Credit rating agency S&P Global (NYSE: $SPGI ) is buying OpenZeppelin, a security firm whose open-source code is used across much of the stablecoin and tokenized-fund market.
In a news release, S&P Global said OpenZeppelin has been responsible for moving more than $37 trillion U.S. of tokenized assets. Terms of the acquisition were not made public.
The deal gives S&P Global access to a part of onchain finance that conventional ratings do not currently cover, including the code that issues, moves and manages stablecoins.
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A crypto project can have strong reserves and a solid credit profile but fail because of a flaw in its smart contracts.
With the OpenZeppelin deal, S&P Global is betting that banks and asset managers will need ways to assess the risk posed by smart contracts before they use onchain products at scale.
“The transaction complements S&P Global's risk assessment and ecosystem development capabilities in digital asset markets,” said the company in its news release.
Founded in 2015, OpenZeppelin provides onchain security assessments and secure development services, alongside an open-source smart contract library that’s used by many of the largest stablecoins and tokenized funds.
OpenZeppelin claims to have detected more than 10,000 vulnerabilities before code reached production.
The OpenZeppelin purchase will extend S&P Global’s work from rating a tokenized financial instrument to rating the code that it runs on.
S&P Global's management team has said that they are preparing for the growth of tokenized financial products, digital representations of stocks and other assets that run on blockchain rails.
SPGI stock has declined 21% in the past 12 months to trade at $404.69 U.S. per share.
