Crypto to the Moon!
Announcing our largest ever investment into MoonPay
Cryptocurrencies and digital assets hold the potential to completely transform how we create, measure, transfer and store value. Yet more than a decade since the first Bitcoin white paper was published, only 1% of the world’s population is reaping the rewards of this financial frontier.
MoonPay — the newest startup we’re thrilled to have welcomed to the Blossom portfolio — has a single mission to solve this; to help billions of people create trillions in digital value by democratising access for all.
“Democratising access” has been the purpose of many visionary founders in their pursuit of bringing novel and innovative technologies to the mainstream. It was the mission communicated by the founders of Skype, Robinhood, Coinbase, and even SpaceX. These companies understood that mass adoption was the only way to lift their respective technologies from offering basic utility to creating immense value. Each took unwieldy technology and made it instantly accessible by building products with entry points that are simple, intuitive and frictionless.
MoonPay stands alongside such visionaries. It is as committed to creating access as it is to creating value. It takes the idea of simple, intuitive and frictionless entry points and raises it to the next level — by increasing the ways governments, businesses and individuals can interact with digital assets by equipping developers with the tools to enable these interactions.
We wholeheartedly share and believe in this mission and it’s why we’ve made our largest ever investment into MoonPay, and are pleased to be welcoming new investors Coatue, NEA, Paradigm, Thrive and Tiger Global in supporting them on their journey. As we look forward to what’s next for the company, we wanted to highlight the ways MoonPay has evolved to become a pioneer of the crypto economy’s development.
- Bringing users from the old world into the new
To succeed and achieve its full potential for all, cryptocurrency has to be accessible to anyone, anywhere. In order to do this, the number of entry points needs to increase. This is the fastest route to increasing adoption. Yet at the same time, there are a number of distribution challenges that plague the industry and make adoption difficult. Challenges that require an easy access on-ramp to convert fiat currency into digital assets, while being compliant with complex, global “Know Your Customer” (KYC) and “Anti Money Laundering” (AML) regulations.
These are challenges that MoonPay acutely understands.
The entry point for crypto is, has been, and will likely be for years to come, from fiat. We know from our investment in Checkout.com that enabling fiat payments online is challenging enough. Yet enabling fiat to crypto, because of the assets’ immaturity, is a thousand times more complex.
There’s no single framework for operating — the rules and regulations around AML and KYC are constantly changing, and in some jurisdictions non-existent; licensing requirements are arduous, not to mention complexities of brokerage and custody. MoonPay abstracts away all this complexity for its merchants so they can focus on developing their product, knowing that when they onboard their users, it will be seamless.
It offers advanced KYC, payment processing, crypto liquidity and delivery, fraud prevention, regulatory licenses, ecosystem identity verification, and custom checkout flows that provide seamless support to businesses. This in turn allows them to offer their customers the ability to buy and sell digital assets quickly in a user-friendly way. MoonPay also helps consumers establish an identity that, once verified, can be used across the entire MoonPay ecosystem without having to repeat a cumbersome onboarding process.
This revolutionary approach has seen MoonPay, to date, process more than $2 billion in transactions and has seen transaction volume grow 35x. It has facilitated more than 30 fiat currencies and more than 90 cryptocurrencies. It now powers more than 250 wallets, websites and applications in over 160 countries, and counting. It has brought time-to-market for web3 developers from months to weeks. Every day we’re seeing innovative new web3 applications, across finance, art, music and more, all enabled by MoonPay’s world-class infrastructure.
2. Adding exponential value
MoonPay’s value to its partners doesn’t stop at onboarding. In fact, it increases with every user who joins the ecosystem and who experiences the benefits of digital assets for the first time. The more people who benefit, the more transactions being made, the more value created, the better conversions for all.
By taking an agnostic approach, MoonPay further removes the barriers to entry by removing the walled gardens that have been built across the industry. Most consumer products try hard to keep their hard-won users within their application. It’s a simple payback calculation to maximise the lifetime value of acquired customers. Yet this does little to contribute to the value of the wider ecosystem.
MoonPay helps users buy, sell and use their coins and tokens without any friction. It allows them to move easily from one site to the next. MoonPay doesn’t discriminate between wallets, exchanges or marketplaces, either. So long as an entry point exists, works and delights its user, MoonPay can be used by partners and customers across the USA, Mumbai and Berlin.
What’s more, MoonPay launched MoonPay.com with this clear-end goal. It’s one of the rare B2B companies that dog foods its own product to not only ensure quality of its infrastructure, but to improve its offering to all. When purchasing through MoonPay for the first time — either on MoonPay.com or through a partner merchant’s site — MoonPay KYCs, onboards and gives that consumer a digital identity. This identity can be used to go on and purchase, or interact with any MoonPay partner without going through onboarding again.
MoonPay knows that each partner it adds to the ecosystem achieves better economies of scale, benefits of which it can in turn pass to the user. And because MoonPay has powered all of these entry points across the globe, the company has created a unique passport for users into the crypto economy. One that can take them and the value of their digital assets anywhere.
3. Enabling users to unlock value from anywhere in the economy
MoonPay’s work is far from complete — the team is constantly adding new payment methods, coins, and products to give developers the complete and exhaustive infrastructure they need to build world-class web3 / crypto applications on top.
In less than two years, MoonPay has enabled >7M users to buy crypto and has grown its partner ecosystem by more than five times. In the early days, MoonPay powered websites or wallets like Bitcoin.com or TrustWallet, and now it’s the rails behind NFT marketplaces like OpenSea. More recently, MoonPay has focused its efforts on merging the creator economy with the crypto economy so that artists reap greater rewards from their hard work. MoonPay can’t predict every application that will need their solution, but works hard to amplify the entrepreneurs and products that want to bring users into the crypto economy.
We see real passion, commitment and value in MoonPay — not just to its own business, but to the digital asset ecosystem and the wider economy and we’re excited to be joining the team as it takes its mission to the next level.
