Why MoonPay Wanted a 27-Year-Old Utah Broker

MoonPay is buying North Capital, a Utah broker that has quietly handled private stock deals since 1999. The prize is not the technology. It is the US securities licenses MoonPay has been borrowing from partners.

Terms were not disclosed. The agreement, announced Wednesday, still needs regulatory sign-off before it closes.

MoonPay’s Push to Tokenization

Only last week, MoonPay opened a route for its 35 million users into a tokenized Treasury fund from WisdomTree. The fine print showed the problem. WisdomTree Securities handled the brokerage because MoonPay had no US broker-dealer of its own.

North Capital fills that hole several times over. It owns two SEC-registered broker-dealers, a registered transfer agent, an investment adviser, and PPEX, an alternative trading system for private securities with more than 1,250 approved assets. Its platform has moved $8.7 billion across primary raises and secondary trades.

This is plumbing, not product. Escrow, investor verification, shareholder records, and clearing are the unglamorous pieces any firm needs before it can legally sell a tokenized share to an American. Buying them beats applying for each one.

“All financial markets are becoming more technology-driven, but the infrastructure supporting them is still fragmented across different tech stacks, providers, and workflows,” Ivan Soto-Wright, CEO of MoonPay, said in the release

What the Deal Means for Users

The purchase fits a pattern. MoonPay reportedly paid $100 million in stock for Solana router DFlow in May, its sixth deal since early 2025. Soto-Wright frames the company around funding, tokenizing, trading, and spending. North Capital is the tokenize-and-trade layer for regulated securities.

For users, the distinction matters. Most tokenized stocks on crypto apps today are synthetic trackers, and the SEC’s proposed exemption would let them trade without voting rights or dividends. A transfer agent lets MoonPay offer the real thing, a security whose holder sits on the issuer’s books.

That gap is widest in private markets, where pre-IPO token products sold to retail usually confer no stake at all. North Capital’s rails support Reg CF and Reg A+ offerings, the exemptions that let non-accredited investors buy private shares, though accredited-only Reg D deals will stay gated.

The open question is demand. Private securities trade thinly, and 35 million crypto buyers do not automatically become private-market investors. Whether MoonPay can turn a compliance stack into volume will show up in PPEX data, not press releases.

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