Crypto M&A Season: Power Plays

If you’re tired of speed-running whatever narrative CT is chasing this week, allow us to touch upon something different. 

The past few weeks might not have been entirely ideal for your bags, and Powell’s speech hasn’t exactly made things any clearer. Cuts, pauses, soft landing, who even knows what he meant.

Maybe markets figure it out, maybe they don’t. Either way, there’s been a different kind of action happening in the background that’s worth paying attention to.

We’re talking about mergers and acquisitions. August and September have been stacked with them.

Exchanges buying up funnels, infra teams pulling middleware into their stack, miners joining forces to survive the halving squeeze, and asset managers angling for US exposure.

It won’t pump your PnL overnight, but it shapes the landscape in ways macro headlines don’t. And in the long run, that’s more important than a 25 bps cut. So let’s get into it.

Acquisitions:

LayerZero ↳ Stargate

First up, we have LayerZero bringing Stargate back under its roof. Handsdown, the headline deal of this M&A season.

The DAO voted through a ~$110 million swap that converts all $STG into $ZRO and folds governance, revenue, and roadmap into one structure source.

From a product perspective, it’s hard not to see the upside: one token, one treasury, one strategy.

The move gives Stargate the resources to push beyond bridging, while tying a revenue-generating protocol that already touches end users deeper into the LayerZero stack.

Wormhole and a few others tried to stall the vote, and some holders argued the swap ratio undervalued STG, but 95% approval tells the story.

Two tokens and two DAOs were dragging things down. Consolidation was the only real path forward.

Kraken ↳ Breakout

Most people yawned at this one, but they shouldn’t have.

Kraken acquired Breakout, a prop trading platform that takes traders from evaluation to funded accounts.

Pass the tests, unlock up to $200K in capital, and keep as much as 90% of the profits.

It’s the FTMO or TopStep model, but plugged straight into exchange-level liquidity.

For traders, it means you can get funded without leaving the platform. For Kraken, it’s a funnel that builds loyalty and pulls more flow through their books.

Avail ↳ Arcana

Avail had already established itself as a leading modular DA layer, but what it lacked was the abstraction layer that makes multichain apps usable.

Arcana filled that gap with its SDK for auth, storage, and chain abstraction.

The deal was a full token acquisition, with XAR holders offered a 4:1 swap into AVAIL.

Clear terms, long-term vesting, and community inclusion made it stand out.

More importantly, Avail now owns the middleware that the devs were already using, instead of waiting around for adoption to catch up.

Coinbase ↳ Sensible

Coinbase has done its fair share of acquisitions, but the pickup of Sensible feels more like a thesis than a tuck-in.

Sensible was built for the everyday reality that most people just leave their coins sitting idle.

The product made it easy to put them to work. Sign up quickly, start earning, and most users actually come back with more. That kind of loyalty caught Coinbase’s attention.

Sensible winds down in October, but the idea now scales inside Coinbase, the crypto exchange that arguably caters to the highest number of retail users.

Ripple ↳ Rail

We’ve got another shot fired in the stablecoin wars. Ripple dropped $200 million on Rail, middleware that most of CT scrolls past, but every treasury team actually needs.

Rail’s already plugged into reconciliation, virtual IBANs, and cross-border flows, which makes it more than just a bolt-on.

With RLUSD about to launch, the deal gives Ripple a ready-made distribution path instead of fighting it out for scraps in DEX liquidity.

Whether that translates into meaningful adoption is another story, but paired with Ripple’s licenses and banking ties, it’s a clear attempt to position RLUSD as the stablecoin for businesses.

Kerberus ↳ Pocket Universe

Kerberus made its second pickup in under a year, this time by acquiring Pocket Universe.

Pocket Universe built its rep as a browser extension that warns users about shady transactions and rug-prone tokens across multiple chains.

Kerberus already had Sentinel3, which hasn’t missed a scam site in two years. Put the two together and you now get wallet-level protection meeting network-level detection.

RedStone ↳ Credora

RedStone’s buy of Credora shows price feeds aren’t enough anymore. Credora built risk ratings that proved their worth on Morpho, where rated vaults grew faster than unrated ones.

That intelligence is now integrated directly into RedStone’s oracles.

RedStone already secures billions across multiple chains and supply feeds for RWA markets like BlackRock’s BUIDL. The Credora acquisition allows them to plug real risk assessments into those feeds.

Mergers:

American Bitcoin ↔ Gryphon

Most people have written off Trump’s crypto plays, and for obvious reasons. But this one might actually matter.

Eric Trump’s American Bitcoin Corp just merged with Gryphon Digital Mining and is now trading on Nasdaq as ABTC.

They’ve banked $220 million, mined 215 BTC, and claim they’ll control over 15% of US hash power.

Post-halving, small and mid miners are roadkill. The only things that matter are cheap capital and scale, and going public hands ABTC both.

CoinShares ↔ Vine Hill

CoinShares is heading stateside with a $1.2 billion deal to go public on Nasdaq through a combination with Vine Hill Capital ($VCIC).

Already Europe’s biggest digital asset manager, the move sets them up to be one of the largest publicly traded players in the world.

For CoinShares, the listing is less about cash and more about reach.

Europe has been home turf, but US distribution is where the deepest capital pools sit.

Being public there means more direct access to investors who have been largely boxed out of the firm’s growth story so far.

Pending approvals, CoinShares will soon compete for flows on the same exchange as the TradFi giants it's been shadowing for years.

Strive ↔ Asset Entities

Strive’s merger with Asset Entities wrapped up this month, and the new company now trades on Nasdaq as ASST.  

Roughly $700 million is already lined up, much of it pointed straight into Bitcoin.

It’s the MicroStrategy playbook, just skipping the endless conference decks and starting with a bigger treasury from day one.

The merger gives Strive the public listing and ticker, while Asset’s crew slides into board and marketing roles.

Concluding thoughts

That’s the state of play. While everyone’s glued to candles and praying Powell saves their bags, this is what's happening behind the scenes.

Bridges are consolidating to cut governance drag. Exchanges are locking in tighter rails to keep traders onboard. Stablecoins are carving out distribution channels that don’t just rely on DEX liquidity.

None of it pumps charts tomorrow. You’re not going to wake up and see “+40% because Kraken bought a prop shop.”

Charts come and go, but deals like these are what keep the space alive. Catch you in the next round of the M&A season.