TL;DR:
- MoonPay acquired Sodot, an Israeli crypto security startup, in an all-stock deal valued at approximately $100 million.
- The new unit, MoonPay Institutional, will offer trading services, tokenized securities, payments, wallet management and stablecoin issuance for institutions.
- Caroline D. Pham, former acting chair of the CFTC, will lead this new division of the company.
MoonPay announced the acquisition of Sodot, an Israeli startup specialized in crypto security, as part of its strategy to enter the institutional market for digital assets. The deal, closed as an all-stock transaction this month and valued at around $100 million according to sources familiar with the matter, gives rise to MoonPay Institutional, a new unit designed to connect large traditional financial firms with blockchain-based services and cryptocurrencies.
The unit will offer trading tools, tokenized securities, payments, wallet management and stablecoin issuance. Sodot’s infrastructure, based on self-hosted multi-party computation (MPC), acts as a key management layer for the institutional business. The system is designed for environments that demand strict control over asset movement, transfer approvals and transaction automation.
MoonPay Institutional: Convergence Between TradFi and DeFi
Leading the new unit will be Caroline D. Pham, who joined MoonPay last December as chief legal officer and chief administrative officer, after serving as acting chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission during 2025. “What we’re seeing now is a truly unique inflection point in the maturation of the digital asset ecosystem,” Pham said in an interview. The executive attributed growing institutional interest to greater regulatory clarity —the United States approved stablecoin regulation last year— and to advances in reliability and security of blockchain networks.
In that context, Pham anticipated a deepening convergence between traditional finance and decentralized finance, though under certain conditions. “You’re going to see a convergence where TradFi meets DeFi, but it has to happen in a controlled and regulated way,” she said.
Acquisitions and Track Record
MoonPay has nearly 30 million customers worldwide and operates the infrastructure of 500 companies within the decentralized economy. The company, known for enabling the purchase and sale of cryptocurrencies via cards and bank transfers, considerably deepened its expansion into enterprise infrastructure over the past year with the acquisition of stablecoin platform Iron and crypto payments firm Helio.
The incorporation of Sodot is aligned with that trajectory and positions the company as a reference player in the institutional on-ramps segment, an increasingly crowded space drawing market attention as banks and asset managers seek regulated pathways to access the crypto industry.
MoonPay’s penetration into institutional services is not just a growth project: it is a signal that the business model based on retail onboarding hits a natural ceiling. Capturing individual users is scalable up to a point; capturing institutions, on the other hand, implies different margins, longer relationships, and less dependence on retail market volatility.
That reorientation leads directly to thinking about where on-ramps are headed as a category. A company that combines fiat access, regulatory compliance, custody, and enterprise services looks less like a payment gateway and more like a crypto investment bank. If MoonPay consolidates that architecture, it could define a new standard for what it means to be infrastructure in this market.
