Fireblocks has denied a report claiming that Visa was in late-stage talks to acquire the institutional crypto custody and stablecoin infrastructure firm for roughly $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,” the company told The Block on Thursday.

The statement came just hours after Axios reported, citing multiple sources, that the two sides were close to a deal. The transaction would have been Visa’s first acquisition in the stablecoin sector and one of the largest in crypto’s history, behind Coinbase’s $2.9 billion purchase of Deribit in 2025 and Naver Financial’s pending $10.3 billion deal for Dunamu, the parent of crypto exchange Upbit.

The reported price would also have marked a steep discount to the $8 billion valuation Fireblocks commanded in January 2022, when it raised $550 million in a Series E round at the peak of the venture funding cycle. The gap underscores how sharply private-market valuations for crypto infrastructure have come down since the boom — even as the sector’s strategic value to payments companies has grown.

Founded in 2018 by Michael Shaulov, Pavel Berengoltz and Idan Ofrat — three veterans of the Israeli cybersecurity scene — Fireblocks sells the infrastructure that banks, exchanges and fintechs use to hold and move digital assets. Its customers include BNY Mellon, Worldpay, Revolut and Galaxy, and the company says it has secured trillions of dollars in transfers across more than 150 blockchains.

Fireblocks powers FIS’s institutional bitcoin trading, underpins BNP Paribas’s digital asset custody, and sits among the founding members of the Botanix federation, a bitcoin sidechain project.

The crypto land grab

Whatever the status of the talks, the report landed on fertile ground. Payment incumbents spent 2026 buying or courting the companies that operate stablecoin and crypto rails rather than building them from scratch.

Mastercard agreed in March to buy BVNK for up to $1.8 billion, after takeover talks with Zerohash fell through, closed the deal in August and secured a New York BitLicense — the state’s permission to conduct virtual-currency business — along the way. Zerohash, for its part, is 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 said its stablecoin settlement volume had passed a $20 billion annualized run rate, more than 15 times the prior year’s level. Both card networks have joined a coalition of more than 140 companies behind Open USD, a dollar stablecoin designed to spread the economics of a $300 billion market beyond Tether and Circle.

Fireblocks launched its own stablecoin payments network in September 2025 with over 40 participants, including Circle, Bridge, Zerohash and Yellow Card, and this year rolled out acceptance tools for neobanks along with a settlement suite aimed at AI agents. For now, the company says the reported deal is not true — leaving one of crypto’s core infrastructure providers independent even as the rails it sells have become prime territory for payments-sector M&A.

This article was written by Micah Zimmerman and originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.