Crypto payments infrastructure firm MoonPay has agreed to acquire North Capital in an all stock deal that Coindesk said was worth more than $60 million, subject to regulatory approvals. The acquisition would give MoonPay a regulated securities infrastructure stack as it expands beyond crypto into tokenized assets.
North Capital helps companies raise capital using exemptions and operates the PPEX ATS (alternative trading system), which has more than 1,250 eligible securities and has supported over $8.7 billion in transaction volume. It also holds broker dealer, transfer agent and investment advisory registrations. MoonPay said the brokerage and advisory businesses would be added to its infrastructure platform.
North Capital also partnered with fellow tokenized securities venue tZERO to launch Agora, a network that connects ATSs so that qualified institutional participants can discover and route orders across venues rather than being siloed in one. The goal is to address the liquidity fragmentation that has held back private and tokenized securities markets. The network, which is currently limited to qualified institutional participants, went live with its first routed order in July. The acquisition raises a question about Agora’s governance, given that one of its two founding ATSs will now belong to a vertically integrated group that also owns a transaction router and payment rails.
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