The encryption industry has launched a wave of mergers and acquisitions: giants are copying, Web3 ecology is reconstructing
Author: ShainCatcher
The world of encryption in 2025 is undergoing an unprecedented wave of mergers and acquisitions。
New mergers and acquisitions occur almost daily, from the DeFi agreement to the regulatory company, from the payment company to the infrastructure service provider. Kraken swallows the futures trading platform Ninjatrader, Coinbase, with $1.5 billion, and recently successively takes over Deribit and the chain-based fundraising platform Echo. According to RootData, the number of encrypted mergers and acquisitions from 2025 to date reached 143, an increase of 93 per cent over the same period last year, not only updating historical records。
Why are the giants interested in M&As at this time of market weakness? How does M&A accumulation affect markets
I. Capital for Time
Mergers and acquisitions are the most direct means for the giants to expand the battlefield and increase competitiveness。
Over the past few years, the bulk of the money in the centralization exchange has been well spent on transaction fees. However, after a shift in secondary markets and a tightening of regulations, simple trading revenues are difficult to sustain growth and external Web2 giants look at. As a result, they began to expand the battlefield through acquisitions — either by filling the ecological short board or by acquiring compliance resources。
Through M&As, giants can leapfrog long periods of autonomous R & D and market breeding and quickly integrate rivals or complementary teams under the umbrella, thereby expanding product matrices in a short period of time, for example, from spot to derivatives, from trading to payments and hosting, and enhancing the service capacity of whole-stock products。
More importantly, by purchasing entities that have received regulatory clearance or a better compliance framework, the platform has been able to obtain “identify” access to certain markets more quickly (e.g. licence plates, compliance processes or clearance corridors in a given jurisdiction), which is more time-efficient than self-building compliance teams. This is particularly important in a world of encrypted regulation and marked geographical differences。
Take Coinbase, for example. Since 2025, its M&A strategy has been almost “chain-wide”: from derivatives exchanges to chain financing platforms, to compliance custodians, covering the chain of transactions, distribution, payment, asset management, etc. An insider close to Coinbase said, "They're going to do the "Golden Map" in encryption -- not at currency prices, but in service systems."
Kraken's action has similar logic. NinjaTrader, an old player in the traditional financial circle, received it by Kraken, which amounts to buying a United States-sanctioned compliance channel to bring traditional futures customers and tools into their ecology. In the future, Kraken will be able to provide more complete derivatives and futures trading services without having to bend over。
Recent M&A incidents Source:RootData
In other wordsWhile the small projects are still burning up the next round of financing and coins, the giants are trading cash for time and acquisition for the futureI don't know。
This trend is not just the involvement of giants such as Coinbase, but also of Web2 giants such as Robinwood, Mastercard, Stripe, Soft Silver, and others, which means that Web3 is no longer just a game of entrepreneurs and diasporas, but is attracting the deep participation of traditional capital, financial institutions, and even listed companies. M&As became a bridge for them to enter Web3。
Moreover, current market conditions provide an important opportunity to increase their M&A inputs. Today, the encryption-level market continues to weaken, with the vast majority of encryption projects facing difficult financing and exit challenges and being disadvantaged in capital markets. As a result, large players with ample cash or capital market access are able to dominate merger pricing and structural design with capital advantages. For sellers, the structure of the transaction to accept equity swaps, partial cash plus shares or strategic cooperation is often more secure than tossing and issuing tokens on the open market. As a result, capitaliers have a natural advantage in M&A negotiations and are able to obtain key technologies, users and licences at a more cost-effective cost。
Two: Web3 The builder's golden cycle
The main exit route for many of the previous Web3 projects was “transmitting-up-buy-back/offset”, which was highly dependent on secondary market sentiment and vulnerable to currency fluctuations. Mergers and acquisitions provide projecters with another more stable path: integration by strategic buyers within or outside of the ecology, access to cash/equity or continued development in product lines integrated into larger platforms, giving teams and technologies a smoother way to capitalization, without placing all their hopes on the “blood-sucking” process of issuing currency。
Mergers such as Coinbase and Kraken have to some extent broadened the way the Web3 project and team value is realized. In the current winter of capital, this has also led to increased investment in the domain of market equity at the encryption level, creating confidence in more encrypted entrepreneurs。
The emergence of mergers and acquisitions in the encryption industry is not an accident, but the result of a combination of market maturity, capital restructuring and regulation with user needs. Mergers allow technology, users and compliance capabilities to be reconfigured more quickly within the encrypted market, with front-end firms using them to consolidate and expand their moats, while M&As provide a more robust exit and development path for small and medium-sized projects。
In the long run, this wave of mergers and acquisitions is expected to stimulate many encryption projects from the technology community or marketing companies to a truly commercial company with a well-defined user landscape and a solid technology, focusing on product experiences, compliance and commercial fallout. There is no doubt that this contributes to the long-term healthy development of the industry and accelerates its mainstreaming。
Of course, M&As are not panaceas. The giants still face many uncertainties in this regard, such as how to integrate the advantages of the buyer into the acquisition party at the organizational, product, compliance, customer and so forth, and often “buy a shell” if integration fails; for example, there may also be valuation bubbles that negatively affect the cash flow and profitability of the merger。
In any case, this would be of great benefit to encrypted entrepreneurs and to the long-term encryption ecology, and the market would provide a more friendly space for projects with solid farming techniques and scenes. "How can we quit if you don't give the coin?" Questions of this kind will also gradually cease to haunt entrepreneurs and builders, whose golden cycle is approaching。
The encryption industry in 2025 is at such a turning point. It's more like a capital gameThe encryption industry's path to maturityI don't know。
In the coming years, we may see that the exchange is no longer just an exchange, but rather a one-stop financial supermarket; that the wallet is not just a wallet, but a financial entry to the user's chain; and that the stable currency is not just a stable currency, but a bottom currency for instant settlement across borders。
And it all started with this wave of “mergers and acquisitions”。