The On-Ramp That Became a Rival

Buying crypto with a credit card inside a wallet app almost always runs through the same rails. MoonPay sits in the checkout of the most widely used wallets across leading chains and hundreds of smaller products.

A user taps “Buy,” MoonPay handles identity verification and settlement, and the tokens arrive a few minutes later.

The wallets get a working checkout without having to build one. MoonPay gets a fee on every transaction. It also gets something that often goes unmentioned in partnership announcements, the underlying data.

And increasingly, it’s using that data to compete with the very wallets that generate it. The company has even built a consumer app that now targets the same users, has overtaken established wallets on download charts (the same apps that once integrated MoonPay), and has publicly set its sights to become the largest consumer crypto product in the market.

The on-ramp is no longer just an on-ramp. It’s a rival sitting inside the checkout flow of its own customers.

What Each Transaction Reveals

A single on-ramp purchase carries more information than it appears to on the surface. The token being bought. The chain it lives on. The size of the order. The card network and issuing bank. The country of the buyer. The time of day. 

The exact step where a purchase fails, whether that’s a rejected card, a failed selfie check, or a user who walked away from the KYC form. Multiply that by more than 30 million accounts across 180 countries, and the result is one of the clearest real-time views of retail crypto demand available anywhere.

In the hands of a neutral infrastructure provider, that visibility is operational. It tunes fraud models, allocates support resources, and raises conversion rates for everyone routing through the platform. 

In the hands of a company with its own consumer ambitions, it becomes a competitive advantage that partners helped pay for.

How openly that ambition is being pursued became clear in a post from NJ Skoberne, MoonPay’s ex-VP of Product and Growth. 

After 30 months of work, he wrote, the MoonPay app had overtaken one of the most prominent crypto wallet apps in terms of downloads, according to Sensor Tower data. 

He then added that this was just the beginning, and that the company had set its sights on the most prominent consumer crypto app in the market, “the big blue one.”

Screenshot from LinkedIn

The people running the product are openly describing the partner ecosystem as a leaderboard to climb.

A Standalone Wallet, Not a Companion App

In 2023, MoonPay launched a consumer wallet of its own. It wasn’t positioned as an extension of the on-ramp or a lightweight utility tied to the checkout flow. It’s a standalone self-custody app offering swaps across thousands of trading pairs, stablecoin balances with instant USD conversion, cross-chain transfers, and a debit card that spends crypto directly from the wallet.

The App Store listing is the part that makes the relationship with partners awkward. The product is pitched as a single place to manage holdings from exchanges and wallets, naming each one directly in the description. 

All of these companies are MoonPay customers. They sent the transaction volume today. And the marketing copy is telling their users to consolidate away from them.

Outside crypto, the closest analog would be a payment processor opening a storefront that competes with the ecommerce platforms it serves, while also holding a ledger of every sale those platforms have ever processed. A processor in that position isn’t starting from zero when it builds something of its own.

The Marketplace Playbook

The world’s largest online retailer built a marketplace, opened it to third-party sellers, and watched which products sold. It then launched in-house brands in the categories that those sellers had already validated. The sellers stayed because the platform’s reach was unmatched, even as they watched margin leak to a house player reading off their dashboards.

MoonPay is running a version of the same approach in crypto payments. It can see which memecoin is surging in Manila before the partner wallet powering the purchase can. It knows which card BIN ranges convert best in Brazil and which ones barely clear in Nigeria. It knows where KYC funnels break, which payment methods get abandoned, and which times of day drive the bulk of small-dollar retail orders. 

A partner wallet deciding what to build next has to run experiments and wait for data. MoonPay can pull the answer from a dashboard that already exists.

Each new integration adds another stream of signal. The signal feeds product decisions. The products compete for users who originally came in through the partner wallets that produced the signal in the first place.

An Acquisition Pattern That Fits the Direction

MoonPay spent heavily in 2025, and the targets line up with where the company is heading. It acquired Helio, a Solana-based merchant checkout platform that brought a direct view into retail payment flows. It also acquired Iron, a stablecoin settlement startup which added virtual bank accounts and treasury infrastructure. 

Meso, a U.S. payments company founded by veterans of a major legacy processor was also bought to bring domestic banking connections and the engineering discipline to embed deeper into partner stacks. Reports point to a fourth acquisition adding programmable on-chain settlement.

Each deal extends MoonPay’s visibility into a new layer of the stack; merchants, settlement, banking, and smart contracts. 

When CEO Ivan Soto-Wright announced the payments acquisition, he described the ramps as the starting phase and said the goal now was to build “the global network that will move money across every form and in every market.” The ramps collected the data. The network is the consumer business being built on top of it.

The Switching Cost Problem

A partner wallet could, in theory, respond by cutting MoonPay out and integrating a different provider. In practice, it rarely happens at scale. 

MoonPay holds the KYC and AML workflows, the fraud prevention systems, the regulatory licensing across dozens of jurisdictions, the card-network relationships, and the banking partnerships that make fiat settlement possible. 

Replacing it means re-verifying every existing user, rebuilding fraud models, renegotiating banking terms, and absorbing conversion losses during the transition. 

For a wallet with millions of monthly actives, that’s a multi-quarter engineering commitment with a real hit to the revenue line.

So the partners stay. They keep routing transactions, keep generating the data, and keep watching as MoonPay ships consumer features that look unusually well-matched to the behavior flowing through their own integrations.

The deeper the integration runs, the higher the cost of leaving. The higher the cost of leaving, the more data accumulates. The more data accumulates, the sharper the competition gets.

A Familiar Structural Conflict

Infrastructure companies that last tend to avoid launching consumer products that compete with their own customers.

The largest card processor doesn’t open a storefront. The largest cloud provider doesn’t run a retail business that competes with the companies it hosts. The dominant communications API doesn’t release its own messaging app. The reason is simply because customers stop trusting infrastructure that might use them as a testing ground for its own products.

When infrastructure operators have crossed that line, regulators eventually noticed. Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer is currently defending antitrust suits built on exactly this dynamic. Google, a dominant search company’s ad business is in court over the same kind of structural conflict.

MoonPay hasn’t faced that level of scrutiny yet, partly because crypto’s regulatory framework is still being assembled. But the shape of the conflict is identical. A platform with privileged visibility into its customers’ businesses is using that visibility to build products that replace them.

The question every wallet routing volume through MoonPay should be asking is no longer whether the company plans to compete for their users. That question has already been answered. The one still open is how much of the data it needed to compete effectively?