Despite the blanket coverage of Afterpay’s $39 billion acquisition by Square, it wasn’t really a sale at all. More accurately it is a merger of unequals, raising the question of what exactly constitutes a sale and whether this should count as Australia’s largest-ever.

Unusually, the buyer is not offering a single dollar of cash. Instead, shareholders will collectively swap their Afterpay shares for a 20 per cent stake in US fintech Square, a company run by Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange.