Fireblocks Rejects Report of $2.5 Billion Visa Acquisition Talks

Fireblocks has denied a report that Visa was in late-stage talks to acquire the institutional crypto custody and stablecoin infrastructure firm for roughly $2.5 billion. The company swatted the story down within hours of its publication.

"We are aware of the rumors about a possible acquisition of Fireblocks by Visa. This is news to us, and not true at present time," Fireblocks told The Block on Thursday.

The denial landed the same day Axios reported, citing multiple sources, that the two sides were close to a deal. If it had gone through, the transaction would have marked Visa's first acquisition in the stablecoin sector and ranked among the largest in crypto's history — behind Coinbase's $2.9 billion purchase of Deribit in 2025 and Naver Financial's pending $10.3 billion deal for Upbit parent Dunamu.

For context on the price tag: $2.5 billion would have been a steep markdown from the $8 billion valuation Fireblocks commanded in January 2022, when it raised $550 million in a Series E round at the peak of the venture cycle. That gap tells its own story about how crypto infrastructure valuations have reset since the last boom.

Who is Fireblocks?

Founded in 2018 by Michael Shaulov, Pavel Berengoltz and Idan Ofrat — three veterans of the Israeli cybersecurity scene — the company sells the plumbing that banks, exchanges and fintechs use to hold and move digital assets.

Its customer list includes BNY Mellon, Worldpay, Revolut and Galaxy. The company says it has secured trillions of dollars in transfers across more than 150 blockchains.

Fireblocks also powers FIS's institutional bitcoin trading, underpins BNP Paribas's digital asset custody, and counts itself among the founding members of the Botanix federation, a bitcoin sidechain project.

Why did the report land on fertile ground?

Whatever the truth of the talks, the story fit an unmistakable pattern. Payment incumbents spent 2026 buying or courting the companies that run stablecoin and crypto rails rather than building the technology in-house.

The precedent is concrete:

• Mastercard agreed in March to buy BVNK for up to $1.8 billion, after takeover talks with Zerohash fell through.
• Mastercard closed the BVNK deal in August and secured a New York BitLicense along the way.
• Zerohash is now seeking a US national trust bank charter.
• Visa partnered with Zerohash in August to add stablecoin funding and payouts to Visa Direct.

Visa's own stablecoin business has scaled fast. In September, the card network said its stablecoin settlement volume had passed a $20 billion annualized run rate — more than 15 times the prior year's level.

Both card networks also joined a coalition of more than 140 companies backing Open USD, a dollar stablecoin designed to spread the economics of a $300 billion market beyond Tether and Circle.

Fireblocks has been building on the same track. It launched its own stablecoin payments network in September 2025 with over 40 participants, including Circle, Bridge, Zerohash and Yellow Card. This year it rolled out acceptance tools for neobanks and a settlement suite aimed at AI agents.

What does this change for the market?

Not much, on paper. A denial is a denial, and companies routinely dispute deal reports while negotiations continue or collapse quietly. What does change is the read on consolidation: the strategic logic that pushed Mastercard toward BVNK applies just as cleanly to Fireblocks, whose custody and tokenization stack sits at the choke point every payment network now wants to own.

So the question isn't whether this specific deal happens. It's which custody and stablecoin infrastructure firm gets absorbed next — and at what discount to 2022's valuations. With Visa's settlement volume compounding at 15x year over year and more than 140 firms now aligned behind Open USD, the acquisition window for crypto rails looks open, denied rumors or not.