Tokenization M&A is accelerating. Most buyers don't know what they're actually acquiring.
When Kraken acquired Backed Finance in late 2025, most of the commentary focused on what the deal signaled about crypto exchanges moving into traditional finance. Within months, Bybit had deployed xStocks, tokenized equities built on Backed's infrastructure, to users across multiple jurisdictions. The speed of that deployment was the tell. This was not a product acquisition. It was an infrastructure acquisition, and the buyers understood exactly what they had bought.
Most corporate development teams working on tokenization deals right now do not have that clarity. They are applying due diligence frameworks built for SaaS businesses or payments processors, where the value sits in recurring revenue, net revenue retention, and customer concentration. In a tokenized asset platform, those metrics exist but they are not the asset. The asset is a set of capabilities that most standard financial models do not even have a line item for.
That gap is going to cost some buyers badly.
What Backed Finance actually was
Backed Finance was a Swiss-based issuer of tokenized securities: equities and bonds wrapped into blockchain-native instruments, structured to be compliant with Swiss DLT (distributed ledger technology) law. Its products, including bCSPX (a tokenized version of the iShares Core S&P 500 ETF), were issued under the Swiss DLT Act framework, which came into force in 2021 and created a legal category for ledger-based securities with genuine ownership rights.
The company was not large by conventional revenue metrics. It was valuable because it had already done the hard work: obtaining the regulatory permissions, building the legal structures for security token issuance, establishing relationships with the underlying ETF and bond issuers, and constructing smart contract architecture that could be audited and relied upon by institutional counterparties.
Bybit's ability to launch xStocks rapidly after the Kraken deal closed is a direct consequence of that pre-built infr