S&P Global Agrees to Acquire Onchain Security Firm OpenZeppelin

S&P Global (SPGI ) announced on September 17, 2026 that it has entered into an agreement to acquire OpenZeppelin, a blockchain security company it described as the security standard for onchain finance. Financial terms were not disclosed, and the transaction is subject to closing conditions. S&P Global said the transaction is not expected to have a material impact on its financial results.

OpenZeppelin confirmed the agreement in its own announcement dated September 17, 2026, stating that the deal brings together the security foundation of onchain finance and one of the most trusted names in global capital markets.

OpenZeppelin will continue to operate as its own business unit under the OpenZeppelin name. Demian Brener, the company’s chief executive, will continue to lead the business, reporting to Yann Le Pallec, President of S&P Global Ratings.

Jefferies LLC is serving as financial advisor to S&P Global, and Clifford Chance is acting as its legal advisor. FT Partners is serving as exclusive financial and strategic advisor to OpenZeppelin, and Cooley is acting as OpenZeppelin’s legal advisor.

Founded in 2015, OpenZeppelin combines onchain security assessments and secure development services with what S&P Global called one of the world’s leading open-source smart contract libraries. S&P Global said OpenZeppelin Contracts underpin more than $37 trillion in value transferred, including the vast majority of the largest stablecoins and tokenized funds. OpenZeppelin said it has conducted more than 900 security engagements for the protocols and institutions defining digital asset markets, and that this work has surfaced more than 10,000 vulnerabilities before production. S&P Global said OpenZeppelin’s technology and expertise are trusted by decentralized finance and traditional financial institutions to secure the onchain infrastructure that increasingly underpins digital assets.

S&P Global said the acquisition complements its risk assessment and ecosystem development capabilities in digital asset markets, enhancing its ability to create the next generation of onchain security assessments and benchmarks as capital markets transition onchain. The company said the deal will expand its risk assessment capabilities into the onchain technology-risk layer and as an extension to onchain financial products, and that its brand, institutional relationships, and global distribution will accelerate OpenZeppelin’s reach into traditional finance.

“Our digital assets strategy centers on bringing trusted data, benchmarks and transparent risk assessment to markets as they move onchain,” Le Pallec said. He added that as digital assets and tokenized markets continue to mature, OpenZeppelin’s technology and expertise will complement S&P Global’s smart contract and onchain technology risk assessment capabilities for traditional financial institutions and DeFi-native companies alike.

In its announcement, OpenZeppelin said institutions entering onchain markets require security that meets rigorous regulatory, compliance, and operational standards, and that S&P Global brings the institutional relationships, global distribution, and more than a century of trust in financial markets that the next stage requires. “Ten years ago, we started OpenZeppelin with the vision of a secure, global financial system powered by blockchain-based smart contracts,” Brener said. He said the same rails used in DeFi now carry tokenized funds, stablecoins, and institutional balance sheets, and that joining S&P Global will take that work to its next stage.

OpenZeppelin’s Open-Source and Client Commitments

OpenZeppelin said the OpenZeppelin Contracts libraries will remain open source, free, and publicly maintained on GitHub, that every released version remains open source permanently and cannot be withdrawn by anyone, and that future versions will stay open source. The company said the same commitment extends across all of its open-source applications and tools.

OpenZeppelin said all security audits, engineering work, and ecosystem programs will continue as they do today, delivered by the same team with the same quality, expertise, and customer experience. What changes, it said, is access to a deeper set of resources and a broader customer network: S&P Global’s research capacity, market data, and institutional reach, for clients ranging from the protocols and networks that pioneered onchain finance to the institutions now adopting it.

S&P Global’s Recent Digital-Assets Activity

The agreement follows a series of digital-assets moves by S&P Global this year. On September 14, 2026, the company announced a strategic investment in Kaiko, a provider of digital asset market data, indices, and data infrastructure, made through S&P Global Ventures as part of Kaiko’s Series B extension. In March 2026, S&P Dow Jones Indices and Kaiko announced the tokenization of the iBoxx U.S. Treasuries Index on the blockchain, which S&P Global described as the first time a major index provider has made a financial benchmark available as a native digital asset. In early September 2026, the two firms combined their crypto index capabilities to launch the co-branded S&P Kaiko Digital Asset Indices.

S&P Global also lists among its recent digital-assets firsts the industry’s first Stablecoin Stability Assessments, the first credit rating of a DeFi protocol, Sky Protocol, and the licensing of the S&P 500 for a tokenized fund, tokenized ETFs, and other digital assets.