MoonPay has acquired crypto infrastructure startup Glide, aiming to fold Glide’s deposit and routing technology into MoonPay’s fiat-to-crypto offering. The companies announced the deal this week, positioning it as a step in MoonPay’s shift from payments toward broader digital asset infrastructure for other applications.
Glide, founded in 2023 by Tushar Soni and Qinyu Tong, is designed to help software applications accept deposits from a wide range of token and wallet sources without requiring users to manually coordinate cross-chain bridges, swaps, and other intermediate steps. Glide’s documentation states the platform supports more than 100 tokens across 30 blockchain networks.
Key takeaways
- MoonPay is integrating Glide’s deposit and routing capabilities into its MoonPay Deposits product.
- Glide’s core utility is simplifying wallet funding across chains, tokens, exchanges, and cards without manual bridge-and-swap workflows.
- The acquisition reinforces MoonPay’s strategy to expand beyond fiat-to-crypto payments into deeper infrastructure layers.
- MoonPay did not disclose financial terms of the acquisition.
Glide’s approach to cross-chain deposit friction
Soni said Glide was created after recurring issues surfaced while working with Web3 consumer startups: users struggled to add funds to their wallets smoothly. In those workflows, balances could end up on the wrong chain, in the wrong token, or sitting on the wrong venue—forcing users to complete multiple steps to get funds where they actually needed them.
“Funds sat on the wrong chain, in the wrong token, on an exchange, or on a card, and every deposit meant bridges, swaps, and drop-offs,” Soni told Cointelegraph.
According to Soni, the founders also met while working on Robinhood Wallet and later pursued Y Combinator with a plan to build wallet infrastructure for Web3 consumer startups. But their engagements with startups made the deposit problem more visible—prompting Glide to pivot from general wallet infrastructure toward a unified deposit flow.
From multiple sources to a single funding experience
Glide’s model centers on reducing the manual complexity that often accompanies deposits in multi-chain ecosystems. Instead of asking users to orchestrate the path from one asset or chain to another, Glide is intended to automate routing so applications can fund wallets from different sources—such as other chains, tokens, wallets, exchanges, or card-based funding.
As Glide evolved, the objective sharpened: enable users to top up without having to complete bridges and swaps themselves. That distinction matters for app developers because it shifts a portion of the user-experience burden away from end-users and into infrastructure logic that can be reused across products.
Glide was founded in 2023 by Soni and Tong, both formerly associated with the team behind Robinhood Wallet. Their focus on deposit flows reflects a broader trend in crypto—consumer-facing services increasingly depend on reliable onboarding and funding rails, not just token support or interfaces.
How MoonPay plans to use the technology
MoonPay said that after the acquisition, Glide’s technology will be integrated into MoonPay Deposits. MoonPay Deposits is already used by applications including Wallet in Telegram, Moonshot, and Paysafe, according to the announcement shared with Cointelegraph.
MoonPay CEO and co-founder Ivan Soto-Wright framed the purchase as part of a larger infrastructure strategy. He pointed to MoonPay’s recent deals expanding security, trading, and accounting capabilities, arguing that digital asset companies need more than checkout-style payments to help businesses and end users operate reliably with crypto.
“Every acquisition this year has added a layer of the infrastructure that businesses and their users need to operate with digital assets: moving money, securing it, trading it, accounting for it,” Soto-Wright said.
Soto-Wright also described the specific problem Glide targets: users can lose funds by sending the wrong token on the wrong chain. The implication is that future blockchain-based platforms will increasingly require infrastructure that removes these complexities from the user’s workflow, making the underlying transfers effectively invisible.
MoonPay’s expanding acquisition pipeline
The companies did not disclose the financial terms of the Glide acquisition.
For MoonPay, the deal adds to a busy stretch of dealmaking. The acquisition was described as MoonPay’s sixth acquisition announcement of 2026, with additional purchases previously reported by Cointelegraph including Sodot, Decent, DFlow, Entendre, and Dawn Labs. MoonPay’s investor roster includes Thrive Capital, Paradigm, Valhalla Ventures, Tiger Global Management, and Coatue, according to startup data platform Tracxn.
MoonPay also noted leadership changes in its compliance and administration function, with former acting chair of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission Caroline Pham named chief legal officer and chief administrative officer late last year.
What to watch next for deposits and routing
With Glide’s deposit and routing technology slated for integration into MoonPay Deposits, the key open question for builders and users will be how quickly MoonPay can translate Glide’s cross-chain simplification into smoother funding experiences across supported apps—and whether that improvement reduces common user errors tied to token and network mismatches.
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