Bloomberg: Visa in talks to buy custodian Fireblocks

Bloomberg reports that Visa is in talks to buy Fireblocks, the crypto custody infrastructure company, at a valuation of around $2.5bn. Neither side has confirmed anything and no terms are public, so the number is the only hard thing in the story.

The price against 2022

Put it next to the last number Fireblocks published. In January 2022 the company closed a $550m Series E at $8bn. A $2.5bn price is 69% below that mark, four and a half years later.

“The round brings total funding to over $1 billion and makes Fireblocks the highest valued digital asset infrastructure provider.”

— Fireblocks, Series E announcement, January 2022

That gap splits the cap table rather than the company. Total funding raised is above $1bn, so in aggregate the backers would get their money back and more. Anyone who bought at the 2022 valuation takes the whole markdown, which is the position most of the 2021 and 2022 private rounds are now in across this industry.

What Visa would get

What Visa would be buying is plumbing, not a brand. At the Series E, Fireblocks held $45bn in assets under custody, had moved more than $2tn through its platform and served over 800 customers. It has since bought the authentication startup Dynamic, extending from crypto custody toward the consumer end of the same pipe. The business it sells is narrow and unglamorous: a custodial wallet that an institution can hand to a compliance officer, with the keys split so no single person holds them.

On Visa's side of the table the sum is small. The company moved $14.2tn of payment volume in its 2025 fiscal year, so $2.5bn is 0.018% of a single year's flow. This would not be a bet on the company. It is a line item that buys a capability Visa does not have.

Why now

The timing explains the logic better than any statement would. Two days ago Visa and Mesh announced paying straight from a wallet balance at 175 million merchant locations. Add custody and the stack is complete: the terminal, the conversion and the vault that holds what is being spent. Banks are assembling the same thing from the other direction, as German savings banks did when they started selling crypto with the bank holding the keys.

Three things settle this. Whether either company confirms, what the final price is against that 2022 mark, and how regulators classify a card network owning a custodian. The third question is the one with no precedent, because the answer decides whether this is a payments deal or a banking one.

Informational material, not investment advice. The talks are a press report, neither company has confirmed them, and no terms have been published.