Bitcoin Magazine

Fireblocks Denies Report of $2.5 Billion Visa Takeover Talks

Fireblocks has denied a report that Visa is in late-stage talks to buy the institutional crypto custody and stablecoin infrastructure firm for around $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 denial came hours after Axios reported, citing multiple sources, that the two sides were close to a deal. It 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 Upbit parent Dunamu.

The reported price would have been a steep markdown from 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 cycle. Founded in 2018 by Michael Shaulov, Pavel Berengoltz and Idan Ofrat, three veterans of the Israeli cybersecurity scene, the company sells the plumbing that banks, exchanges and fintechs use to hold and move digital assets. 

Its customers include BNY Mellon, Worldpay, Revolut and Galaxy, and it 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 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 takeover talks with Zerohash fell through, closed that deal in August and secured a New York BitLicense 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 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 and a settlement suite aimed at AI agents. 

This post Fireblocks Denies Report of $2.5 Billion Visa Takeover Talks first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

TL;DR

• Fiserv’s digital-asset platform is live, with Bank of North Dakota’s Roughrider Coin as its first production use case.
• Roughrider Coin transactions are processed on Solana, while VersaBank serves as issuer and Fireblocks supplies tokenization and security infrastructure.
• The deployment gives Solana a live role inside a regulated interbank payment product rather than another retail crypto application.

Solana has picked up a very different kind of workload: moving a bank-backed stablecoin inside a US financial institution network.

Fiserv said on October 1 that its digital-asset platform is now live with financial-institution clients. The first production use case is Roughrider Coin, a dollar-backed stablecoin created for Bank of North Dakota and designed to make interbank money movement more efficient across the state.

Transactions run on Solana.

The stack combines banking, tokenization and a public blockchain

Roughrider Coin is not simply a token deployed by an anonymous smart-contract team.

VersaBank serves as issuer, Fireblocks provides digital-asset infrastructure and tokenization services, and Fiserv connects the product into financial-institution systems. Solana handles blockchain transaction processing underneath that structure.

That division of roles is what makes the deployment interesting.

Traditional banks are unlikely to replace their entire technology stack with a crypto wallet. They are much more likely to adopt blockchain settlement when it is embedded inside vendors, compliance systems and operational processes they already understand.

Bitcoinist has followed the same pattern in other markets. SoFi launched a bank-issued stablecoin across Ethereum and Solana, while Western Union rolled out USDPT on Solana.

Solana is increasingly being used as payment infrastructure

The network’s reputation was built heavily around fast trading, memecoins and decentralized exchanges.

Stablecoins are changing the composition of activity. Bitcoinist reported this summer that Solana’s stablecoin market cap crossed $15 billion, giving payment and treasury applications a much deeper liquidity base.

A state-linked banking use case pushes the network another step in that direction.

It does not mean Bank of North Dakota is speculating on SOL. The blockchain is being used as settlement infrastructure beneath a dollar-denominated financial product.

The bigger question is whether Fiserv can repeat the model

One bank stablecoin is useful evidence, but Fiserv’s distribution is what could make the story much larger.

The company supplies technology to financial institutions at scale. If its digital-asset platform becomes something banks can adopt through an existing vendor relationship, blockchain settlement stops being a bespoke innovation project and starts looking more like another banking feature.

Roughrider Coin is the first live use case. The number of institutions that follow will tell us whether it becomes a template.

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This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.