MoonPay

Last updated
MoonPay
Company type Private 
Industry Cryptocurrency 
Founded2019 in the United States
FoundersIvan Soto-Wright, Victor Faramond
Headquarters
Miami
,
United States
Area served
International (160 countries in 2024)
Key people
Ivan Soto-Wright (CEO)
Asiff Hirji (President)
ServicesPayment processing, blockchain infrastructure 
Total equity $3.4 billion (2022) [1]   

MoonPay is a multinational financial technology company involved in the transfer of cryptocurrency. Founded by Ivan Soto-Wright and Victor Faramond [2] in 2019, the company is based in Miami [3] and provides payment infrastructure for cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to be bought and sold with fiat currencies. [4]

Contents

History

2019 - 2021

MoonPay was launched in 2019 [3] by business partners Victor Faramond and Ivan Soto-Wright, [5] the latter of whom became CEO. [5] With headquarters in Miami, [3] the company initially had a team of five people. [5] MoonPay began as a crypto payment exchange, letting users purchase crypto with traditional fiat currency and then store those assets in their own wallets. [6] The company is involved in the transfer of cryptocurrency. [3] MoonPay also built crypto-payment infrastructures for websites. [5]

By 2021, MoonPay had "processed $2 billion worth of crypto transactions" since its founding. It also converted "all major payment methods" into cryptocurrency, including credit cards and Apple Pay. [7] The software was integrated into major crypto exchanges such as OpenSea and Bitcoin.com. [3]

In its first financing round, MoonPay raised US$555 million in November 2021 [4] in an investment led by Tiger Global Management and Coatue Management. [8] Others investors included Blossom Capital, NEA, Thrive Capital, and Paradigm. [9] The deal valued MoonPay at $3.4 billion. [4] [3] After the fundraising, MoonPay outlined plans to hire 200 employees, [8] at which point it had a staff of 130. [7] It also said it would make acquisitions to accelerate growth. [8]

In November 2021, MoonPay executives sold $150 million of company shares in a secondary stock sale. Wrote Fortune about the sale in 2023, "while secondary sales of equity during funding rounds were not uncommon [in 2021], investors and employees have critiqued the selloffs by executives during 2021" for occurring shortly before the 2022 crypto market crash. For 2021, MoonPay brought in $150 million in annual revenue. [4]

2022

According to the South Florida Business Journal , MoonPay billed itself as the largest provider of cryptocurrency payments infrastructure by early 2022. [10] In January 2022, MoonPay began allowing customers to purchase NFTs through marketplaces with integrated MoonPay technology, as compared to only cryptocurrency. The NFT purchasing service was described by Billboard as "first-to-market technology," as previously buying NFTs through crypto marketplaces was an "arduous" process "that took customers off-platform to create a digital wallet, buy crypto, then return to spend it with several fees along the way." [5] In January 2022, Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon endorsed the company's NFT purchasing technology on The Tonight Show . [4] MoonPay also purchased NFTs directly from auction houses, and in early 2022, purchased a rare World of Women NFT for $754,340 at Christie's auction house. [11]

By March 2022, MoonPay stated it was used in around 250 wallets, websites, and applications in around 160 countries. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, on March 11, 2022, MoonPay ceased supporting customer accounts in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus as a result of "political tension". [11] In March 2022, MoonPay named James Freis as special adviser for global regulatory compliance. Freis had previously directed the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) bureau in the US and blown the whistle on the Wirecard scandal. [5] On April 12, 2022, it was reported that MoonPay had brought in around 60 entertainment and investment celebrities as backers, raising a total of $87 million. [5] Among the named investors were The Chainsmokers. [5] In April 2022, MoonPay announced it had been profitable since its launch and that its services were used by 10 million customers. In May 2022, MoonPay ranked No. 44 on that year's CNBC Disruptor 50 list. [2] In summer of 2022, MoonPay announced it was partnering with MasterCard on an NFT checkout service. [6]

MoonPay's NFT minting platform HyperMint [12] was launched in June 2022 [13] to provide "an alternative to centralized NFT exchanges like Opensea for creators and their supporters." [6] For the launch, MoonPay partnered with brands such as Universal Pictures, Fox Corporation, Death Row Records, [13] and Creative Artists Agency for the launch. Among a number of early NFT collections created through the platform, [14] Snoop Dogg used HyperMint to "create a token-gated storefront" for merchandise related to an album release. By July 2022, the eSports organization FaZe Clan had also partnered with HyperMint. [6]

By 2022, a number of scandals in the crypto industry as well as "macroeconomic challenges" had led to a downturn in the cryptocurrency and NFT markets, [13] with trading volume dropping significantly. By the end of 2022, one of MoonPay's investors, Tiger Global, lowered its internal valuation of MoonPay to $2.8 billion. [4]

In December 2022, MoonPay and Yuga Labs were sued in a class-action lawsuit alleging that Yuga Labs, Bored Apes, and MoonPay had "artificially inflated the price of [Yuga Labs'] digital offerings by using celebrity insiders, who promoted the NFTs without disclosing their financial relationships to the firm." [15] MoonPay stated that its relevant relationships with celebrities had already been disclosed and that "we look forward to it being dismissed." [16] Former TIME president Keith Grossman became MoonPay's President of Enterprise at the start of 2023. Prior to joining MoonPay, Grossman oversaw the magazine's TIMEPieces NFT collection. [13]

2023-2024

It was reported in February 2023 that the wallet MoonPayHQ had spent at least $25 million on NFTs since 2021, with about $15 million of that spent on Bored Apes. MoonPay told CNN that they had 14 Bored Ape NFTs in a cold storage wallet which offered "more safety," and that five of the NFTs had been "purchased by concierge clients" and were in the process of being transferred. [16] After serving as President and COO of Coinbase, Asiff Hirji was hired as MoonPay's President in February 2023. [14] Fortune in 2023 ranked MoonPay #5 on its Crypto 40 list of cryptocurrency companies. [17] In 2024, MoonPay had an estimated valuation of $3.4 valuation and stated it had overseen the transfer of $2 billion in crypto overall. It was active in around 160 countries. [1]

Products

MoonPay is a financial technology company involved in the transfer of cryptocurrency, and it has a suite of software products that convert between fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies. [1] Users can also purchase digital assets such as NFTs [18] on the MoonPay app, or through various web3 exchanges like Coinbase, OpenSea, [19] MetaMask, [4] and Bitcoin.com, which have MoonPay integrated into their platforms. [5] MoonPay states their software accepts all major payment methods, [1] among them among them debit and credit card, [18] local [1] bank transfers, [10] Apple Pay, Google Pay, [2] and Samsung Pay. [1]

Beyond transfer of cryptocurrency, MoonPay operates an NFT minting platform it calls HyperMint, [12] which can also be used to mint other digital assets besides NFTs. [14] According to MoonPay, its software helps cryptocurrency and NFT creators and sellers stay compliant with regulators. [10] The company also has a "concierge arm" that in 2022 became known for helping celebrities such as Jimmy Fallon purchase NFTs. [5]

MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright has stated MoonPay does not hold customer funds as part of its business model, which is in contrast to crypto companies such as FTX, which was criticized after its 2022 bankruptcy for being unable to return digital assets to clients after storing them in custodial wallets. Soto-Wright described MoonPay’s platform as "non-custodial," arguing that MPC (multi-party computation) technology for storing assets was safer than custodial wallets and provided users with more control of their assets. [13]

See also

Related Research Articles

A cryptocurrency exchange, or a digital currency exchange (DCE), is a business that allows customers to trade cryptocurrencies or digital currencies for other assets, such as conventional fiat money or other digital currencies. Exchanges may accept credit card payments, wire transfers or other forms of payment in exchange for digital currencies or cryptocurrencies. A cryptocurrency exchange can be a market maker that typically takes the bid–ask spreads as a transaction commission for its service or, as a matching platform, simply charges fees.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Block, Inc.</span> American financial services company

Block, Inc. is a U.S. listed company founded by Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey in 2009. It is a financial technology conglomerate. The company reportedly serves 56 million users and 4 million businesses, and processes payments worth US$228 billion annually as of 2023.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cryptocurrency</span> Digital currency not reliant on a central authority

A cryptocurrency, crypto-currency, or crypto is a digital currency designed to work as a medium of exchange through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it.

Coinbase Global, Inc., branded Coinbase, is an American publicly traded company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform. Coinbase is a distributed company; all employees operate via remote work. It is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States in terms of trading volume. The company was founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam. In May 2020, Coinbase announced it would shut its San Francisco, California, headquarters and change operations to remote-first, part of a wave of several major tech companies closing headquarters in San Francisco in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Blockchain.com is a cryptocurrency financial services company. The company began as the first Bitcoin blockchain explorer in 2011 and later created a cryptocurrency wallet that accounted for 28% of bitcoin transactions between 2012 and 2020. It also operates a cryptocurrency exchange and provides institutional markets lending business and data, charts, and analytics.

Circle is a peer-to-peer payments technology company that now manages stablecoin USDC, a cryptocurrency the value of which is pegged to the U.S. dollar. It was founded by Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville in October 2013. Circle is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. USDC, the second largest stablecoin worldwide, is designed to hold at or near a stable price of $1. The majority of its stablecoin collateral is held in short-term U.S. government securities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robinhood Markets</span> US-based financial services company

Robinhood Markets, Inc. is an American financial services company headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The company provides an electronic trading platform accessible via mobile app that facilitates commission-free trades of stocks, exchange-traded funds and cryptocurrency, as well as cryptocurrency wallets, credit cards and other banking services. The company's revenue comes primarily from payment for order flow, net interest income, and subscription fees. The company has 23.9 million funded customers, 13.7 million monthly active users, and $130 billion in assets under custody.

BitGo, Inc. is a digital asset trust company and security company, headquartered in Palo Alto, California. It was founded in 2013 by Mike Belshe and Ben Davenport. Galaxy Digital announced its acquisition of BitGo in 2021 for $1.2 billion, although this acquisition was announced to have been canceled in 2022 after the crypto downturn, with BitGo continuing as an independent company.

Kraken is a United States–based cryptocurrency exchange, founded in 2011. It was one of the first bitcoin exchanges to be listed on Bloomberg Terminal and was valued at US$3 billion in January 2024. The company has been the subject of several regulatory investigations since 2018, and has agreed to cumulative fines of over $30 million.

Gemini Trust Company, LLC (Gemini) is an American cryptocurrency exchange and custodian bank. It was founded in 2014 by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.

A cryptocurrency wallet is a device, physical medium, program or an online service which stores the public and/or private keys for cryptocurrency transactions. In addition to this basic function of storing the keys, a cryptocurrency wallet more often offers the functionality of encrypting and/or signing information. Signing can for example result in executing a smart contract, a cryptocurrency transaction, identification, or legally signing a 'document'.

Tether is an unaudited cryptocurrency stablecoin, launched by the company Tether Limited Inc. in 2014. As of January 2024, Tether's website lists fourteen protocols and blockchains on which Tether has been minted.

Binance Holdings Ltd., branded Binance, is a global company that operates the largest cryptocurrency exchange in terms of daily trading volume of cryptocurrencies. Binance was founded in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao, a developer who had previously created high-frequency trading software. Binance was initially based in China, then moved to Japan shortly before the Chinese government restricted cryptocurrency companies. Binance subsequently left Japan for Malta and currently has no official company headquarters.

Cryptocurrency and crime describe notable examples of cybercrime related to theft of cryptocurrencies and some methods or security vulnerabilities commonly exploited. Cryptojacking is a form of cybercrime specific to cryptocurrencies that have been used on websites to hijack a victim's resources and use them for hashing and mining cryptocurrency.

<i>CryptoPunks</i> Pioneering non-fungible token on Ethereum

CryptoPunks is a non-fungible token (NFT) collection on the Ethereum blockchain. The project was launched in June 2017 by the Larva Labs studio, a two-person team consisting of Canadian software developers Matt Hall and John Watkinson. The experimental project was inspired by the London punk scenes, the cyberpunk movement, and electronic music artists Daft Punk. The crypto art blockchain project was an inspiration for the ERC-721 standard for NFTs and the modern crypto art movement, which has since become a part of the cryptocurrency and decentralized finance ecosystems on multiple blockchains.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Solana (blockchain platform)</span> Public blockchain platform

Solana is a blockchain platform which uses a proof-of-stake mechanism to provide smart contract functionality. Its native cryptocurrency is SOL.

Crypto.com is a cryptocurrency exchange company based in Singapore that offers various financial services, including an app, exchange, and non-custodial DeFi wallet, NFT marketplace, and direct payment service in cryptocurrency. As of June 2023, the company reportedly had 80 million customers and 4,000 employees. The exchange issues its own exchange token named Cronos (CRO).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Celsius Network</span> American cryptocurrency company

Celsius Network LLC was a cryptocurrency company. Headquartered in Hoboken, New Jersey, Celsius maintained offices in four countries and operated globally. Users could deposit a range of cryptocurrency digital assets, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, into a Celsius wallet to earn a percentage yield, and could take out loans by pledging their cryptocurrencies as security. As of May 2022, the company had lent out $8 billion to clients and had almost $12 billion in assets under management.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anchorage Digital</span> Digital asset platform

Anchorage Digital is a digital asset platform and infrastructure provider that deals in the holding, investing, and infrastructure for cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency products. It has the first and only federally chartered cryptocurrency bank, receiving approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in 2021.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arkham Intelligence</span>

Arkham Intelligence is a public data application that enables users to analyze blockchain and cryptocurrency activity. Founded by Miguel Morel in 2020, the company's platform utilizes AI to identify and catalog the owners of blockchain addresses.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "About - MoonPay". www.moonpay.com.
  2. 1 2 3 "44. MoonPay". CNBC. 2022-05-17. Retrieved 2024-06-24.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Browne, Ryan (2021-11-22). "Crypto start-up MoonPay hits $3.4 billion valuation as bitcoin fever reaches new heights". CNBC . Retrieved 23 February 2024.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Weiss, Ben (2023-05-31). "MoonPay executives cashed out $150 million in equity just months before crypto crash". Fortune . Retrieved 23 February 2024.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Hissong, Samantha (2022-04-13). "Crypto's Celebrity Whisperer Plans to 'Leverage' Bieber, Drake & More to Drive NFTs to Mainstream". Billboard . Retrieved 23 February 2024.
  6. 1 2 3 4 Kozhipatt, Jacob. "A 32-year-old entrepreneur who raised over half a billion in funding from traditional finance elites breaks down the 3 reasons why crypto's future is still bright". Business Insider.
  7. 1 2 Dailey, Natasha. "MoonPay scores $3.4 billion valuation as the PayPal for crypto reportedly plans hiring spree". Markets Insider.
  8. 1 2 3 Levin, Jonathan (2021-11-22). "MoonPay, a PayPal for Crypto, on Hiring Spree With $555 Million". Bloomberg .
  9. ↑ Nicolle, Emily. "Crypto payments firm MoonPay valued at $3.4bn after Coatue and Tiger injection" . www.fnlondon.com.
  10. 1 2 3 Portero, Ashley. "MoonPay's $87M raise includes celebrity investors" . South Florida Business Journal.
  11. 1 2 "MoonPay Freezes Operations in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus". finance.yahoo.com. March 11, 2022.
  12. 1 2 Shen, Lucinda (2022-09-26). "Moonpay's ambitions go beyond payments". Axios . Retrieved 23 February 2024.
  13. 1 2 3 4 5 de León, Riley (2022-11-28). "Crypto startup MoonPay hires Time president to lead its enterprise business". CNBC . Retrieved 23 February 2024.
  14. 1 2 3 "Unknown".[ permanent dead link ]
  15. ↑ Acosta, Deborah (10 May 2023). "Miami's Love Affair With Crypto Is Souring as Bitcoin Faithful Flock to the City". Wall Street Journal . Retrieved 23 February 2024.
  16. 1 2 Reeve, Elle (2023-02-10). "A twisted tale of celebrity promotion, opaque transactions and allegations of racist tropes". CNN . Retrieved 23 February 2024.
  17. ↑ "Moonpay". Fortune.
  18. 1 2 "Explained | What is MoonPay and why are so many celebrities rallying behind it? - CNBC TV18". CNBCTV18. April 14, 2022.
  19. ↑ "Tech Visionaries Bieber, Paltrow Dump $87 Million Into Crypto Exchange". Gizmodo. April 13, 2022.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.