FundraiseJun 28, 2026, 04:56 UTC

SBI Group acquires bitbank for $289M

What's the deal? SBI Holdings is acquiring Japanese crypto exchange bitbank for $289 million, among the largest blockchain acquisition deals announced in June 2026.

The acquisition came as 18 blockchain startups raised a combined $497.3 million over the same period.

bitbank is a centralised exchange licensed by the Japanese Financial Services Agency. It offers spot and margin trading, lending, and institutional services across assets including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP.

Why now? Investors are returning to crypto infrastructure, and rounds that month spanned DeFi, AI, and payments.

Ornn raised $33 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Galaxy Digital, and others. It is building a financial market for GPU computing, aiming to make compute as tradable as oil or electricity.

Smaller deals showed where capital is flowing. Canopy, a DeFi yield platform, raised $8.5 million; Orthogonal, an API platform for AI agents, raised $4.3 million; and on-chain yield infrastructure firm Ground raised $3.6 million.

The signal: Among the notable venture rounds, Andreessen Horowitz and Galaxy Digital — two of crypto's most active backers — moved into Ornn, signalling that even an early-stage compute marketplace can command marquee investors when it sits at the crypto-AI intersection. With SBI moving on bitbank at the corporate level, the pattern points to capital concentrating around regulated infrastructure rather than tokens.