Fintech Giant MoonPay Snaps Up Glide in Key 2026 Acquisition to Boost Deposits

MoonPay, a leading crypto payments infrastructure company, announced on July 16, 2026, its acquisition of Glide, a specialized crypto deposits infrastructure firm. Glide, established in 2023 by Tushar Soni and Qinyu Tong, who previously spearheaded the development of Robinhood’s crypto wallet, will integrate its team, technology, and customer base into MoonPay immediately. This strategic move aims to bolster MoonPay's deposit capabilities and strengthen its position in the evolving digital asset landscape.

Glide's core offering simplifies the process of accepting crypto deposits for applications. It eliminates the need for users to manually convert funds to a compatible token on a specific blockchain before transacting. The company's proprietary in-house routing layer intelligently selects between instant relayer and bridge-and-swap routes, optimizing for both speed and cost, and facilitates real-time settlement of cross-chain transactions. At the time of the acquisition, Glide supported deposits across more than 100 tokens and 30 blockchain networks, including funding from centralized exchanges and traditional fiat onramps, and reported an impressive annual processing volume exceeding $100 million.

The integration of Glide's advanced deposit technology will enhance MoonPay Deposits, an existing product that serves a diverse client roster including Wallet in Telegram, Moonshot, and Paysafe. Deposits facilitated through this system are received via self-custodial escrow smart contracts, which are fully verifiable on-chain. MoonPay has positioned the combined product as the most compliant non-custodial funding solution available in the market, although this characterization has not been independently verified. Ivan Soto-Wright, chief executive and co-founder of MoonPay, expressed enthusiasm for the acquisition, stating that Glide has developed some of the best deposit technology, and bringing their team onboard will significantly accelerate MoonPay's deposit strategy and place it at the forefront of this category's development. Both Tushar Soni and Qinyu Tong will join MoonPay as part of the transaction, though the financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

This acquisition marks MoonPay’s sixth announced deal in 2026, reflecting a broader strategic pattern of vertical integration within the digital-asset infrastructure sector. Previous acquisitions this year include Sodot (for key management, forming MoonPay Institutional), Decent and DFlow (integrated into MoonPay Trade), Entendre (AI accounting agents), and Dawn Labs (AI-native trading infrastructure). Each of these acquisitions has added a distinct infrastructure layer to MoonPay’s ecosystem: custody, order routing, artificial intelligence accounting, AI trading, and now, multi-chain deposit acceptance.

The acquisition addresses a critical pain point in digital-asset onboarding: wrong-token and wrong-chain deposits, which frequently lead to permanently or temporarily inaccessible funds for retail users and considerable support overhead for platforms. By solving this issue at the infrastructure level, Glide's technology offers substantial commercial value to any application seeking to reduce onboarding friction without increasing KYC repetition or obliging users to hold the native token of a particular chain. MoonPay’s extensive regulatory footprint, encompassing a New York BitLicense, a New York Limited Purpose Trust Charter, US money transmitter licenses across multiple states, and Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) authorization in the EU, provides unparalleled distribution reach that smaller deposit-layer startups cannot easily replicate. While competitors exist in the cross-chain deposit and bridging segment, MoonPay’s regulated, institutional-grade positioning establishes a distinct risk and compliance profile compared to permissionless alternatives. With MiCA now operational and EU supervisors intensifying scrutiny on crypto service providers' custody and fund-flow arrangements, the compliance architecture of deposit products has become a crucial differentiator. The Glide deal, with its emphasis on self-custodial escrow and on-chain verifiability, appears meticulously designed to align with this evolving regulatory landscape.