Crypto M&A in the first half of 2026 ran 87 announced deals carrying $9.66 billion of disclosed value. One transaction, Bullish buying Equiniti at $4.2 billion, took 43% of that. The top four acquirers between them took 76% of the half. The remaining 83 deals shared roughly $2.3 billion.

Deal count is falling at the same time. H2 2025 carried 116 announcements against 87 in H1 2026, a drop of 25%, and the count has now declined for three straight quarters. I went through that distribution deal by deal in the crypto half.

Wider fintech shows the same compression. Global investment reached $103.1 billion across 2,100 deals in H1 2026, against 2,501 deals in the half before. More money, fewer buyers writing cheques.

I name them deliberately here, because I find an abstract buyer pool is what makes an owner overconfident.

Bullish paid $4.2 billion for Equiniti in May. Mastercard agreed up to $1.8 billion for BVNK in March. Figure took Kiavi at $717 million and IREN took Mirantis at $625 million. Payward, Kraken's parent, agreed up to $600 million for Reap. Polygon Labs committed over $250 million for Coinme and Sequence together in January.

I count six acquirers there, carrying most of the money in one sector for six months. So I would not tell a seller in stablecoin infrastructure that they are addressing a market. They are addressing a list of names I can count on one hand.

The United States absorbed $80.8 billion of H1 fintech investment across 933 deals, which averages $86.6 million per deal on my arithmetic. EMEA absorbed $11.3 billion across 626 deals, or $18 million. Asia-Pacific absorbed $4.6 billion across 350 deals, or $13 million.

I read that as the large cheques sitting mostly in one country. Hold a licence in Lithuania, Malta or Cyprus and your premium bidder is probably American. That buyer has probably never filed a change of control with your supervisor. I would add months to the timetable for that, and I would shorten the list again.

I have watched three effects land on real processes.

The median disclosed crypto deal stayed flat at $100 million across both halves of the last year while aggregate value tripled. I read that as concentration lifting the total and leaving the middle of the market untouched.

Only 24% of H1 announcements disclosed a price. I would assume your comparables are invisible to you and visible to a buyer who has run twenty processes.

A short list also removes your best lever. I treat two interested parties as a negotiation, and one interested party as an acceptance.

Build the buyer list before the process, not during it, and build it wider than the obvious names. I would add strategic acquirers in adjacent categories, financial sponsors that already own a platform in the sector, and regional players who need your passport. None of them appear on a first draft.

Then I would make the asset easy to price, because I have seen a short list get shorter every time a buyer has to guess. I want the permission set, the supervisory history, the banking relationships and the client book in one structured presentation before the first call. I costed that preparation, and what it protects, in my piece on licence premiums.

Finding buyers outside your own address book is the part I rarely see an owner manage alone. The seller side of N5Deal exists for that, with matching across a verified buyer base rather than a broker's personal contacts, and a free valuation as the starting point. You can also read the other side of the market on the live listings to see what your likely buyer is comparing you against.

I could not establish how many distinct acquirers were active across all 87 crypto deals of the half. The disclosed transactions name a handful. The 66 undisclosed ones name almost nobody, so the true buyer count could be far higher than the visible one.

I also could not verify a per-buyer breakdown of the wider $103.1 billion fintech figure. KPMG publishes it by region and segment, not by acquirer, and I would not estimate the split.

This is market commentary and not advice on any specific sale, purchase or valuation. Deal counts and disclosed values vary between data providers, average deal sizes here are arithmetic on published aggregates rather than observed prices, and buyer behaviour in one half-year does not predict the next. Before running a sale process, take the case to an M&A adviser active in your licence category and to a lawyer qualified where your entity is authorised.