MoonPay Acquires Glide to Fortify Crypto Deposit Infrastructure

MoonPay has acquired crypto infrastructure startup Glide, founded by former Robinhood Wallet engineers, to consolidate cross-chain deposit capabilities and eliminate the friction associated with on-chain asset transfers.

Engineering the End of Cross-Chain Friction

Founded in 2023 by Tushar Soni and Qinyu Tong, Glide was built to address a critical bottleneck in Web3 adoption: the complexity of funding wallets. MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright emphasized that this acquisition is a strategic pillar in transforming MoonPay from a simple fiat-to-crypto gateway into a comprehensive digital asset infrastructure provider. This move follows a series of deals by MoonPay to bolster its capabilities in security, trading, and accounting.

Unifying the Fragmented Liquidity Landscape

The integration of Glide’s technology into MoonPay Deposits aims to render the complexities of bridging and swapping invisible to the end-user. This addresses a significant market failure where funds often remain trapped on the wrong chain or in the wrong token, requiring manual intervention and causing user drop-off.

■Glide supports over 100 tokens across 30 blockchain networks.

■The technology will be integrated into apps like Wallet in Telegram, Moonshot, and Paysafe.

■This marks MoonPay’s sixth acquisition announcement of the year, following deals with Sodot, Decent, and DFlow, Entendre and Dawn Labs.

From a quantitative perspective, user experience (UX) failures are directly correlated to liquidity leakage. When users struggle to bridge funds or send tokens to the wrong chain, capital efficiency drops, and transaction volume is lost. MoonPay’s move to abstract these layers is essentially a play to increase the "velocity of money" within the crypto ecosystem. By lowering the technical barrier to entry, they are expanding the total addressable market for crypto transactions. However, as an analyst, one must watch if this centralization of routing creates a single point of failure or regulatory scrutiny in the future.