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Donald Trump has not yet taken office, but the supposed increase in cryptocurrency M&A deals under his presidency appears to have already begun.
Onshore and offshore cryptocurrency platform MoonPay has acquired Helio payments startup Solana in an all-stock deal valued at $175 million, Helio CEO Stijn Bomin confirmed today. Bomin added that the entire Helio team will join MoonPay. There may be more mergers and acquisitions on the horizon, especially in the emerging cryptocurrency payments space. Two other founders in the cryptocurrency payments space confirmed to me that they have seen acquisition interest recently.
MoonPay is a popular service for users trying to purchase cryptocurrencies using bank accounts, credit cards, or PayPal. Helio is more focused on e-commerce and has been making headlines lately Its Shopify plugin Allows merchants to accept payments via the Solana network.
By acquiring Helio, MoonPay is showing an ambition to expand beyond buying and selling cryptocurrencies to providing the infrastructure for people to pay for goods and services with cryptocurrencies, Meso CEO Ben Mills told me. By combining forces, MoonPay has become one of the most popular companies in the on-chain payments space, Bomin said.
MoonPay's Helio deal is one of the most notable recent acquisitions in the cryptocurrency sector Buy Stripe for October From stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge for $1.1 billion. Notably, both deals involved payments in cryptocurrencies – an original use case for the technology but one that has not yet become widespread.
Crypto still believes in payments. In a recent Solana founder survey conducted by Lightspeed, The majority voted Payments is Solana's most underrated sector.
However, the size of the deal remains a matter of perspective. Mills said that purchasing Stripe Bridge was a validation of cryptocurrencies because Stripe is not a cryptocurrency company.
Within the industry, MoonPay's purchase of Helio "seems like an internal merger that's probably healthy, but it doesn't tell us much," he added.
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