MoonPay has acquired Sodot, a Tel Aviv-based cryptographic security startup, in a $100 million all-stock transaction announced on April 29, 2026. The deal, reported by Cointelegraph, brings Sodot's multi-party computation (MPC) infrastructure inside MoonPay's wallet, payments, and card stack.
Sodot builds the threshold cryptography that lets a private key be split across multiple devices or servers, with no single party ever holding the full key. That primitive sits underneath modern self-custody and institutional custody products, including the kind of self-custody options that consumer crypto cards have been pushing toward for the last two years.
What MoonPay Just Bought
Sodot was founded in 2022 by veterans of Israeli intelligence units and academic cryptography labs, and raised a Series A in 2023 to commercialize its MPC SDK. The product is not a wallet or a custodian. It is the cryptographic engine that powers other people's wallets and custodians, sold as a library and managed service.
The company's core pitch was speed. Most production MPC implementations carry latency overhead that breaks consumer flows. Sodot's published benchmarks claimed signing operations measured in milliseconds, not seconds, with formal proofs of security under standard adversarial models. That performance profile is the difference between an MPC wallet that feels like a regular wallet and one that feels like waiting for a bank wire.
For a payments company that processes onramp and offramp transactions for hundreds of partners, low-latency cryptography is not a nice-to-have. It decides whether checkout works.
Why MoonPay Needs This In-House
Most of MoonPay's competitors lease their custody and key infrastructure from third parties such as Fireblocks, BitGo, or Copper. That works, but it leaves a margin and a roadmap dependency on someone else. Owning the cryptographic layer means MoonPay can ship features other onramp providers cannot, including embedded MPC wallets for partner apps, programmable spending policies for stablecoin spending flows, and self-custody options for its card products without routing through a competitor's stack.
It also matters for the card business specifically. MoonPay has been quietly expanding into card issuance and stablecoin payouts, including its 2024 acquisition of stablecoin payments firm Helio. A native MPC layer lets it offer the kind of non-custodial spending experience that vendors like Gnosis Pay and Visa's recent partnership with WeFi have been racing to build out.
$100M All-Stock, Not Cash
The structure of the deal is worth noting. An all-stock transaction at this scale signals two things: MoonPay is conserving cash, and Sodot's team is being paid to stay. Stock-based deals tend to come with multi-year vesting schedules tied to integration milestones, which means Sodot's engineers are now MoonPay employees with a financial incentive to ship the integration cleanly.
For comparison, Fireblocks raised a $550 million Series E at an $8 billion valuation in 2022. Sodot's $100 million tag, presumably reflecting its earlier stage, sets a benchmark for MPC-native acquisitions in the current market. Neither side disclosed revenue figures or customer counts.
The Tel Aviv Security Pipeline
Sodot is the latest in a steady run of Israeli crypto security exits. Curv was acquired by PayPal in 2021. Fireblocks itself is Tel Aviv-founded. KZen Networks (now ZenGo) and StarkWare both came out of the same academic and 8200 Unit cryptography talent pool. The pattern is consistent: deep cryptographic research, narrow technical moat, eventual acquisition by a US-based scale player that needs the IP and the team.
For MoonPay, founded in Miami and headquartered in London, this is a way to plant a serious engineering footprint in Israel without building from scratch. Israel approved its first regulated shekel stablecoin earlier this month and is becoming an active jurisdiction for crypto product development, not just security research.
What Changes for Users
Most MoonPay users will not notice this acquisition for some time. Integrations of this kind typically take 12 to 18 months to surface as user-facing features. When they do, expect MoonPay's wallet products to ship MPC-based recovery, partner apps to gain embedded wallet capabilities through MoonPay's SDK, and the card products to start offering true self-custody variants.
The competitive read is that MoonPay is positioning to compete not just with Stripe and Ramp on onramps, but with Fireblocks and BitGo on the infrastructure layer underneath wallets and cards. That is a much larger market, and a much harder one to win.
Overview
MoonPay's $100 million all-stock acquisition of Sodot is a vertical integration play. The company is buying the cryptographic engine underneath its wallet and card products instead of continuing to rent it. The deal does not change anything for end users today, but it sets up MoonPay to compete on infrastructure with Fireblocks and BitGo, not just on onramps with Stripe and Ramp. The price tag, $100 million in stock, also sets a fresh benchmark for MPC-native acquisitions in 2026.
