Crypto payments company MoonPay looks to compete with Stripe with Iron stablecoin acquisition

Crypto payments giant MoonPay is expanding its push into the enterprise market with the acquisition of Iron, an API-first stablecoin infrastructure startup.

This marks MoonPay’s second significant acquisition in two months, underscoring its ambition to dominate the rapidly growing stablecoin payments market.

“We think everyone is going to have a digital currency wallet, whether it’s inside of a bank account or independently. And we build a backwards compatibility to the existing financial system,” MoonPay Co-Founder and CEO Ivan Soto-Wright told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in an exclusive interview.

Already, MoonPay makes it easier for people to participate in the new crypto economy by enabling onboarding through most traditional payment rails, including debit cards, bank accounts, PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, and Google Pay.

Now, with Iron, MoonPay can offer businesses the ability to accept stablecoin payments, unlocking instant, low-cost, and borderless transactions.

Soto-Wright compared the acquisition to when PayPal bought Braintree, which handles credit card processing for companies like Meta and processed nearly $600 billion in total payment volume last year. 

“This is our Braintree moment,” said Soto-Wright. “Iron’s technology positions MoonPay to become the definitive infrastructure provider for enterprise stablecoin solutions.”

Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies pegged to real-world assets, and in 2024 alone, most of the $27 trillion transferred through stablecoins consisted of digital dollars moving seamlessly across blockchains.

Soto-Wright likened the deal’s potential impact to the transformation seen in telecommunications.

“It was really expensive to place a long distance phone call, and then you had Skype, then you had Zoom, you had all this internet-based technology for doing communication — same thing will take place for money, and that’s essentially the blockchain,” he said.

This marks MoonPay’s second major acquisition this year, following its $175 million purchase of Helio in January.

Businesses across the financial services landscape, from legacy banks to startup payment providers, are adopting stablecoins or exploring launching their own. Stablecoins make it easier and cheaper to switch between currencies and to move money digitally. Standard Chartered predicted in a recent report that stablecoins could grow to become about 10% of foreign exchange transactions, up from 1% today.

MoonPay’s purchase comes one month after Stripe closed its $1.1 billion deal to buy a different payment infrastructure company called Bridge Network, the largest deal both for Stripe and the crypto ecosystem more broadly.

Bridge makes it easier for businesses to accept stablecoin payments without having to directly deal in digital tokens. Customers include Coinbase and SpaceX.

MoonPay, which has more than 30 million accounts in 180 countries, was last valued at $3.4 billion when it raised its last round of funding in 2021. The company tells CNBC it is cash-flow positive and profitable and that net revenue increased by 112% in 2024 from a year earlier.

“We think it is an internet-driven payment method you’ll see all across the world,” Soto-Wright said.” “If you think about the United States, we have been a little bit behind. Real-time payments has taken years to get rolled out. We actually think wallets can help skip that technology jump and stablecoins are going to be a very important part of that.”