S&P Global Enters Agreement to Acquire OpenZeppelin

September 17, 2026 — S&P Global (NYSE: SPGI) has entered an agreement to acquire OpenZeppelin, the security standard for onchain finance. Since 2015, OpenZeppelin has set the security standards and secured the infrastructure onchain finance is built on: $37 trillion in value transferred through OpenZeppelin Contracts, more than 900 security engagements, and 10,000+ vulnerabilities surfaced before production. The agreement brings together the security foundation of onchain finance and one of the most trusted names in global capital markets, just as onchain finance grows from an emerging market into core financial infrastructure.

Why we are doing this

OpenZeppelin’s mission is to accelerate the world's transition to an open financial system, and that transition has reached an inflection point. Traditional finance is moving onchain: the vast majority of the largest stablecoins and tokenized money market funds are built on OpenZeppelin's standards, and the institutions entering these markets require security that meets rigorous regulatory, compliance, and operational standards. Accelerating institutional adoption of onchain finance requires deep integration with those frameworks, without sacrificing the values and the openness that defines this technology: open source code and permissionless public networks anyone can build on. S&P Global brings what that next stage requires: institutional relationships, global distribution, and more than a century of trust in financial markets.

For the crypto and DeFi ecosystem, this is the moment the rails the community built become institutional infrastructure. OpenZeppelin, working within S&P Global, connects DeFi and public blockchains to the benchmarks, risk frameworks, and institutional relationships that global markets already run on, bringing the ecosystem into its next phase of growth. OpenZeppelin’s standards, open source libraries, security research, and ecosystem programs developers rely on carry forward with institutional resources behind them.

"Ten years ago, we started OpenZeppelin with the vision of a secure, global financial system powered by blockchain-based smart contracts,” said Demian Brener, CEO, OpenZeppelin. “Today, those same rails used in DeFi carry tokenized funds, stablecoins, and institutional balance sheets. Joining S&P Global will take this work to its next stage: the standard our team and community built becomes the standard the next generation of global finance runs on."

“Our digital assets strategy centers on bringing trusted data, benchmarks and transparent risk assessment to markets as they move onchain," said Yann Le Pallec, President, S&P Global Ratings. "As digital assets and tokenized markets continue to mature, OpenZeppelin’s technology and expertise will complement our smart contract and onchain technology risk assessment capabilities, giving traditional financial institutions and DeFi-native companies alike the confidence to build and transact in this new environment.”

Unchanged commitments, institutional resources

Open source standards: The OpenZeppelin Contracts libraries, the established gold standard for onchain development, remain open source, free, and publicly maintained on GitHub. Every released version remains open source permanently and cannot be withdrawn by anyone, and future versions stay open source. The same commitment extends across all our open source applications and tools as building open source security standards remains a core priority.

Client engagements: All security audits, engineering work, and ecosystem programs continue as they do today, delivered by the same team with the same quality, expertise, and customer experience. What changes is access to a deeper set of resources and a broader customer network: S&P Global's research capacity, market data, and institutional reach strengthen what we deliver to every client, from the protocols and networks that pioneered onchain finance to the institutions now adopting it.

For the last decade, OpenZeppelin has set the security standard for onchain finance. Today begins a new chapter for that mission, together with one of the most trusted names in global markets.

The transaction is subject to closing conditions. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. FT Partners is serving as financial advisor to OpenZeppelin; Cooley is acting as OpenZeppelin’s legal advisor.

Media inquiries: press@openzeppelin.com