21shares spent years building its crypto franchise outside Wall Street’s orbit. From Zurich, it launched exchange-traded products that gave European investors access to Bitcoin and Ether long before the U.S. would allow them.

Now, in selling itself to FalconX—a crypto prime broker backed by Tiger Global and Singapore’s GIC—the company is trading autonomy for scale as crypto moves closer to the financial mainstream.

The deal underscores a broader shift: crypto specialists are entering traditional investment channels through regulated products. And the FalconX-21shares deal is part of a broader surge. Crypto M&A topped $10 billion for the first time in the third quarter, a more than 30-fold increase from a year earlier, according to Architect Partners.

For years, crypto was an M&A

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