MoonPay Wants to Be the Infrastructure Layer Behind the Tokenized Economy

For years, MoonPay was known as crypto's buy button. If someone wanted to purchase Bitcoin, Ethereum, or another digital asset with a credit card, there was a good chance MoonPay was powering the transaction behind the scenes.

Today, the company is aiming for something much bigger.

MoonPay announced the launch of MoonPay Trade, a new platform designed to give financial institutions, asset managers, fintechs, and enterprises access to digital assets, liquidity, and settlement across more than 200 blockchains through a single API.

The launch follows MoonPay's acquisition of Decent.xyz, a Y Combinator-backed cross-chain routing company that now serves as the foundation of MoonPay Trade's execution infrastructure.

More importantly, the move signals how aggressively MoonPay is expanding beyond payments and into the rapidly growing market for tokenized assets.

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The Problem: Onchain Markets Are Fragmented

The tokenized asset market has grown dramatically over the past three years.

Real-world assets on public blockchains have expanded from less than $2 billion to more than $25 billion in onchain value. Meanwhile, asset managers, banks, and fintech companies are increasingly exploring tokenized funds, stablecoins, digital collateral, and blockchain-based settlement systems.

The challenge is that the infrastructure remains fragmented.

Liquidity is spread across hundreds of blockchains, decentralized exchanges, bridges, protocols, and settlement networks. Connecting directly to each system requires significant engineering resources, compliance oversight, and operational complexity.

MoonPay believes institutions don't want to manage that complexity themselves. Instead, MoonPay Trade aims to provide a single access point to the broader onchain economy.

Through one integration, clients can access cross-chain execution, settlement, payments, collateral transfers, stablecoin conversion, and liquidity routing across networks including Ethereum, Solana, Base, Hyperliquid, and Bitcoin.

From Buy Button to Financial Infrastructure

The launch is also the latest step in MoonPay's transformation into a much broader financial infrastructure company.

Over the past 18 months, the company has completed more than six acquisitions spanning payments, stablecoins, custody, and trading infrastructure.

The acquisition of Decent adds another critical layer.

Founded in 2021 and backed by Y Combinator, Archetype, and Circle, Decent built routing technology capable of finding and executing transactions across more than 200 blockchains and millions of digital assets.

Its infrastructure was designed to solve one of crypto's biggest user experience problems: moving assets between chains without forcing users to understand the increasingly complex architecture underneath.

Now integrated into MoonPay Trade, that technology becomes part of a larger institutional offering.

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The Institutional Opportunity

MoonPay is launching the platform at a time when traditional finance is becoming increasingly serious about tokenization.

Major firms including Franklin Templeton have already launched tokenized funds, while tokenized treasuries, private credit products, and stablecoin-based payment systems continue gaining traction.

Industry forecasts suggest the opportunity could become substantially larger.

According to projections cited by MoonPay, the tokenized real-world asset market could grow from roughly $25 billion today to as much as $14 trillion by 2030 and potentially $55 trillion by 2035.

The company believes the biggest obstacle is no longer regulation or demand. It's infrastructure.

"Institutions are tokenizing funds, moving collateral across chains, and settling in dozens of currencies," said Ivan Soto-Wright. "The market is here."

Building for Banks and Asset Managers

MoonPay Trade will serve as the execution layer for MoonPay Institutional, the company's regulated financial services division led by Caroline D. Pham, the former acting chair of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The platform combines onchain execution with fiat settlement, compliance systems, KYC and AML infrastructure, reporting tools, and access to more than 120 fiat currencies.

In practical terms, MoonPay is attempting to offer banks, asset managers, and enterprises a single integration that connects traditional finance to blockchain markets.

Rather than building infrastructure chain by chain, institutions can access the broader ecosystem through one platform.