S&P Global Agrees to Buy OpenZeppelin and Fold Smart Contract Audits Into Ratings

S&P Global announced on Thursday that it has agreed to acquire OpenZeppelin, the smart contract security firm, and will run it as a business unit reporting to S&P Global Ratings. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The arrangement puts code auditing and risk assessment under the same division. S&P Global Ratings has been extending its assessment work into digital assets for years, and in November 2025 it downgraded the stability rating on Tether’s USDT to “weak,” the lowest grade on its scale.

OpenZeppelin, founded in 2015, maintains open source libraries of smart contract components that developers reuse instead of writing their own. The company says those contracts underpin more than $37 trillion in value transferred, and that it has run more than 900 security engagements. Both figures are the company’s own.

OpenZeppelin will keep its name and operate as its own business unit. Demian Brener will stay on as chief executive and report to Yann Le Pallec, president of S&P Global Ratings.

“Our digital assets strategy centers on bringing trusted data, benchmarks and transparent risk assessment to markets as they move onchain,” Le Pallec said in the release.

Brener said in a post on OpenZeppelin’s site that joining S&P Global “will take this work to its next stage: the standard our team and community built becomes the standard the next generation of global finance runs on.”

The company also addressed the question its developer users were most likely to ask, writing that “Every released version remains open source permanently and cannot be withdrawn by anyone, and future versions stay open source.”

S&P put no price on the transaction and said it “is not expected to have a material impact on the financial results of S&P Global.” It had filed no Form 8-K as of Thursday, according to its filing history on the SEC’s EDGAR system. Public companies have four business days to report entering a material definitive agreement.

The release said the deal is subject to closing conditions and gave no expected closing date. Jefferies is advising S&P Global on the transaction and FT Partners is advising OpenZeppelin.

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