S&P Global Buys the Auditor Behind Most Stablecoins: Why Now, and Why Twice?

SP Global agreed Thursday to buy OpenZeppelin, whose open-source code sits beneath most of the worlds largest stablecoins. It is the ratings giants second crypto deal in three days. Neither company disclosed a price. The purchase hands SP a grip on the code that moves tokenized money, not just the data describing it. The Code Running Beneath Most Stablecoins OpenZeppelin has published free smart contract building blocks since 2015. Smart contracts are programs that move money on a blockchain without a bank in the middle. The firm says its code has carried more than $37 trillion in value. It has run over 900 security reviews and found more than 10,000 flaws. OpenZeppelins standards, technology, and expertise already power the infrastructure behind the worlds leading stablecoins, tokenized funds, DeFi protocols, and onchain markets, Chief executive Demian Brener said that in the companys statement. He keeps his job and will report to SP Global Ratings president Yann Le Pallec. SP Global Has Spent a Year Rating Crypto Products The company issued the first credit rating of a DeFi protocol, Sky, and the first stablecoin stability assessments. It also tokenized the SP 500 with Centrifuge, then built a hybrid crypto-equity benchmark. Each of those judged a product. Buying OpenZeppelin pushes the company into judging the code underneath. That shift carries history. SP paid $1.375 billion in 2015 to settle Justice Department claims that it defrauded investors over its crisis-era mortgage ratings. Two Deals in Three Days Buy Two Different Layers On Monday, SP led a $110 million funding round in Kaiko. The Paris firm sells pricing data across more than 150 exchanges and protocols. BNP Paribas, Nasdaq Ventures and Royal Bank of Canada joined the round. Kaiko measures what tokenized assets are worth. OpenZeppelin checks whether the code holding them holds up. Both bets meet the same awkward fact. CoinGecko studied 245 incidents since January 2025. Protocols that had already cleared independent reviews accounted for 88% of everything stolen. Those breaches cost $3.63 billion through July 2026, which means audited protocols still lose funds. SP Global Inc (SPGI) Performance. Source: TradingView Investors have been cooler on the buyer. SPGI closed at $406.76 on September 16, near the floor of a 52-week range topping out at $552.25.