S&P Global has agreed to acquire OpenZeppelin, a smart-contract security company whose open-source software is widely used across the stablecoin and tokenized-fund market. The deal will bring smart-contract security into the traditional financial information company’s growing digital-asset business. Financial terms were not disclosed, while S&P said the transaction is subject to closing conditions.
OpenZeppelin’s technology is used to build and secure smart contracts that issue, transfer and manage digital assets. S&P Global said contracts built using its library have moved more than $37 trillion over time. The figure represents the cumulative value transferred through contracts using the library and does not mean that OpenZeppelin manages or holds $37 trillion in assets.
Today we are announcing that S&P Global has entered an agreement to acquire OpenZeppelin.
Onchain finance is growing from an emerging market into core financial infrastructure, and the standards and rails our team and community built are becoming the rails of global finance.… pic.twitter.com/iADnpWzQ8F
— OpenZeppelin (@OpenZeppelin) September 17, 2026
The acquisition gives S&P access to a part of onchain finance that conventional financial ratings do not directly cover: the software and code behind stablecoins, tokenized funds and DeFi products.
That creates a different type of risk for financial institutions. A digital asset project may have adequate reserves or a strong credit profile but still face problems if a vulnerability exists in its smart contracts. S&P’s move indicates an interest in developing ways to assess this technology risk as banks and asset managers explore onchain financial products.
Founded in 2015, OpenZeppelin provides smart-contract security assessments and secure development services, alongside its open-source library. According to S&P, the company has completed more than 900 security engagements and identified more than 10,000 vulnerabilities before affected code reached production.
OpenZeppelin co-founder and CEO Demian Brener will continue to lead the business as a separate unit under the OpenZeppelin name, reporting to S&P Global executive leadership.
The acquisition also extends S&P Global’s existing work in digital assets. Over the past year, the company has published assessments of stablecoin stability and issued the first credit rating of a DeFi protocol, Sky.
S&P has also been expanding its presence in crypto market data. Earlier this week, it participated in a strategic investment that extended crypto data company Kaiko’s Series B to $110 million. In September, S&P Dow Jones Indices and Kaiko launched a digital asset index suite, while in March they tokenized the iBoxx U.S. Treasuries Index.
The OpenZeppelin deal therefore adds another layer to S&P’s digital-asset strategy. Instead of focusing only on the financial strength or credit characteristics of an onchain project, the company will now have access to expertise in assessing the underlying smart-contract technology.
For the wider crypto industry, the development highlights the growing connection between traditional financial institutions and the infrastructure supporting tokenized assets.
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