MoonPay built its name letting people buy crypto with a debit card. Now it wants to sell custody and settlement to banks. The pivot just got a $100 million price tag.
The crypto firm said Wednesday it agreed to acquire Israeli crypto security startup Sodot in a $100 million stock deal, then immediately launched a new institutional unit on top of the technology.
Sodot's core technology is multi-party computation, or MPC, which fragments private keys across multiple parties so no single party can move funds alone. MPC is one of the few approaches institutions have been willing to trust for crypto custody, because it removes the single point of failure that has tripped up earlier setups.
That technology is the foundation for the new MoonPay Institutional business. The unit will offer trading, tokenized securities, payments, wallet management, and stablecoin issuance to traditional financial firms.
The unit will be led by Caroline Pham, the former acting chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Pham joined MoonPay in December as chief legal officer and chief administrative officer after running the CFTC.
Hiring a former regulator to lead an institutional crypto push is itself a signal. MoonPay is pitching this product to banks, asset managers, and broker-dealers, and it is staffing for a regulated environment, not a retail one.
Goldman Sachs reported that 71% of institutional asset managers plan to increase their digital asset exposure over the next 12 months. That is a big enough number to draw new infrastructure entrants. The catch has always been custody. Without a setup that meets the operational and compliance bar of large institutions, the money stays on the sidelines.
MoonPay is now betting that Sodot's MPC stack closes that gap.
The institutional crypto market is crowded. Coinbase, Anchorage, and Fidelity Digital Assets all serve some version of this client. MoonPay's edge will likely come from its existing payments rails, where it can wire crypto, stablecoin, and tokenized asset workflows together. The next data point is the institutional rollout, which the company has not given a public launch date for yet.
