Stabolut

🚨 BREAKING: Kraken acquires Reap for $600M. Stripe bought Bridge for $1.1B. Mastercard bought BVNK for $1.8B. Now Kraken buys Reap for $600M. $3.5B in stablecoin infrastructure M&A in 14 months. Every category of payments company is racing to own stablecoin rails before they become as foundational as card networks. Reap is Hong Kong-based, founded in 2018, already profitable. They issue Visa corporate cards funded by stablecoins, run cross-border settlement, and serve 22,000+ businesses across Asia. ---- To me it looks like Kraken paid for distribution and licenses in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Mexico. Not for technology they could build in-house. Stablecoins and payments aren't cyclical unlike crypto trading. In a bear market Spot trading margins are collapsing. Every cycle, the spread gets thinner. Exchanges that thrive need recurring revenue from services, not transaction fees from speculation. --- Kraken has now spent roughly $2.7B on acquisitions. - NinjaTrader ($1.5B for derivatives). - Bitnomial ($550M for options). Backed (tokenized equities). And now Reap for stablecoin-powered B2B payments. That looks like a company assembling the pieces of a diversified financial services firm ahead of an IPO. The stablecoin infrastructure land grab is accelerating because B2B stablecoin payment volumes went from under $100M/month in early 2023 to over $3B/month by 2025. A 30x increase in two years. Processors want it (Stripe). Card networks want it (Mastercard). And now exchanges want it too (Kraken). The acquirers keep paying premium prices for the same thing: multi-jurisdictional licenses and live enterprise clients. The regulated plumbing. The stablecoin stack is consolidating fast. And the companies buying it are the ones who understand that the money is in moving money, not trading it. – at Romford, London