Ivan Soto-Wright

Ivan Soto-Wright built the rails almost every retail crypto buyer uses without thinking about. MoonPay, the on-ramp he co-founded in 2019, is the small white-label widget inside MetaMask, OpenSea, Trust Wallet, and dozens of other apps that turns a credit card into bitcoin in two clicks. By 2026 it processes billions of dollars a year for tens of millions of users, and its founder has gone from a twenty-something former JPMorgan analyst trying to buy a small amount of ether to one of the most quietly important infrastructure operators in the asset class.

Origins

Soto-Wright was born to Spanish and British parents, raised across the Caribbean and Europe, and educated in the United Kingdom. He worked briefly in fixed-income at JPMorgan before becoming frustrated, like millions of would-be retail buyers, with how difficult it was to actually purchase cryptocurrency at modest sums in 2018. The friction — KYC across multiple sites, repeated bank rejections, weeks of waiting — was the product opportunity. He left the bank, partnered with Victor Faramond, and built the first version of MoonPay as a hosted checkout that wallets and exchanges could embed in minutes.

MoonPay scales

The product hit at the right moment. The 2020-2021 cycle drove a wave of new buyers, and MoonPay's white-label model meant it could grow on the back of every consumer app that needed an on-ramp but did not want to build payments. The company raised at a valuation north of three billion dollars in 2021, attracted investments from celebrities including Justin Bieber, Snoop Dogg, and Drake, and quietly became the default rail for fiat-to-crypto across the Web3 stack. Its dashboards now sit inside MetaMask, OpenSea, Bitpay, and most of the major NFT marketplaces, and it has expanded into off-ramps, stablecoin settlement, and B2B payments rails.

NFT moment

The 2022 NFT cycle was, briefly, a high-margin business for MoonPay. The company helped celebrities buy Bored Apes — leaked emails later showed it advanced JPEGs to several public figures rather than waiting for fiat to settle — and the surrounding press cycle was mixed. Soto-Wright has spoken publicly about wanting MoonPay to function as a regulated, transparent payments company rather than as a speculative-asset reseller, and the company has since refocused on its core on-ramp business as NFT volumes faded.

Where he stands in 2026

In 2026, Soto-Wright is in his early thirties, still CEO, and MoonPay has become as load-bearing for retail crypto as Stripe is for e-commerce. The company has expanded into stablecoin payments, on-chain payroll, and B2B settlement, in line with the broader shift from speculation to utility that defines this part of the cycle. The unresolved questions around him are about regulatory scope as stablecoin frameworks crystallize, about whether MoonPay eventually becomes a public company, and about how on-ramp pricing pressure shapes the business as Stripe Crypto, Coinbase, and Robinhood compete at scale. What is not in question is that he built the layer between fiat and crypto that the rest of the industry now takes for granted.