Mastercard spent seven months circling ZeroHash, first as a buyer and then as a potential investor. On May 19, CoinDesk reported that Mastercard has dropped its investment plans entirely. The reason: Mastercard acquired BVNK, a London-based stablecoin infrastructure firm, for $1.8 billion. With that deal closed, the strategic rationale for owning a stake in ZeroHash collapsed.
ZeroHash, for its part, is not standing still. The Chicago-based crypto settlement and trading infrastructure company is now in talks to raise a new funding round at a valuation above $1.5 billion, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter cited by CoinDesk. That figure is higher than the $1.5 billion target the company was working with in January — itself a step down from the $2 billion the Mastercard acquisition was reportedly worth.
How the deal unwound
The arc runs from late October 2025, when Fortune reported that Mastercard was in late-stage talks to acquire ZeroHash at up to $2 billion. Within weeks, ZeroHash walked away from the deal, choosing to remain independent. By January 2026, the posture had shifted: ZeroHash was in fundraising mode at $1.5 billion while Mastercard was still reportedly weighing a smaller strategic investment. ZeroHash said at the time it was "not entertaining an acquisition by Mastercard." Then Mastercard bought BVNK. The investment conversation ended.
What ZeroHash does
ZeroHash is infrastructure — the settlement and custody rails that allow financial institutions to offer crypto services without building the compliance and operational layer themselves. It is regulated across the EU and EEA and positions itself at the institutional end of the on-ramp market. Its customers are banks, fintechs, and asset managers that want crypto exposure without holding a money transmission license in every jurisdiction. That positioning is exactly what made it attractive to Mastercard in the first place, and what makes the Mastercard-BVNK deal interesting as a counterpoint: BVNK targets the same institutional stablecoin use case from a different architecture.
What the valuation gap tells you
The original Mastercard offer valued ZeroHash at up to $2 billion. The current independent raise targets above $1.5 billion. That gap is not a collapse — a company that rejected a $2 billion acquisition and is now raising at a premium to its earlier independent fundraising target is in a defensible position. But the spread does suggest that without a strategic acquirer prepared to pay a control premium, the market puts ZeroHash closer to $1.5 billion than $2 billion on a standalone basis.
The BVNK question
Mastercard's $1.8 billion BVNK acquisition is the real story behind ZeroHash's independent path. BVNK and ZeroHash overlap significantly: both sell infrastructure that lets enterprises move money using stablecoins. Mastercard chose to own the asset rather than partner with it — and then chose BVNK over ZeroHash. That preference reveals something about what Mastercard actually wanted. BVNK is more closely integrated into payment workflows; ZeroHash is deeper in the regulated crypto-native custody and settlement layer. Mastercard appears to have decided it wants infrastructure that plugs into payment flows, not infrastructure that bridges into crypto markets.
The broader pattern
Payment networks are threading this needle carefully. Visa has pursued integrations and partnerships — on-chain settlement pilots, USDC work with Circle — without acquiring the infrastructure stack itself. PayPal built its own stablecoin. Mastercard, until BVNK, had largely followed the partnership model. The BVNK acquisition is a departure: it signals that at least one major network has decided that at $1.8 billion, owning the stablecoin rails beats licensing them.
ZeroHash's outcome from that calculation is independence, a higher fundraising floor than its last round, and no Mastercard on the cap table. Whether that is the better result depends on who buys into the new round and at what terms — details the company has not disclosed.