MoonPay launches MoonPay Trade to pull banks into DeFi and tokenized assets

Accordingly, MoonPay said MoonPay Trade will act as the core execution layer for its newly launched MoonPay Institutional business, which the company built on top of its recent acquisition of Israeli digital asset security firm Sodot.

In this way, MoonPay Institutional is designed to serve financial institutions, asset managers, trading firms and exchanges, providing secure key management, cross‑chain collateral management and access to digital asset markets and DeFi.

From retail on‑ramps to institutional rails, where does Moonpay stand?

Since its inception, MoonPay has been best known as a retail fiat‑to‑crypto on‑ramp embedded in wallets, exchanges and consumer apps. MoonPay Trade marks a shift toward deeper infrastructure: rather than just selling crypto to end users, the company now wants to power banks and fintechs as they plug into tokenized capital markets and DeFi liquidity.

MoonPay now says Trade will support tokenized fund subscriptions, allowing institutions to buy into tokenized funds and structured products directly on chain, using stablecoins and tokenized cash equivalents as rails.

The platform also supports collateral transfers, enabling institutions to move tokenized collateral across chains and venues, and integrates with DeFi protocols such as Aave, Morpho and Maple Finance so that clients can lend, borrow and generate yield directly on chain through a single interface.

Under the hood, MoonPay is leaning on the multi‑party computation (MPC) wallet technology it acquired with Sodot to secure institutional keys and automate complex on‑chain workflows without exposing private keys or requiring clients to manage raw wallets. The company says it now serves more than 30 million customers across 180 countries and works with over 500 enterprise clients, experience it plans to leverage as it pivots toward being an institutional DeFi access layer.

Competing for institutional DeFi flow, how do other DeFi players stack up?

This all comes as only an estimated 10% of RWA Liquidity is active in DeFi protocols. As of May 21, research by Tanaka shows the RWA market is exploding, but DeFi is barely participating: only about 10% of tokenized assets sit in DeFi, and of roughly 7 billion dollars in tokenized gold and commodities on-chain, just 184 million dollars is actually deployed in DeFi protocols.

MoonPay Trade thus drops into an increasingly crowded field of institutional DeFi access platforms, where players like Fireblocks, Circle, Coinbase and BitGo are all vying to become the default pipes into tokenized funds and on‑chain credit markets.

The company’s pitch now seems to be a combination of consumer reach, stablecoin infrastructure, and new institutional custody and execution stack can make it an all‑in‑one gateway for banks and fintechs that do not want to stitch together multiple vendors.

In that sense, MoonPay Trade is both a product launch and a strategic reorientation, signaling that the company intends to compete not just as a retail checkout button, but as a full‑stack infrastructure provider for the era of tokenized and composable finance.