MoonPay acquires Solana startup to grow payments services

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Donald Trump is yet to take office, but the presumed increase in crypto M&A deals under his presidency already appears to be underway.

Crypto on- and off-ramp platform MoonPay has acquired Solana payments startup Helio in an all-equity deal valued at $175 million, Helio CEO Stijn Paumen confirmed today. Paumen added that the entire Helio team will be joining MoonPay. There could be more M&A action on the horizon, especially in the emerging field of crypto payments. Two other founders in the crypto payments space confirmed to me that they’ve seen recent acquisition interest.

MoonPay is a popular service for users trying to purchase crypto using bank accounts, credit cards or PayPal. Helio is more e-commerce focused, most recently making headlines for its Shopify plugin that lets merchants accept payments via the Solana network. 

In acquiring Helio, MoonPay is showing an aspiration to expand beyond buying and selling crypto into providing infrastructure for people to pay for goods and services with crypto, Ben Mills, CEO of the on-ramp company Meso, told me. By combining forces, MoonPay is becoming one of the most vaunted outfits in onchain payments, Paumen said. 

MoonPay’s Helio deal is one of the crypto sector’s more notable recent acquisitions, joining Stripe’s October purchase of the stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge for a reported $1.1 billion. It feels notable that both of these deals involved crypto payments — which is the technology’s original use case but not one that has caught on very broadly just yet.

Crypto still believes in payments. In Lightspeed’s recent Solana Founders poll, a plurality voted that payments are Solana’s most underrated sector.

Still, how big of a deal this all is remains a matter of perspective. Stripe buying Bridge was a validation for crypto because Stripe isn’t a crypto company, Mills said.

The intra-industry deal of MoonPay buying Helio “feels more like internal consolidation which is probably healthy, but doesn’t tell us much,” he added.

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