S&P Global announced on Thursday that it has entered an agreement to acquire OpenZeppelin, a blockchain security company founded in 2015 that develops open-source smart-contract software and provides security assessments for protocols and financial institutions. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The deal remains subject to customary closing conditions and is not expected to have a material impact on S&P Global’s financial results.

OpenZeppelin’s Contracts library underpins more than $37 trillion in cumulative value transferred and is used by the vast majority of the largest stablecoins and tokenized funds. The company has completed more than 900 security engagements and identified over 10,000 vulnerabilities before code reached production. Its open-source libraries and related applications will remain free and publicly maintained on GitHub.

Strategic Push into Onchain Technology Risk

S&P Global described the acquisition as a step that complements its existing risk-assessment and ecosystem-development capabilities in digital-asset markets. The move is intended to expand the firm’s ability to create onchain security assessments, benchmarks and related intelligence as capital markets shift toward tokenized products.

Conventional credit ratings focus on an issuer’s financial strength and reserves. Smart-contract flaws can still cause failures even when those fundamentals are sound. By adding OpenZeppelin’s expertise, S&P Global aims to extend risk analysis from the entity level to the underlying code that issues, moves and manages stablecoins, tokenized funds and decentralized-finance products.

OpenZeppelin will continue to operate as a separate business unit under its existing name. Chief Executive Demian Brener will remain in that role and report to Le Pallec.

Part of Broader Digital-Asset Expansion

The OpenZeppelin agreement follows other recent steps by S&P Global in the digital-asset space. Earlier in the week the firm led a strategic investment that extended crypto market-data provider Kaiko’s Series B funding round to $110 million. S&P Dow Jones Indices and Kaiko have also launched co-branded digital-asset indices and previously tokenized an iBoxx U.S. Treasuries index.

S&P Global has published stablecoin stability assessments and previously assigned a credit rating to a decentralized-finance protocol. The OpenZeppelin acquisition extends that work from rating entities and reserves to evaluating the technological infrastructure those products rely on.

Jefferies LLC served as financial adviser to S&P Global, with Clifford Chance acting as legal counsel. FT Partners advised OpenZeppelin, and Cooley provided legal advice to the security firm.

S&P Global, listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SPGI, provides data, ratings, benchmarks and analytics used by businesses, governments and investors worldwide. OpenZeppelin has positioned itself since 2015 as a provider of security standards for blockchain-based financial infrastructure used by both decentralized protocols and traditional institutions.