While several crypto firms are collapsing or shutting down, MoonPay, Circle and Kraken are still buying. This month alone, three crypto companies filed for Chapter 11 protection in the United States and two exchanges said they were preparing to cease operations. At the same time, the three larger firms announced or completed deals aimed at tightening control over infrastructure tied to their core businesses.
The article was written by David Christopher and translated by Saoirse for Foresight News.
Why crypto acquirers are buying differently
In mature technology sectors, infrastructure tends to become standardized over time, pushing capital toward business integration. Crypto is moving in the same direction, but with an extra layer of uncertainty: the market’s long-term structure is still unsettled.
No one knows which platform will become the main venue for user trading, which blockchain will carry the most value settlement, or which dollar stablecoin will emerge as the default market standard. That changes the motive behind acquisitions. In a mature market, consolidation is often about lifting margins. In crypto, consolidation can be a way to survive across several possible end states rather than betting everything on just one.
That is what separates the logic behind MoonPay, Circle and Kraken. Each company depends differently on those three unresolved questions: distribution, chain dominance and stablecoin leadership.
MoonPay: building without picking a winner
MoonPay sits at the point where traditional finance connects with the onchain economy. Most crypto apps need tools that convert bank balances into onchain assets and back again. MoonPay’s model does not rely on any single blockchain, and it does not depend on one stablecoin becoming dominant.
On July 16, MoonPay acquired Glide, its sixth acquisition this year. The deal fits its existing playbook. Glide allows apps to accept deposits from most tokens, wallets, exchanges and bank cards, then automatically handle token swaps and cross-chain operations before delivering the asset a user actually wants.
Before that, MoonPay had already used earlier acquisitions to add private key management, trade execution, AI quantitative trading and financial reconciliation tools. It once handled mostly the entry and exit points between fiat and crypto. Now it is moving deeper into the transaction flow. No matter where a user trades, MoonPay wants a place in fund transfers, trade settlement, bookkeeping and withdrawals.
The original report contrasts that approach with Polygon. In January, Polygon spent more than $250 million to acquire Coinme and Sequence, adding compliance licenses, wallet functions and fiat on- and off-ramp capabilities for its “open money system.” The business modules are similar, but the economic exposure is not. Polygon benefits most if value accumulates on Polygon itself. MoonPay benefits by following users wherever they go.
Circle: defending USDC’s position
Circle faces a different problem. Its revenue is heavily tied to a single asset, USDC, and the emergence of OUSD has put pressure on that model.
The Open Standard Alliance includes more than 140 companies, among them Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock and Coinbase. Under the alliance rules, partners can mint and redeem OUSD for free. After paying a small management fee, participating institutions can retain most of the interest generated by reserve assets. On the day the news landed, shares of Circle parent company CRCL fell about 16%.
That matters because reserve interest is Circle’s main source of revenue. Even if USDC supply remains steady, margins would still come under pressure if Circle has to give up a larger share of that interest to exchanges and wallet providers in order to keep distribution channels supporting USDC.
Against that backdrop, Circle’s recent patent acquisition looks like a move to strengthen areas around the stablecoin rather than relying only on reserve economics. Circle said it bought nearly 1,000 granted patents from IBM’s blockchain patent portfolio, covering banking, insurance, enterprise infrastructure and secure cloud services. The company said the patents will support USDC, the Circle Payments Network, the Arc platform and smart financial tools, but did not disclose further details.
If revenue sharing becomes standard across the stablecoin sector and spreads compress, the basis for user choice may shift. Yield alone may not be enough. Settlement links between banks and enterprise systems, treasury tools for business users and traceability that can satisfy audit requirements could become more important over time than simply offering better economics on reserves.
Kraken: pushing toward an all-in-one trading endpoint
Kraken’s acquisition logic is tied to the race to build a broad trading account. According to the report, Coinbase, Robinhood and Kraken are all trying to create a single account through which users can trade multiple asset classes, including spot crypto, onchain assets, stocks, derivatives, payment products and tokenized securities.
At the same time, each company is building its own onchain trading ecosystem through Base, Robinhood Chain and Ink. The goal is to connect onchain and offchain markets inside one experience.
Kraken parent company Payward recently finalized an agreement to acquire the wallet-as-a-service business of Magic Labs. The infrastructure behind embedded wallets in apps such as Polymarket is provided by Magic Labs. The report says Kraken users already do not need to create a separate wallet to trade onchain tokens. It also says Kraken’s tokenized stock product, xStocks, has passed $350 billion in cumulative trading volume. Kraken also operates Ink, an Ethereum layer-2 network that has yet to see mass adoption.
With Magic Labs folded in, Kraken can embed wallet functionality more deeply inside its own products. Users carrying out onchain actions would not need to keep bouncing to third-party wallets and could access onchain markets directly from the existing app. Ink could also use the same infrastructure to connect more easily with Kraken’s existing user channels.
The chain race is still open
Recent market developments suggest exchange-led onchain ecosystems remain highly fluid. Robinhood Chain launched on July 1. Three weeks later, its daily active users had surpassed Base, with early traffic driven mainly by memecoin trading. Its tokenized stock activity has also started to take shape, according to the report.
Base still leads on harder measures such as liquidity and stablecoin balances. Even so, Robinhood’s rapid rise shows that a traditional brokerage can use its built-in distribution to establish a new onchain trading venue quickly.
Large platforms are buying optionality
The immediate triggers behind recent bankruptcies and shutdowns differ from one company to another, but they point to the same broader reality: the industry structure is still being rearranged. On the other side of that shakeout, larger platforms are acquiring technical capabilities piece by piece, improving current products while also positioning for several different futures at once.
As the barrier to obtaining infrastructure keeps falling, the competitive edge is shifting toward how smoothly products are integrated and how large an ecosystem a platform can build. Crypto may be maturing, but the room for competition across major segments is still wide open.