Half-Month Three Acquisitions, MoonPay Prepares to Aggressively Expand Its Institutional Business and Push Toward an IPO | MoonPay, Acquisition - ChainCatcher

Author: Gu Yu, ChainCatcher

In spring 2026, when the “capital winter” has not yet fully thawed, crypto payment company MoonPay has nevertheless completed three acquisitions at a breathtaking pace: at the end of April, it acquired institutional-grade security solution Sodot; in early May, it acquired Solana trading platform DFlow; and in mid-May, it brought AI trading research lab Dawn Labs under its umbrella.

Three acquisitions in two weeks—7 acquisitions accumulated over 18 months. This pace is extremely rare across the entire crypto industry, and it sends a clear signal to the market: this unicorn, once known for “buying crypto with a credit card,” is using aggressive mergers and acquisitions to plug the last few gaps in its payment capabilities, preparing for the upcoming race for crypto payment gateways and for its IPO.

Starting from “buying crypto with a credit card”

MoonPay was founded by Ivan Soto-Wright and Victor Faramond in 2019 in Miami, United States. At the time, the vision was simple and direct: to enable ordinary people to buy cryptocurrencies with credit cards and debit cards. As an on-ramp for deposits, MoonPay rapidly surged during the subsequent NFT bull market. By 2021, MoonPay had processed transactions worth $2 billion, integrated with major platforms such as OpenSea, and in the same year, completed a $555 million Series A round led by Tiger Global and Coatue, reaching a valuation of $3.4 billion.

However, a pure on-ramp has no moat, and the decline of the NFT market sharply weakened MoonPay’s influence. With traditional payment giants such as Stripe and PayPal, as well as a large number of emerging rivals such as BVNK, Mesh, and KAST, flooding into the space, competition in the payments track has entered an extremely fierce stage.

As an early player in the crypto payments track, MoonPay must take the initiative to expand the boundaries of its capabilities in order to withstand the dual squeeze from both cross-industry players and upstart crypto companies. Starting from the end of 2024, MoonPay’s strategic focus also shifted—quietly, but in a way that is meaningful.

In a recent interview with Fortune, MoonPay co-founder and CEO Ivan Soto-Wright summarized the company’s latest strategic framework: “We build MoonPay around four pillars: fund, tokenize, trade, spend.”

In the past, MoonPay’s real advantage was actually only in the fiat-onramp segment—“fund.” But now, from fiat on-ramps, to stablecoin issuance, to on-chain transaction routing, to merchant acquiring, institutional custody, and AI trading capabilities, MoonPay is constructing a full crypto financial infrastructure layer by layer through capital acquisitions.

The significance of seven acquisitions

First, let’s look at the roles played by the three transactions just completed:

Sodot (about $100 million all-stock deal): an Israeli MPC key management company that has secured more than $50 billion in transaction security for clients such as BitGo and eToro across more than 10 million wallets. Sodot corresponds to the security foundation and is also the entry ticket for institutional business.

DFlow: a transaction routing platform on the Solana chain. Its smart router can scan dozens of DEXs in milliseconds to find the optimal path for a trade. DFlow’s DEX aggregator accounts for 5%-10% of transaction volume on Solana among comparable platforms. In Q1 2026, it cumulatively processed more than $12 billion in transactions, and infrastructure from it is used by Coinbase, Phantom wallets, and others.

In addition, DFlow is also developing on Solana a system that tokenizes Kalshi prediction market tokens, enabling developers to directly access each market’s real on-chain representation from the Kalshi order book. This is also a function MoonPay favors.

Dawn Labs: an AI research lab that launched the AI-native trading tool Dawn CLI. Its first go-to-market scenario is the prediction market Polymarket, which can convert users’ ideas into executable code. This acquisition allows MoonPay to enter the rapidly growing segment of AI-assisted trading and prediction markets, while also adding strategic automation capabilities on top of its “trade” pillar.

Previously, MoonPay had already been gradually building an AI-native financial technology stack, including the MoonAgents Mastercard debit card for AI agents, the MoonPay CLI command-line interface for crypto-asset payments, and payment proxy services called MoonPay Agents.

The three acquisitions correspond to, respectively: institutional-grade security and compliance, on-chain transaction execution, and an AI strategy layer—each step extending the frontier of MoonPay’s existing capability boundaries.

The previous four acquisitions, on the other hand, were specific additions to MoonPay’s B-end payment capabilities themselves.

Helio: In January 2025, MoonPay acquired Helio, a Solana-based payment processing platform, for about $175 million. The platform has processed more than $1.5 billion in transactions and serves more than 6,000 merchants, covering e-commerce, digital goods, and subscription scenarios. Helio filled the blank in MoonPay’s merchant acquiring and consumer payment endpoints, allowing MoonPay to expand beyond serving C-end crypto-buying users, and to also output payment collection and settlement capabilities to B-end merchants.

Iron: In March 2025, MoonPay acquired Iron, a German stablecoin infrastructure platform. The platform provides enterprise-grade stablecoin API infrastructure, enabling MoonPay to cover the full stablecoin value chain, including issuance, fiat on/off ramps, exchange, and payments. Notably, Iron’s technology later became the core of MoonPay’s collaboration with Mastercard. In May 2025, Mastercard and MoonPay reached a strategic cooperation, jointly rolling out stablecoin payment services for global merchants, and the underlying technology is Iron’s API technical architecture.

Decent: In mid-2025, MoonPay acquired Decent, a cross-chain trading API product. Customers can integrate it and enable their users to quickly convert assets between any chains within minutes. This enables MoonPay to significantly reduce the cost of transferring assets between different chains and improves the user payment experience.

Meso: In September 2025, MoonPay acquired Meso, a crypto payments company. Developers can use the Meso SDK to add frictionless deposit and withdrawal channels to their applications, thereby improving user acquisition and retention rates. Meso allows users to access their banks from any integrated dapp or wallet with a single click, enabling them to quickly fund their accounts and easily withdraw when needed.

Launching institutional business

After improving its own payment capability matrix, MoonPay announced in April this year the establishment of an institutional business department, MoonPay Institutional, led by former CFTC Acting Chair Caroline Pham. It provides large traditional financial institutions with various crypto and blockchain services, including trading, tokenized securities, payments, wallet management, and stablecoin issuance.

It is evident that these extensive service capabilities essentially come from the technology and infrastructure MoonPay has rapidly acquired through acquisitions over the past year or more. Its goal is not merely to “do payments,” but to package these capabilities into complete solutions, sell them to traditional financial institutions, and thereby obtain higher profit margins and a capital-market premium.

At the same time, MoonPay has also made it clear in interviews that these acquisitions are paving the way for its IPO. “Over the past 18 months, every acquisition we’ve made has been to enhance the strength of the platform. That way, when we take the step of going public, we can not only list smoothly, but also lead the industry trend,” Soto-Wright said.

In February this year, one of MoonPay’s competitors, RedotPay, was already reported to be planning a $1 billion IPO in the United States at a $4 billion valuation. RedotPay also said its annualized revenue has exceeded $150 million.

In media reports last December, it was said that Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) was involved in MoonPay’s fundraising negotiations, targeting a valuation of around $5 billion. However, after that, no further updates on the deal were announced, and this year Intercontinental Exchange Group also participated in Circle’s $200 million financing for its payment Layer1 Arc, adding even more variables to the situation.

From a “credit-card crypto buying tool” to an institutional-grade crypto financial infrastructure platform, MoonPay is trying to complete a thorough identity leap. And against the backdrop of stablecoins, AI Agent, on-chain trading, and prediction markets accelerating their integration together, competition around the crypto payments gateway has become extraordinarily intense.

When traditional payment giants such as Stripe, PayPal, and Mastercard begin to fully move into stablecoin and on-chain payments, the time window left for native crypto companies is actually not much.

MoonPay’s frantic acquisitions are essentially also about building its own moat at the fastest speed—because once traditional financial infrastructure is truly completed as on-chain, most of the intermediary roles in today’s crypto payments industry could be reshuffled.