Fireblocks denies report of $2.5 billion Visa acquisition talks

Fireblocks denied a report that Visa is in late-stage talks to acquire the crypto custody and stablecoin infrastructure company for about $2.5 billion. "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," a Fireblocks spokesperson said, quoted by CoinDesk.

The denial landed hours after Axios reported, citing multiple sources, that the two sides were close to a deal at that price, Bitcoin Magazine reported. Visa did not respond to requests for comment about the talks.

The account rests on two competing statements rather than documents. Axios built its story on multiple unidentified sources, and the Fireblocks response arrived in words to reporters within hours of publication. Neither company has published an agreement, term sheet or other record of the reported talks.

Timing shapes how the denial reads. Axios published first, the Fireblocks response followed within hours, CoinDesk put out its own account at 10:37 a.m. EDT on Oct. 22, and the update carrying Coinbase's denial went out at 15:24 UTC the same day. Visa's position amounts to no comment, which neither confirms nor rules out the talks the Axios sources described.

A $2.5 billion purchase would still rank among the biggest deals in crypto, and it would have been Visa's first acquisition in the stablecoin sector. It sits behind Coinbase's $2.9 billion acquisition of Deribit in 2025 and Naver Financial's pending $10.3 billion agreement for Upbit parent Dunamu, according to Bitcoin Magazine. The price also implies a steep markdown from the last valuation Fireblocks disclosed: $8 billion in January 2022, when it raised $550 million in a Series E round. At $2.5 billion, that works out to roughly a 69 percent discount.

Fireblocks was not the only potential buyer in the discussion. Sources told CoinDesk that Coinbase had come up in informal sale conversations over the previous three or four weeks, and Coinbase later denied it was involved in a possible transaction. CoinDesk added that denial to its article in an update at 15:24 UTC on Oct. 22.

The reported talks pointed at infrastructure rather than users. Fireblocks, founded in 2018 by Michael Shaulov, Pavel Berengoltz and Idan Ofrat, sells custody and transfer tools to banks, exchanges and fintechs, with customers including BNY Mellon, Worldpay, Revolut and Galaxy, Bitcoin Magazine reported. The company launched a stablecoin payments network in September 2025 with more than 40 participants, among them Circle, Bridge, Zerohash and Yellow Card, and this year rolled out acceptance tools for neobanks and a settlement suite aimed at AI agents.

Its core product is custody built on multi-party computation, which keeps pieces of a signing key in separate locations so no single holder can move funds alone. Fireblocks says its network has secured trillions of dollars of transfers across more than 150 blockchains, a figure the company publishes about itself rather than an audited measure.

Visa has been buying and partnering across the same layer of the industry. Payment incumbents spent 2026 buying or courting the companies that handle stablecoin and crypto rails rather than building them from scratch. Mastercard agreed in March to buy BVNK for up to $1.8 billion, after its own takeover talks with Zerohash fell through, and closed that deal in August; 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, and in September it said its stablecoin settlement volume had passed a $20 billion annualized run rate, more than 15 times the level of a year earlier. Both card networks have also joined the coalition behind Open USD, a dollar stablecoin designed to spread the economics of a $300 billion market beyond Tether and Circle.

Fireblocks kept expanding while the acquisition talk circulated. It powers institutional bitcoin trading at FIS and custody work at BNP Paribas and sits among the founding members of the Botanix bitcoin sidechain federation. Its founders came from the Israeli cybersecurity scene and built the company into a supplier of the plumbing that banks, exchanges and fintechs use to hold and move digital assets.