Crypto giants aren’t betting on the track—they’re betting on, “No matter how the endgame turns out, I can keep living.”
Written by: David Christopher
Compiled by: Saoirse, Foresight News
This month, three cryptocurrency companies filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11 of (U.S.) bankruptcy law, and two exchanges announced that they will soon cease operations. During the same period when the industry saw a string of major blowups, MoonPay, Circle, and Kraken all announced or rolled out trading-related deals, strengthening their own plans to build core business-supporting infrastructure.
There’s a common rule of thumb in the mature technology industry: as infrastructure gradually becomes standardized and commoditized, capital shifts toward business consolidation. The crypto industry follows the same trend, but with an extra variable: the industry landscape remains undecided. No one can say for sure which platform the mainstream will ultimately use for trading, which blockchain will carry the most value for settlement, or which USD stablecoin will become the market’s standard-issue staple.
This also fundamentally changes the underlying purpose of crypto company acquisitions. In mature markets, consolidation is done to expand profit margins; in the crypto industry, consolidation is done so that regardless of which future trading channels, underlying blockchains, and mainstream stablecoins ultimately prevail, companies can continue to operate normally. The differences in the acquisition logic of the three companies, at their core, reflect how dependent they are on these three industry endgame questions.
MoonPay: No need to bet on who wins or loses the race
MoonPay sits at the interchange between the traditional financial system and the on-chain economy. Most crypto applications need tools to complete two-way exchange between bank balances and on-chain assets. MoonPay’s business model is not tied to any single blockchain and does not rely on a particular stablecoin to occupy the mainstream.
On July 16, MoonPay acquired Glide, which is also the sixth acquisition it completed this year—continuing its established development approach. Glide enables all kinds of applications to receive funding deposits from the vast majority of tokens, wallets, exchanges, and bank cards, automatically completing token swaps and cross-chain operations to deliver the assets users need. Before this, MoonPay had already filled out capabilities such as private key management, trade execution, AI quantitative trading, and financial reconciliation through multiple rounds of acquisitions. In the past, MoonPay only handled the beginning and end of fiat entering and exiting the crypto world. Now, no matter which platform a user trades on, MoonPay is involved in the full workflow: fund transfers, trade settlement, record reconciliation, and withdrawals.
Polygon makes a clear comparison. Earlier this January, Polygon spent more than $250 million to acquire Coinme and Sequence, completing regulatory licenses, wallets, and fiat on/off-ramp capabilities for its own “open money system.” While the business modules developed by both companies are similar, Polygon’s profit maximization is built on large amounts of value accumulating on the Polygon chain. MoonPay’s earnings, meanwhile, follow user flow and are not constrained by any specific blockchain.
Circle: Must hold on to USDC’s mainstream position
Circle’s revenue highly depends on a single asset: USDC. And with the introduction of OUSD, Circle is directly facing profit pressure.
The Open Standards Alliance includes more than 140 companies such as Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, and Coinbase. The alliance rules allow partner parties to freely mint and redeem OUSD. After deducting a small management fee, participating institutions can retain most of the interest generated from reserve assets. On the day the news broke, Circle’s parent company CRCL’s share price fell by about 16%. Reserve interest is Circle’s most critical source of revenue. Even if USDC issuance remains stable, if Circle has to give up more interest to exchanges and wallet providers in exchange for continued channel support for USDC circulation, the company’s profit margins will still come under pressure.
Circle’s recently announced patent acquisition is precisely to respond to this competition. Circle bought nearly a thousand approved blockchain patents from IBM’s blockchain patent portfolio, covering multiple areas including banking, insurance, enterprise infrastructure, and security cloud services. Circle said these patents will be used to empower USDC, the Circle payments network, the Arc platform, and smart financial tools, without disclosing further details.
If profit sharing becomes the norm in the stablecoin industry, industry spreads will generally narrow, and the core basis for users to choose stablecoins will no longer be just interest income, but the supporting ecosystem: a settlement pipeline that connects banks and enterprise systems, treasury management tools for enterprise funds, and complete traceability capabilities that meet audit requirements. Compared with competing on interest alone, competition at the infrastructure layer will have longer-lasting competitiveness.
Kraken: Striving to become a comprehensive mainstream trading terminal
Coinbase, Robinhood, and Kraken are all racing to build all-in-one accounts, letting users trade assets of all categories within a single account: crypto spot, on-chain assets, stocks, derivatives, payment products, and tokenized securities. At the same time, each company is building its own on-chain trading ecosystem by leveraging the Base chain, Robinhood Chain, and the Ink chain, respectively, with the goal of bridging on-chain and off-chain markets to deliver a unified trading experience.
Kraken’s parent company, Payward, has recently finalized an acquisition agreement to take over Magic Labs’ wallet-as-a-service business. The underlying infrastructure for embedded wallets in apps such as Polymarket is also provided by Magic Labs. Currently, Kraken users don’t need to create a separate wallet to trade on-chain tokens. The platform’s tokenized stock products, xStocks, have surpassed $350 billion in cumulative trading volume. Kraken also operates the Ethereum Layer 2 network Ink, but this chain has yet to see large-scale adoption.
After acquiring Magic Labs, Kraken can deeply embed wallet functionality into its own products. When users perform on-chain operations, they don’t need to repeatedly jump to a third-party wallet; they can access on-chain markets directly within the existing app. The Ethereum Layer 2 network Ink can also leverage this underlying infrastructure to connect more conveniently with Kraken’s large existing user channels.
Industry developments over the past few weeks have confirmed that exchanges building their own on-chain trading lanes still remains full of uncertainty. Robinhood Chain went live on July 1, and three weeks later its daily active users surpassed Base. Early traffic was mainly driven by meme coin trading; now its tokenized stock trading is also taking shape. While Base still looks stronger in hard metrics such as liquidity and stablecoin reserves, Robinhood’s rapid rise proves that traditional brokerages can rely on their own user channels to quickly build a brand-new on-chain trading hub.
The triggers for multiple crypto companies going bankrupt and shutting down this month vary, but they all point to a reshuffling of the industry landscape. Meanwhile, large platforms continue to acquire various technical capabilities, strengthen their product competitiveness in the present, and position for multiple possible futures across the industry.
As the barriers to obtaining underlying infrastructure keep falling, the deciding factors in industry competition shift to product integration smoothness and the scale of the ecosystem network. Although the crypto industry has become increasingly mature, there is still ample room for competition across all major tracks.