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Acquire.Fi and The Tie Capital both run buy-side and sell-side M&A advisory in digital assets but are not substitutes for each other.
Acquire.Fi operates a mandate-driven, off-market deal desk focused on operating businesses, licensed entities, and secondaries. The Tie Capital operates as a newly registered US broker-dealer centered on protocols, token capitalization structures, and securities-regulated execution.
That difference decides who you should call. Choose wrong and you either pay for regulatory machinery your deal never needed or hand a token restructuring to a firm not licensed to execute the securities side.
The core difference is regulatory architecture. Acquire.Fi operates as a specialist advisory firm and deal platform. Acquire.Fi is not a crypto asset service provider and does not offer regulated financial services.
The Tie Capital is a broker-dealer registered with the US Securities and Exchange Commission and a member of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. They conduct investment banking through that entity.
Acquire.Fi manages both sides through a single team on a mandate basis. The private M&A mandate process has four stages: mandate submission and deal team review, onboarding and positioning, matched introduction, and advisory through LOI, diligence, and close.
Sellers get positioning work, teaser and information memorandum preparation, targeted outreach to a verified buyer network of 500 or more, plus document management and negotiation support. Buyers submit acquisition criteria and receive screened off-market targets that never appear on a public listing.
The pitch is control. No auctions, no open bidding, no shotgun outreach to fifty tire-kickers who will leak your revenue numbers.
The Tie Capital covers a wider transaction menu because its license permits it. Alongside buy-side and sell-side M&A, it handles private capital raises across equity, token, and hybrid structures; protocol restructurings including take-privates and recapitalizations; token generation events; token-to-equity conversions; and special situations like coordinated treasury and secondary transactions.
On sell-side work, it runs valuation analysis, buyer identification, positioning, and process management through close. On buy-side work, it represents acquirers on target identification, bid structuring, and end-to-end diligence management.
Suppose your capitalization table is half tokens and half equity; that breadth matters. Most bulge-bracket banks still will not touch a protocol cap table, which is the gap The Tie Capital aims to fill.
Acquire.Fi serves revenue-generating businesses and regulated entities, while The Tie Capital serves crypto-native issuers with token economies at the center of the business model.
Acquire.Fi sets a hard commercial floor on the sell side: $5 million or more in annual revenue, or licensed and regulated operations. On the buy side, it works with exchanges, funds, prime brokerages, private equity firms, strategic acquirers, and intermediaries who bring qualified counterparties.
The Tie Capital groups clients into protocols, onchain businesses, and crypto service providers such as exchanges and custodians. Its stated sector coverage spans blockchain networks across L0, L1, and L2, decentralized finance, decentralized physical infrastructure, decentralized AI, payments, and real-world asset tokenization.
Region is where the two firms diverge most sharply and is often underestimated by founders. Acquire.Fi’s published deal history reads like a map of frontier licensing, covering regulated hubs across three continents. Targeted searches span Central America, Eastern Europe, the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. It has also advised on a Swiss self-regulatory organization sale and a localized Turkish exchange.
The Tie is headquartered in New York with locations in Boca Raton and Austin, and its regulated status is US-anchored through the SEC and FINRA. This is an advantage when your buyer universe is American institutions and a constraint when your deal is a Dubai-to-Singapore transaction with no US nexus.
Acquire.Fi publishes explicit qualification thresholds, while The Tie Capital relies on regulated onboarding standards it does not publish.
Acquire.Fi requires buyers to show a verifiable acquisition history or committed capital before seeing anything. Sellers must meet the revenue or licensing floor. Roughly 3% of applications make the cut, not because Acquire.Fi is gatekeeping but because of quality control.
Every introduction happens only after both sides sign NDAs and pass the deal team's review. At the $2,000 tier and above, buyer vetting and qualification is an explicit line item, and the Elite tier adds a buyer due diligence report.
The Tie Capital's vetting obligations come from securities law rather than from a published policy page. A FINRA member firm must run anti-money-laundering programs, know-your-customer checks, and suitability analysis, and it must supervise all of it under written procedures. Its Chief Compliance Officer is a former FINRA Principal Examiner with more than a decade overseeing compliance at registered securities firms.
You can also verify the firm and its registered people yourself through FINRA BrokerCheck, which is a genuine transparency advantage.
Both have confidentiality controls to mitigate leaks, and they rest on different foundations. Acquire. Fi's controls are contractual and structural. The Tie Capital's are contractual plus regulator-supervised.
Acquire.Fi gates confidentiality by design. Private mandates never appear on public listings unless you request one. NDAs and confidentiality agreements are included at every pricing tier, and no introduction happens before both counterparties are papered and vetted.
For a founder still paying salaries, that structure is the whole point. A leaked exit process spooks your engineers, largest customers, and token holders in roughly that order.
Broker-dealers carry confidentiality duties they cannot contract away. The SEC's examination report on information barriers describes how firms must control material non-public information through watch lists, restricted lists, and control-room processes that separate deal teams from trading and sales desks.
Neither model is automatically safer. A well-run NDA-gated process with four people can leak less than a large regulated firm with fifty. But if your board wants documented, examinable controls, only one firm is subject to routine regulatory examination.
Acquire.Fi wins on transparency, as the fee schedule is published. The Tie Capital's is not.
Acquire. Fi's pricing page lists four tiers with a one-time listing fee covering a six-month term:
Success fees are due only at close, and the percentage falls as deal size rises. At the entry tier, the stated success fee runs 15% on the smallest deal bands and steps down to 12% as valuation increases. Higher tiers have a reduced fee at close and Senior Advisory structured deal by deal.
The Tie Capital does not publish rates, which is standard practice for investment banks and also standard practice for higher all-in costs. Registered broker-dealers typically bundle a monthly retainer, a work-product fee, and a success fee, and the retainer is billed whether or not you ever reach a closing.
That structure suits a $200 million restructuring with a funded balance sheet. For a bootstrapped founder, it's not ideal. Ask yourself a simple question before signing anything: how much do I owe this firm if the deal dies in diligence?
Acquire.Fi has the longer M&A execution record. The Tie Capital has the longer institutional platform record. Those are different things, and conflating them is the most common mistake founders make when they shortlist advisors.
Acquire.Fi publishes a named transaction history spanning 2024 through 2026. Kraken acquired the Vertex perpetuals exchange via Ink Foundation in a process that ran roughly 16 months from engagement to close. Katana, incubated by GSR and Polygon, acquired IDEX in 2026 to launch native perpetual futures. Paxful acquired the Omni consumer wallet, with Acquire.Fi acting as introducer and M&A consultant. The Tenset launchpad sold to a fund in 2024 on a cash-plus-bonus structure.
The list also includes buy-side licensing mandates across multiple continents, SPAC target sourcing for a $150 million-plus vehicle backed by a Hong Kong family office, and OTC block work in notional sizes from $500,000 to $10 million.
The Tie Capital launched on August 3, 2026 as a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Tie Inc. At the time of writing, it has no publicly announced closed client mandates, which is exactly what you would expect from an investment bank that is a few weeks old.
However, Its team credentials are real. Their senior management holds FINRA licenses and has executed acquisition financings and sell-side M&A. The parent company also has a genuine acquisition record as a principal, having bought Stakin, Staking Rewards, and Liquidity Land. Buying companies for yourself and advising a founder through someone else's exit are related skills, not identical ones.
So the honest read is this. Suppose you want a firm that has repeatedly walked crypto operating businesses to a signed closing, Acquire. Fi's list is the one with receipts. If you want individual bankers with large-cap execution pedigree, The Tie Capital's bench is stronger on paper.
Both offer substantial supporting services, and each set of extras reveals what the firm is really built for.
Acquire. Fi's supporting stack points at liquidity and jurisdiction. It runs one of the larger Web3 secondaries networks covering SAFT, SAFE, equity, and locked token positions, alongside structured OTC block execution and token loan introductions across more than 15 lenders. Acquire.Fi also offers independent valuation analysis, multi-jurisdiction license targeting, unlock schedule strategy, market-making advisory, and a free business valuation calculator for founders who want a range before they commit to anything.
The Tie's supporting stack points at intelligence and access. The firm sits inside a platform that includes The Tie Terminal for market intelligence, data APIs, Staking Rewards, validator infrastructure through Stakin, conferences, a corporate access program, and Bridge Messenger for compliant communications.
Which set helps you more? If your problem is finding the right buyer in an unusual jurisdiction and getting locked tokens liquidated, Acquire. Fi's adjacencies do more work. If your problem is investor visibility and institutional data credibility ahead of a raise, The Tie's ecosystem does more.
There is no single winner. The better firm depends on what kind of asset you are buying or selling.
Acquire.Fi is the stronger fit when:
The published closings in that exact bracket are the strongest evidence available.
The Tie Capital is the stronger fit when your transaction is securities-heavy or token-native in ways that demand a licensed broker-dealer. Token generation events, token-to-equity conversions, protocol take-privates, and US institutional capital raises all sit squarely in its lane and outside Acquire.Fi's scope.
With deep roots in traditional finance and the digital asset industry, Acquire.Fi operates as a specialist M&A advisory firm. Coverage spans M&A, secondaries, OTC, and capital markets advisory across digital assets and frontier tech. Decades of combined experience across every stage of the deal lifecycle.
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