MoonPay has agreed to acquire North Capital Investment Technology in an all-stock deal valued at more than $60 million, buying its way into regulated US securities infrastructure as the crypto payments company pushes into tokenized real-world assets.
The deal, announced September 23, makes the Utah-based private-markets platform a wholly owned subsidiary of MoonPay once regulatory approvals clear. North Capital brings four SEC registrations with it: a registered broker-dealer, an alternative trading system, a transfer agent and an investment adviser.
Those registrations matter more than the price tag. A crypto payments firm cannot simply start issuing and trading tokenized securities under US law. It needs the licenses, and buying a firm that already holds them is faster than applying for each one separately. The PPEX alternative trading system at North Capital handles secondary trading of exempt securities, including tokenized ones, which is exactly the capability MoonPay lacks today.
What MoonPay gets
North Capital has supported more than $8.7 billion in primary and secondary transaction volume, according to figures cited at the announcement. The platform provides investor onboarding, transaction processing, subscription escrow, custody and secondary trading for private securities issuers, fund managers and professional intermediaries.
MoonPay founder and chief executive Ivan Soto-Wright framed the purchase as groundwork rather than a product launch. The company is “building the regulatory foundation to support mass adoption of tokenized real-world assets,” he said in a statement, adding that the acquired capabilities could “connect different parts of the financial system through modern, programmable infrastructure.”
MoonPay serves more than 35 million customers across 180 countries and over 1,500 enterprise clients, per the company announcement. Founded in 2019, the firm built its name on fiat-to-crypto on-ramps before expanding into enterprise payment infrastructure. The acquisition moves it beyond crypto payments into three adjacent businesses at once: tokenized asset issuance, stablecoin liquidity services and decentralized finance tooling.
Why the timing fits
The purchase lands in a crowded week for tokenization news. NYSE signed an agreement with Blockchain.com to distribute tokenized US stocks through a planned digital trading platform, pending approval. South Korean regulators published a roadmap to move capital markets onto distributed ledgers by February 2027, ending with onchain stablecoin settlement. Coinbase has a pending CFTC filing for cash-settled perpetual futures on US stocks and ETFs.
Traditional exchanges and crypto-native firms are converging on the same thesis: securities that settle on public blockchains will capture issuance volume from legacy rails. The bottleneck is not technology but regulatory standing, which is why the deals that matter lately are license acquisitions rather than protocol launches.
Financial terms were not disclosed in the announcement. A person familiar with the deal told Fortune the price exceeded $60 million in stock. The all-stock structure keeps cash on the balance sheet at MoonPay and ties former owners of North Capital to the performance of the combined company, an arrangement that also avoids draining liquidity from a private firm still funding its own growth.
Background on North Capital
North Capital Investment Technology has operated for over a decade from Salt Lake City, building API-first tooling for private placements and exempt offerings. Its clients include private securities issuers, professional intermediaries, fund managers and investors who need compliant rails for raising capital, managing subscriptions and trading in secondary markets.
The firm runs four regulated entities under one roof. A registered broker-dealer executes securities transactions. The PPEX alternative trading system provides a venue for secondary trades in exempt securities. A transfer agent maintains ownership records. An investment adviser rounds out the set. Most tokenization startups hold none of these, which is why several have spent the past two years partnering with or acquiring regulated firms rather than building their own.
Don Dowd, founder and chief executive of North Capital, pointed to the distribution reach of MoonPay as the main draw in the combination. A standalone infrastructure provider depends on partners to bring deal flow. Inside a consumer-facing payments company with tens of millions of users, the same infrastructure gets a direct funnel.
Integration risk
The deal still needs regulatory clearance, and none of the parties gave a closing timeline. Broker-dealer and transfer agent registrations transfer under FINRA and SEC review, a process that typically takes months. Until then North Capital operates independently.
There is also a cultural gap to bridge. The business at North Capital was built for exempt private offerings, a slow-moving corner of capital markets with heavy paperwork and long settlement cycles. The retail crypto business at MoonPay runs on instant transactions and mobile-first onboarding. Whether the combined firm can serve both without tripping compliance wires is the question investors will watch once the subsidiary reports inside MoonPay.
Competitive pressure adds urgency. Ripple, tZero, Securitize and several exchange groups are each assembling tokenized securities stacks, some through acquisitions, some through partnerships. The NYSE deal with Blockchain.com shows the largest traditional exchange wants distribution through crypto channels rather than building retail rails itself. Whoever assembles licenses, custody and distribution first sets the terms for everyone else.
For MoonPay, the calculation is straightforward. Tokenized real-world assets have moved from conference talking point to product category, with major exchanges committing capital. The $60 million cost of a regulated platform is small next to the fine for operating an unregistered securities business, and far smaller than the revenue at stake if tokenized issuance scales the way its backers expect.
For North Capital, the sale ends a decade of independence but solves a distribution problem the firm could not fix alone. Infrastructure providers live or die by deal flow, and deal flow follows distribution. In a market where the largest exchange and the largest payments firms are all building tokenized rails, selling to one of them beats being priced out by all of them.
Sources: Fortune; CoinDesk; Cointelegraph; PR Newswire (MoonPay announcement, September 23, 2026)