Axios reported on Oct. 22, 2026, that Visa held late-stage talks to buy Fireblocks for about $2.5 billion1. Michael Shaulov co-founded Fireblocks and still runs it as chief executive. Fireblocks called the report untrue, telling CoinDesk, "This is news to us, and not true at present time."
That price sits 69 percent below Fireblocks' 2022 valuation of $8 billion2. D1 Capital Partners and Spark Capital led that 2022 funding round.
Read that denial, and the easy story writes itself: a card network wants deeper into a custody business that keeps growing stronger. The price undercuts that story. $2.5 billion reads as a discount, the deepest reported markdown in crypto infrastructure this year. A business growing stronger rarely sells for a third of the price it fetched in that 2022 round.
Fireblocks stays private, so its reported price is the only test available. BitGo Holdings trades in public daylight, and its ticker tells a similar story. Its initial public offering priced at $18 a share on Jan. 22, 2026, valuing the custody and staking firm at roughly $2.08 billion3. The stock closed at $5.53 on Oct. 23, 2026, at 20:00 UTC4. That price gives BitGo a market capitalization near $650 million, or about $0.65 billion, a drop of 69 percent from its IPO price.
BitGo's own prospectus leaned on custody as the safe part of its story. Custody and staking supplied more than 80 percent of its real economic revenue, underwriters told investors in January3. That revenue was worth $160 million to $170 million a year. By October 2026, nine months after that January IPO, the company's own chief executive wants custody fees gone from that mix entirely.
Fireblocks' reported price and BitGo's stock each sit 69% below their peaks, Oct. 23, 2026
Company valuations in billions of dollars, from each firm's peak price to its value on Oct. 23, 2026
- Peak valuation
- Value on Oct. 23, 2026
Sources: Cointelegraph [2]; StockAnalysis.com [4].
Read the chart as a table
| Item | Peak valuation | Value on Oct. 23, 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Fireblocks | $8B | $2.5B |
| BitGo | $2.08B | $0.65B |
BitGo's own chief executive names the reason plainly. Mike Belshe told Bloomberg in Singapore on Oct. 6, 2026, that prime brokerage should become the company's main engine, ahead of custody fees5. "We would like it to be 100% of our revenue," Belshe said. “Nobody wants to pay for custody. We don't want to charge you for custody.”
BitGo's own numbers back him up. Its margin on digital asset sales fell to 17 basis points in the second quarter of 20266. That margin stood at 32 basis points the quarter before, crypto.news reported. A basis point equals a hundredth of a percentage point. BitGo kept about 17 cents for every $1,000 it moved through its platform that summer.
BitGo's digital asset margin fell from 32 to 17 basis points between Q1 and Q2 2026
BitGo's margin on digital asset sales, in basis points, by quarter in 2026
- Q2 2026: 17 bps
- Q1 2026: 32 bps
Source: crypto.news [6].
Read the chart as a table
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Q1 2026 | 32 bps |
| Q2 2026 | 17 bps |
Boston Consulting Group reads the same market in the opposite direction. Tibor Merey is a BCG managing director and partner. He published a report with Ripple on Oct. 22, 2026, that names custody the ground every other digital finance service stands on7. “Digital asset custody is no longer simply about protecting assets. It is turning into the layer that every other digital finance service runs on and becoming a strategic capability that determines how financial institutions participate in digital finance,” Merey said.
Ripple's commissioned research gives Merey's case its number. More than 30 percent of digital assets outside centralized exchanges already sit in institutional custody arrangements, the BCG report found8. The same report estimates custody could add $80 million to $100 million in profit for a regional bank. That bank would need $200 billion to $300 billion in assets. Usage, and the profit it can unlock elsewhere, keeps climbing even as the price for custody alone keeps falling.
That tension is the whole story. Institutions keep increasing how much custody they use. The price anyone pays for it keeps falling anyway. Who pays for that gap, and who profits from closing it?
Visa profits if it buys the infrastructure cheap and later prices its own customers for everything built on top of it. Fireblocks and BitGo's early investors absorb the loss on custody alone, the business each one built its early valuation on. Clients carry the smallest risk today. A card network with Visa's balance sheet secures assets at least as well as a startup running thin margins.
Watch what Visa charges for the services it bundles on top of custody once the infrastructure belongs to Visa. That is where the business model moves next.
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Sources
- Ian Allison, "Crypto custody specialist Fireblocks denies it's in talks to be acquired by Visa," CoinDesk, Oct. 22, 2026, https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/10/22/crypto-custody-specialist-fireblocks-denies-its-in-talks-to-be-acquired-by-visa
- Nate Kostar, "Fireblocks Pushes Back on Reported $2.5B Visa Deal," Cointelegraph, Oct. 22, 2026, https://cointelegraph.com/news/fireblocks-disputes-report-of-25b-visa-acquisition-talks
- Sam Reynolds, "BitGo prices IPO at $18, pitching custody growth over crypto trading swings," CoinDesk, Jan. 21, 2026, https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/01/21/bitgo-prices-ipo-at-usd18-pitching-custody-growth-over-crypto-trading-swings
- StockAnalysis.com Staff, "BitGo Holdings (BTGO) Stock Price," StockAnalysis.com, Oct. 23, 2026, https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/btgo/
- John Chen, "BitGo shifts beyond crypto custody with prime brokerage push," CryptoBriefing, Oct. 6, 2026, https://cryptobriefing.com/bitgo-prime-brokerage-main-revenue-engine/
- Olivia Stephanie, "BitGo shifts focus from crypto custody to trading, lending," crypto.news, Oct. 6, 2026, https://crypto.news/bitgo-shifts-from-custody-to-trading-lending/
- Tibor Merey, Bernhard Kronfellner, "Digital Asset Custody Is Evolving from Safekeeping into Core Financial Infrastructure," Boston Consulting Group, Oct. 22, 2026, https://www.bcg.com/press/22october2026-digital-asset-custody-safekeeping-into-core-financial-infrastructure
- Varinder Singh, "Ripple and BCG Report Uncovers Why Financial Institutions Are Betting Big on Custody," CoinGape, Oct. 22, 2026, https://coingape.com/ripple-and-bcg-report-uncovers-why-financial-institutions-are-betting-big-on-custody/