Every deal that moved stablecoin payment infrastructure this year, with what it cost, when it closed, and why the buyer said it bought. Updated as deals land.
Three acquisitions and one venture round reshaped who owns the plumbing behind stablecoin payments in 2026, and one collapsed approach reshaped it as much as any of them. Three of those events landed in the last eleven weeks.
This page exists because deal coverage disappears. A transaction gets a day of headlines, the price is reported inconsistently, and six months later nobody can reconstruct what was paid or what the buyer said it was buying. What follows is the record, kept in one place.
What counts as an entry
The ledger has a boundary, stated once so the omissions make sense.
An entry qualifies when the target’s main business is stablecoin payment infrastructure: issuance, card enablement, on-chain settlement, treasury, or cross-border rails built on tokens. The buyer’s motive has to be that infrastructure and not something adjacent.
That rule excludes several large 2026 transactions. Payward’s $550 million purchase of the derivatives exchange Bitnomial, closed in May, is a licensing play, not a payments one. Wallet infrastructure deals sit at the edge and are noted where the buyer tied them to payments. Venture rounds are included when the round repriced a company that other buyers were circling, since a valuation is a deal term for everyone who wanted the asset.
Every figure below is the one the parties or their filings stated. Where a price is a maximum including contingent consideration, it says so, because “up to” and “for” are not the same number and press coverage routinely collapses them.
The baseline these prices sit against
Two earlier deals set the range that 2026 buyers negotiated inside.
Stripe bought Bridge for about $1.1 billion in October 2024, which was the transaction that established stablecoin infrastructure as something a payments company buys rather than builds. Ripple bought the prime broker Hidden Road for about $1.25 billion in October 2025, extending the pattern into institutional plumbing.
Both landed near the same number, and both were the largest deal in the sector at the time. What changed in 2026 is that the ceiling moved and the buyer list widened. A card network, an exchange parent, and a stablecoin issuer all closed or announced acquisitions within the same nine months.
Mastercard and BVNK, up to $1.8 billion, closed August 3
The largest of the year, and the one with the most complicated path to it.
Mastercard announced the acquisition on March 17 at a value reported by Bloomberg and CNBC at up to $1.8 billion, including roughly $300 million in contingent consideration. The company completed the acquisition on August 3. BVNK builds infrastructure connecting fiat and on-chain payments, letting businesses hold, move and convert value across both.
Jorn Lambert, Mastercard’s chief product officer, gave the reason in the closing announcement, saying stablecoins are “increasingly addressing real-world needs in areas like cross-border B2B payments, remittances, payouts, settlement and treasury flows.” His framing elsewhere has been consistent: in a world where fiat, stablecoins and tokenized deposits coexist, the value sits in connecting the rails.
Read alongside his March comment to Fortune that the existing card business has “no problem to be solved,” the position is coherent. Mastercard did not buy BVNK to fix cards. It bought reach into payment flows that cards never served.
Payward and Reap, up to $600 million, closed July 2
The buyer here is Kraken’s parent, and the target is a card business.
Payward announced the deal in May and closed $600 million on July 2, with the final figure subject to earnouts. Reap is a Hong Kong stablecoin payments company running card issuance and stablecoin treasury management, and it continues as a standalone brand inside Payward.
Arjun Sethi, co-chief executive of Payward and Kraken, described the ambition in terms that go past the immediate product: “We are building the rails for an open, global financial system, where stablecoins are the settlement medium and tokenized assets are the native collateral underneath every transaction.”
Reap co-founder Daren Guo pointed at the operational thesis instead, saying the combination would “power the agentic payment flows that will define the next generation of embedded card issuance and financial operations.”
The deal closed while Payward awaited a decision on the national trust bank charter it applied for in May, which is the context that makes a card-issuing acquisition make sense. An exchange buying card rails and a bank charter in the same year is assembling something other than an exchange.
Payward also bought the embedded wallet provider Magic Labs on July 27 for an undisclosed sum, which belongs here as a footnote to the same strategy.
Read more: Circle turns USDC into a payments network with rails of its own • Rain’s $250 million round prices stablecoin card plumbing
Circle and Tazapay, $400 million in stock, announced September 10
The most recent entry, and the only one still open.
Circle announced on September 10 that it buys Tazapay for $400 million in stock. Tazapay is a Singapore cross-border payments company with more than $25 billion in annualized payment volume, over 60 banking and fintech partners, and payout rails reaching more than 100 markets. Closing is expected in 2027, subject to approvals including the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
Jeremy Allaire framed it as distribution for the token, saying “stablecoin settlement is becoming core infrastructure in the global economy” and that pairing USDC with Tazapay’s banking relationships, local payout rails and institutional customers would accelerate USDC adoption worldwide. Irfan Ganchi, Circle’s senior vice president of payments, put the mechanical version, saying it extends coverage to move money anywhere stablecoin payments are being adopted.
Note the direction of travel. Circle is an issuer buying local payout capability, which is the opposite of the card networks buying token capability. Both sides are purchasing the half they lack, and what Circle builds on top of that is covered separately in our reporting on Circle’s payment network.
The deal that did not happen, and why it matters
Mastercard’s path to BVNK ran through a company that refused to sell.
Fortune reported in October 2025 that Mastercard was in talks to buy Zerohash for as much as $2 billion. By January, those talks had ended without a deal. A Zerohash spokesperson was unusually direct about it, saying the company was not entertaining an acquisition by Mastercard and that remaining independent best positioned it to keep building for customers. Zerohash had raised $104 million at a $1 billion valuation four months earlier, which is the kind of thing that makes a founder confident.
Mastercard then considered a strategic investment instead, and by May had dropped that too. Zerohash went looking for funding above a $1.5 billion valuation on its own.
Two months after the talks collapsed, Mastercard announced BVNK. The sequence is worth recording because it sets a market price for refusal: the asset that said no is raising above $1.5 billion, and the asset that said yes sold for up to $1.8 billion.
BVNK had been approached before. Coinbase reportedly pursued it at around $2 billion in 2025 and the deal collapsed before signing. Two of the largest potential buyers in the sector chased the same two companies, and only one of those three approaches produced a transaction.
Rain, $250 million at a $1.95 billion valuation, January 9
Not an acquisition, but it set the price that the year’s buyers were measured against.
Rain announced $250 million on January 9 at a $1.95 billion valuation, led by ICONIQ with Sapphire Ventures, Dragonfly, Bessemer, Galaxy Ventures, FirstMark, Lightspeed, Norwest and Endeavor Catalyst participating. Chief executive Farooq Malik said the money was for bringing the infrastructure to new markets and helping more enterprises go live quickly.
The relevance to the acquisition column is the price it implied. A card enabler worth nearly $2 billion in January makes a $600 million acquisition of a smaller enabler look reasonable in July, and it gives every other company in the category a number to point at. What that layer does and why it is concentrated is the subject of our piece on the card enablers.
What the prices imply, where the disclosure allows
A price on its own is not a valuation, and only one of this year’s deals was published enough to compute anything.
Circle disclosed both sides. It is paying $400 million in stock for a company processing more than $25 billion in annualized payment volume, which puts the price at roughly 1.6 percent of the volume flowing through the target each year. That is not a revenue multiple, since Tazapay’s take rate is not public, but it is a number a corporate development team can hold against its own pipeline.
Nothing comparable exists for the others. Mastercard did not publish BVNK’s volume, revenue, or customer count in either the announcement or the closing release. Payward disclosed no operating figures for Reap. Both companies described what the target does, and neither said how much it does.
That gap is worth naming instead of filling with estimates. Sector valuations are being discussed based on four headline prices and almost no operating data, which means most published multiples for stablecoin infrastructure are constructed from private figures the authors did not see.
The one hard comparison available is between prices. Up to $1.8 billion bought a fiat-to-chain payments platform. Up to $600 million bought a regional card issuer with treasury tooling. $400 million is buying payout rails across 100 markets. Those three numbers describe a rough ordering of what buyers currently pay for breadth, for a card license, and for local reach.
What the ledger shows
Four patterns are visible once the entries sit together.
Buyers are purchasing the capability they do not have. A card network bought on-chain infrastructure. An issuer bought local payout rails. An exchange bought card issuance. Nobody bought more of what they already did.
Prices cluster by what the target owns. Companies holding licenses, banking relationships and live payment volume cleared several hundred million to nearly two billion. That is the going rate for regulated connectivity, and it explains why the same handful of names appear on every buyer’s list.
Contingent consideration is doing real work. Mastercard’s roughly $300 million contingent portion and Payward’s earnouts mean the headline prices are ceilings. Anyone modeling sector valuations from press coverage is probably modeling the maximum.
And the sellers hold the stronger hand. Zerohash walked away from $2 billion and is raising instead. BVNK survived one collapsed approach before selling to a different buyer the following year. In a sector this thin, a target with a license and live volume can wait.
How this ledger is kept
Three rules govern this page, stated so readers can hold us to them.
Every entry carries the buyer, the target, the stated consideration, the announcement date, and the closing date where one exists, plus the buyer’s reasoning in its own words instead of ours. Entries move between the closed, announced, and abandoned groupings as their status changes, and nothing is deleted when it does, because a deal that fell apart is part of the record.
Prices are reported as the parties stated them. Where a figure comes from press reporting instead of a filing or a release, this page says so. Where a maximum includes contingent consideration, the contingent portion is named separately whenever it has been disclosed.
Corrections are marked in place. A deal ledger that quietly edits a price it got wrong is worth less than one that shows its working.
What is likely to land next
Three things would each add an entry before the year ends.
Whether Zerohash sells to anyone. It refused Mastercard, lost Mastercard’s investment interest, and is raising independently, which leaves an unattached asset of scale in a market of buyers. The next approach it receives is the entry to watch.
Whether the card enabler layer consolidates further. Payward bought one enabler, and Rain is priced as an acquirer rather than a target, which leaves the smaller programs in the category as the obvious next transactions.
And whether any issuer buys distribution the way Circle just did. Circle is paying $400 million in stock for payout rails reaching a hundred markets. Every other issuer facing the same coverage problem has now seen what that costs.
The pattern underneath all of it is straightforward enough to state plainly. The companies that spent the last three years building regulated connections between tokens and banks are being bought by the companies that already have the customers, and the prices being paid are the market’s estimate of how long it would take to build that connectivity instead.