Why Visa Would Buy Instead of Build

• Visa Fireblocks talks have reportedly reached a late stage, with a deal valued at about $2.5 billion.
• The price sits far below the $8 billion valuation Fireblocks reached in early 2022.
• Fireblocks would give Visa custody, wallet and stablecoin technology already used by thousands of institutions.
• Neither company has confirmed the deal, and its terms remain undisclosed.

Visa is in late-stage negotiations to acquire Fireblocks, the New York-based provider of digital asset custody and stablecoin infrastructure, in a deal that would value the company at roughly $2.5 billion, Axios reported on October 22, citing multiple sources. If completed, it would be Visa’s first acquisition in the crypto space and would give the world’s largest card network direct ownership of the technology banks, exchanges and payment firms use to store and settle digital assets. Visa launched its own stablecoin platform in July, so the more telling question is why it would spend $2.5 billion on technology it has already started to build.

Why Fireblocks would sell for less than a third of its 2022 price

In January 2022, Fireblocks raised $550 million in a Series E round led by D1 Capital Partners and Spark Capital at an $8 billion valuation. A $2.5 billion deal would land 68.75% below that mark.

The discount reflects the funding market more than the business. Investors priced crypto infrastructure during a period of near-zero interest rates, and Fireblocks quadrupled its valuation in about six months. Rate hikes later erased much of that premium across the sector. Fireblocks does not publish revenue or profit figures, so the reported price alone cannot show whether operations have weakened.

Even at the lower figure, the price would dwarf the deals Fireblocks itself has made. The company paid about $90 million for Dynamic and $130 million for TRES Finance, so a $2.5 billion sale would put it in a different weight class from the startups it has been absorbing.

Visa would gain a wallet and settlement network it never built

Fireblocks built its reputation on multiparty computation (MPC), a method that splits the key controlling a wallet among several parties so no single device or employee can move funds alone. Around that core it added wallet-as-a-service for banks, stablecoin issuance tools, tokenization and treasury automation.

The bigger prize is the Fireblocks Network, which links banks, exchanges, custodians and payment providers so they can transfer assets directly. The company says it serves more than 2,500 enterprises across over 200 blockchains and has processed more than $16 trillion in cumulative volume. That figure is not revenue or assets under custody. Fireblocks Trust Company also holds a New York qualified custody charter, granted by the NYDFS in May 2024.

VSP and Visa Direct explain why Visa is shopping now

Visa launched its Visa Stablecoin Platform (VSP) on July 16, an enterprise tool for minting, holding and redeeming stablecoins. On October 15, USDC-based prefunding for Visa Direct went live with Inyo Global, letting businesses fund cross-border payouts in near real time instead of parking cash abroad days ahead. Visa also supports more than 160 stablecoin-linked card programs.

What VSP lacks is connections. A stablecoin platform only works if the banks, exchanges and payment firms on the other side of a transfer are plugged into it, and Fireblocks already links more than 2,500 of them. Building that network from scratch would mean persuading each institution to integrate a new system, a process that can take years. Competition adds pressure. Mastercard has already closed its $1.8 billion purchase of stablecoin infrastructure firm BVNK, a company Visa itself had backed through a strategic investment in 2025. Visa funded the startup and watched its rival buy it. Neither Visa nor Fireblocks has said the business would be merged into VSP.

Stablecoins already overtook Bitcoin on Fireblocks’ network

Fireblocks spent the past year moving toward payments. Its $130 million purchase of TRES Finance in January, reported by Fortune, followed the Dynamic deal by three months.  Banks need reconciliation and audit trails as much as secure wallets, and TRES supplied them.

Adam Levine of Fireblocks Financial Services told Markets Media in a 2026 interview that stablecoins had overtaken Bitcoin as the network’s top source of transaction volume over the previous 12 to 18 months. A company built to secure crypto trading now earns more of its activity from dollar-denominated payments than from Bitcoin.

Euronet and Mastercard-linked clients face a neutrality test

Three days before the Axios report, Fireblocks and Euronet Worldwide expanded their partnership into white-label stablecoin-funded cards. That deal shows the core risk. Infrastructure providers sell neutrality, and some Fireblocks clients compete with Visa or work with Mastercard. Fireblocks counts Worldpay, BNY Mellon and Revolut among its clients, and a card processor like Worldpay sits in the middle of Visa and Mastercard transactions alike. Clients in that position may hesitate to route settlement through a network owned by one of the two card schemes.

October 27 earnings and NYDFS review are the next checkpoints

Visa reports fiscal fourth-quarter results on October 27, where analysts will likely press management on stablecoin strategy, even if executives decline to discuss an unannounced deal. Any signed agreement would also need regulatory clearance, including NYDFS review of the change of control at Fireblocks Trust Company, so Fireblocks would likely keep operating independently for months after any signing. Independent custody rivals such as Anchorage Digital and BitGo would then compete against two card networks that own their crypto infrastructure outright.