MoonPay buys broker North Capital for over $60 million in stock, a licensed path into tokenized securities

MoonPay, the company best known for letting people buy crypto with a card or bank transfer, has agreed to acquire North Capital, a Utah firm that builds the back-office and trading systems behind private securities offerings. The deal is all stock and is worth more than $60 million, people familiar with it told CoinDesk, Cointelegraph and Fortune. Neither company put a price in its announcement.

Both boards have approved it. North Capital will become a wholly owned MoonPay subsidiary once regulators sign off and other closing conditions are met, Cointelegraph reported.

What MoonPay is actually buying

The asset here is the paperwork. North Capital's affiliates include broker-dealers, an alternative trading system, a transfer agent and an investment adviser, all registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to the announcement as reported by Cointelegraph. A person familiar with the deal told Fortune the licenses were a key reason MoonPay bought the company rather than building its own.

We checked the public record. FINRA's BrokerCheck lists North Capital Private Securities Corporation as an active broker-dealer, formed in Delaware in May 2010 and approved by FINRA on January 24, 2011, with registrations in 53 states and territories. FINRA classifies it as a small firm, and its record shows one regulatory event disclosure. Buying a firm that has held those approvals for 15 years is a shortcut compared with applying from scratch, although the change of ownership still needs regulatory sign-off.

The number behind the price

The announcement says North Capital has supported more than $8.7 billion of primary and secondary transaction volume. CoinDesk rounded that to about $9 billion. On the $60 million figure the sources gave, MoonPay is paying roughly 0.7 cents for every dollar of deals that have ever passed through North Capital's systems. That is a cheap-looking multiple, but transaction volume is not revenue, and neither company disclosed North Capital's sales or profit, so the true valuation cannot be worked out from what is public.

Because the deal is paid in MoonPay shares, the real cost also depends on what those private shares are worth. Cointelegraph cited Tracxn data putting MoonPay's valuation at $3.4 billion; at that figure, the deal would equal a little under 2% of the company.

What the headlines blur

Fortune linked the deal to the SEC's new "Innovation Exemption", issued on September 17. That order is narrower than it sounds. It covers tokenized versions of NMS stock, meaning shares already listed on U.S. exchanges, traded through permissioned automated market makers on venues the SEC calls Tokenized Securities Venues. It limits the number of symbols and the volume traded, requires the token to carry the same rights as the ordinary share, and expires after five years.

North Capital's business, by the companies' own description, is mostly private markets: helping private issuers and fund managers raise money, keep records of holders, and allow resales. That is a different lane from trading tokenized Apple or Nvidia shares. The licenses could help MoonPay in either area, but the deal is better read as a bet on tokenized private assets than as a direct play on the SEC's listed-stock exemption.

Who should pay attention

For crypto traders, this is one more sign that the payments and exchange companies are racing to own regulated plumbing, following Robinhood and Kraken into tokenized securities. MoonPay has already bought trading infrastructure firm DFlow, key management company Sodot and finance operations platform Entendre this year, according to Cointelegraph.

For small companies and funds that raise money through private offerings, the question is what changes after the deal closes. Nothing, for now: the transaction still needs regulatory approval, and neither side has said whether North Capital's pricing or services will change. Our earlier piece on where federal crypto rules stand covers the wider rulebook.

Sources: CoinDesk; Cointelegraph; Fortune; FINRA BrokerCheck; SEC. The deal value comes from unnamed sources cited by those outlets and was not confirmed by the companies. This is market information, not investment advice.