MoonPay: Investing in Crypto Payments Infrastructure
The cryptocurrency market capitalization continues to increase at a rapid pace, having recently crossed $2T in market cap (~10x YoY). At the same time, the total unique, active blockchain wallets has grown to ~75M (3x from 2018).
With this backdrop, there is a massive opportunity to provide an infrastructure for the crypto space to invest behind this growing demand curve. Given the heightened consumer adoption of digital assets, greater volumes of digital asset transactions and rapidly growing cashless transaction landscape, an opportunity emerges to invest behind the payment layer facilitating those transactions.
Fiat-to-crypto on-ramps are gateways to allow users to buy cryptocurrencies using “fiat currency” such as Euros or Dollars. To use crypto-native apps, users need to have cryptocurrency. Thus, users need to be “on-ramped” from the fiat world. However, to build compliant crypto applications dealing with fiat and cryptocurrencies, resources need to be devoted to investigating and building compliance programs, applying for licensing, building banking and payment relationships and more. However, developing the capability to offer crypto in-house is complex, expensive and requires years of runway.
Enter MoonPay.
Founded in late 2018, MoonPay serves as the primary payments gateway for credit cards to purchase cryptocurrencies and other digital assets on platforms like OpenSea, Bitcoin.com, Abra and more. In short, MoonPay is building a Paypal for Crypto . The Company has three main functions: 1) KYC Onboarding and Regulatory Compliance 2) Fiat Rails and Fraud Prevention and 3) Crypto Brokerage and Crypto Custody. To do this, MoonPay has acquired licenses to provide coverage in 160+ countries, secured relationships with tier 1 banking and mobile wallet providers, and put considerable safety measures in place to provide secure access and protection against fraud through partnerships with qualified custodians.
Given the difficulties in setting all of this up, MoonPay has been one of the fastest growing companies having reached $2B in transactions, 7M+ customers and 250+ partners across 160 countries since inception in 2019. The company has also expanded their list of accepted currencies to over 30 fiat and 90 cryptocurrencies with 35x growth in transaction volume.
End of November marked a major milestone for MoonPay as they have closed a $555M Series A financing round, being the largest and highest valued Series A for any bootstrapped crypto company globally. Led by Tiger Global and Coatue, we are excited to partner with MoonPay to help give the next 1B people access to cryptocurrency by 2030.
