What I Read This Week… Crypto acquisitions and public listings in the U.S. reached $8.2 billion across 88 transactions in the first four months of 2025, already tripling the total value of all 2024 crypto deal-making. These transactions reflect five distinct deal patterns. 1) Bitcoin treasury acquisitions, where companies like Twenty One Capital are accumulating bitcoin as their primary business model, converting corporate treasuries into bitcoin investment vehicles to capitalize on cryptocurrency appreciation (similar to MicroStrategy). 2) Mergers between traditional financial companies and crypto infrastructure companies, such as DTCC’s acquisition of Securrency, enabling traditional financial institutions to offer cryptocurrency services to clients who want exposure to both asset classes on a single platform. 3) Institutional service acquisitions, such as Ripple's purchase of Metaco, which is intended to create specialized platforms that help professional investors securely store and manage digital assets with the compliance features required by large institutions. 4) Consolidation of crypto exchanges, including Kraken's $1.5 billion purchase of futures broker NinjaTrader, as crypto platforms acquire traditional brokerages to create seamless trading between digital and conventional assets, allowing users to move effortlessly between different asset classes. 5) On-chain mergers between token-based projects, such as the merger of Fetch, Ocean Protocol, and SingularityNET, to combine user bases and offerings and accelerate the capture of network effects for their tokens. Collectively, these transactions may bridge the gap between traditional finance and decentralized finance, driving institutional adoption while creating a more integrated cryptocurrency ecosystem.