveals
Ripple + G-Treasury: liquidity visibility and control
Ripple’s acquisition of G-Treasury, a corporate treasury management platform, addresses the liquidity fragmentation problem: digital assets scattered across multiple wallets, exchanges, and OTC relationships without centralized visibility. G-Treasury brings capital management, cash forecasting, and compliance capabilities that give treasury teams real-time control. Their aim is to close the gap between knowing where assets are and being able to move them efficiently.
Fireblocks + Dynamic: unified wallet infrastructure across use cases
When Fireblocks acquired Dynamic, we were addressing a fundamental infrastructure fragmentation problem. Businesses are using digital assets in more ways than ever before, including to make their operations more efficient through use cases like treasury management, and to offer their customers new experiences. This shift requires wallet infrastructure that spans the full spectrum, from institutional custody to consumer-grade embedded wallets.
Companies need to enable millions of users to safely interact with digital assets without needing to be familiar with crypto. The fastest and most secure way to unlock this capability is via a unified wallet infrastructure that abstracts away blockchain complexity and removes the custody burden, which is a non-starter for payments companies and platforms.
The old approach was different solutions for institutional treasury, operational wallets, and customer-facing applications. With Dynamic + Fireblocks, businesses get a single platform that handles institutional MPC custody, operational wallets, and embedded customer wallets.
Modern Treasury + Beam: bridging traditional and onchain finance
Modern Treasury’s acquisition of Beam was a clear signal of their evolution from traditional payment rails (wires, ACH, RTP) to stablecoin rails. The acquisition confirms that the line between “traditional” and “digital” payment operations is disappearing. Companies don’t want separate treasury systems for fiat and crypto. They want unified payment operations where stablecoins are just another rail alongside wires and ACH across wallets, exchanges and banking systems.
With stablecoins becoming operational payment rails, companies need infrastructure that treats them like any other payment method. Finance teams managing both USD wires and USDC transfers shouldn’t need entirely different systems to do so.
Paxos + Fordefi: expanding access to DeFi
Paxos acquiring Fordefi is about solving the DeFi access gap. Paxos customers were demanding regulated access to decentralized finance. With this acquisition, Paxos is looking to compete with other major players like Coinbase as institutions increasingly view DeFi as a viable option. They also absorb Fordefi’s security controls, policy enforcement, and risk management for DeFi operations.
The challenge is that companies need to protect against both external threats (phishing, smart contract exploits) and internal risks (unauthorized transactions, policy violations) while maintaining the operational speed that digital asset capabilities promise. The solution lies in pre-transaction validation and policy enforcement that works across different wallet types, use cases, and operational teams.
Fireblocks + TRES Finance: building the financial operating system
As the line between crypto and traditional finance continues to blur, the need for improved regulatory and financial oversight of digital assets continues to crystallize. For companies integrating digital assets into their financial operations, this isn’t something that can continue to be outsourced as an afterthought, but rather as a core component to your broader financial operating system.
This is why Fireblocks acquired TRES Finance, combining secure infrastructure with audit-ready financial data for institutional digital asset operations. TRES provides a full suite of tools for accounting, audit, reporting and reconciliation, enabling institutions to stay financially compliant.
Together, this solves the financial data gap with contextualized blockchain data; regulatory requirement challenges across reporting, security and infrastructure; and ecosystem fragmentation across blockchains, jurisdictions and platforms.
How to prepare your digital asset business model
As blockchain utility becomes ubiquitous, business and product teams expect digital asset infrastructure to match the sophistication of traditional financial systems. The “good enough for crypto” standard no longer applies when digital assets power core business operations. The technology is now good enough for finance at scale.
Here’s what those teams actually need:
- Scalable wallet infrastructure across use cases. Support for treasury operations, payment processing, merchant settlement, and customer-facing applications on a single platform. The ability to launch new products and enter new markets without rebuilding core infrastructure, e.g. scaling from 10 to 10 million wallets with appropriate controls for each context.
- Unified visibility and operations. Real-time view of all digital assets across wallets, exchanges, counterparties, entities, and use cases with consolidated reporting that integrates crypto and fiat operations. Automated reconciliation that eliminates manual processes and provides audit-ready transaction histories.
- Automated workflow authorization and policies. A policy engine that applies consistently across all wallet types, use cases, and operational teams. Approval workflows that match business processes and risk tolerances. Pre-transaction compliance and security checks rather than post-transaction reviews.
- Developer-friendly integration. Single integration points for APIs that connect to ERPs, accounting platforms, and banking systems. Fiat on/off-ramp integration with existing banking relationships. Flexible authentication and wallet connectivity options.
- Security and compliance at every layer. Transaction security policies that prevent losses before they occur. Compliance frameworks that adapt to different regulatory requirements across jurisdictions. Audit trails that satisfy both internal governance and external regulatory requirements. Risk management tools that protect operations without slowing down business velocity.
Companies whose infrastructure can’t deliver these capabilities face enhanced regulatory scrutiny, board-level governance questions about risk management, customer expectations for seamless embedded experiences, and competitive dynamics where infrastructure determines product launch velocity and market position.
What the acquisitions are signaling
The pattern is clear: The market is consolidating around end-to-end digital asset infrastructure that supports multiple use cases, not point solutions for each operational need. Fragmented systems create operational costs and strategic limitations that compound over time. The longer companies wait to address infrastructure gaps, the more expensive and disruptive the transition becomes. More critically, infrastructure constraints slow product development and limit competitive positioning.
In 2026, success requires infrastructure that enables digital asset capabilities at every layer of the business, from back-office treasury operations to customer-facing embedded finance experiences. Digital asset infrastructure must deliver real-time visibility, centralized control, scalable wallet provisioning, developer-friendly integration, and seamless connection with existing business systems. Infrastructure decisions made today will determine which companies capture the opportunities emerging as blockchain becomes a ubiquitous utility layer.
Learn how Fireblocks delivers unified infrastructure for digital asset operations across treasury, payments, and embedded finance. Speak to an expert today.
