Circle agreed on 8 September to buy Tazapay, a Singapore cross-border payments firm, for 400 million dollars in stock. It is Circle’s largest acquisition since the Poloniex exchange in 2018. Tazapay connects banks and fintech companies across more than 100 markets and says it processes over 25 billion dollars a year in transactions, about 60 per cent of it already in stablecoins. The deal should close in 2027, pending sign-off from several regulators including the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
The stated logic is last-mile infrastructure, the step that turns a stablecoin back into local currency in a bank account without Circle building a network in every country. Tazapay holds payment licences in Singapore, Canada, Australia and the United States, with applications pending in the EU, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates. It has served more than 1,000 companies and has designed the Circle Payments Network since 2025.
Circle Ventures already backed Tazapay’s Series B in August 2025, so this is a company Circle knew well and partly owned. The price is in shares, not cash, the exact count fixed by the average over the 20 trading days before closing, plus 25 million dollars in retention stock for staff. Circle shares fell 2.7 per cent on the day, to 99.30 dollars, and are still up more than a quarter this year.
The question is what Circle is buying that it did not already have. Tazapay was building the payments network, ran most of its flow in stablecoins and shared an investor. An all-stock price not known until 2027, on a share that has swung hard since listing, is what existing holders carry. And the volume figure comes from the target, so a regulator reviewing the deal will want it checked.
