Why Is MoonPay Buying Glide?
MoonPay has acquired Glide, a Y Combinator-backed crypto deposits startup, in an all-equity transaction that brings Glide’s technology and four-person team into the company. Glide lets applications accept crypto deposits from any token, wallet, exchange, or card without requiring users to manually bridge or swap assets across blockchains. The deal adds another infrastructure layer to MoonPay’s payments stack as the company continues to expand beyond fiat-to-crypto ramps into deposits, swaps, trading, commerce, institutional services, and stablecoin infrastructure. The companies began discussing the acquisition late last year, and the transaction has now closed. Glide co-founder and CEO Tushar Soni declined to disclose the size of the deal. Glide’s full team, including co-founders Soni and Qinyu Tong, will join MoonPay. Founded in 2023, Glide was built by former members of the team that developed Robinhood’s crypto wallet. MoonPay said the startup is backed by Y Combinator, Titan Fund, and other investors. Soni declined to disclose how much the company had raised.How Does Glide Fit Into MoonPay’s Payments Strategy?
Glide’s core product targets one of crypto’s most persistent onboarding problems: users often hold assets on different wallets, exchanges, and blockchains, while applications want a simpler way to accept deposits. In practice, that can require manual swaps, bridging, or network selection before a user can fund an account or complete a transaction. Glide’s routing technology is designed to remove that friction by automatically choosing the fastest and lowest-cost way to move funds across blockchains. MoonPay said Glide supports deposits and payments across more than 100 tokens and 30 blockchain networks and processes more than $100 million in annualized transaction volume. The deposits are handled through self-custodial smart contracts, allowing users to keep control of their assets while making transactions verifiable onchain. That structure gives MoonPay a product that can serve consumer apps, wallets, exchanges, and payment platforms seeking broader crypto funding options without forcing users through a complex cross-chain process. MoonPay plans to integrate Glide’s technology into MoonPay Deposits, its existing product used by apps including Wallet in Telegram, Moonshot, and Paysafe. Glide served more than 50 business customers, and those customers will now be served by MoonPay.Investor Takeaway
The acquisition shows MoonPay using deals to turn its payments platform into a broader crypto transaction layer. Glide adds deposit routing and cross-chain funding technology, which can help MoonPay serve apps that need users to move value quickly across tokens, wallets, and networks.
