Nium Acquires Cypher to Bridge Fiat and Crypto

Nium has acquired Cypher to further develop Nium as the core infrastructure layer for compliant money movement and value exchange that bridges fiat and digital assets.

The acquisition brings together Nium’s cross-border payments infrastructure and Cypher’s crypto-native non-custodial wallet and issuing capabilities, Nium said in a Wednesday (July 8) press release.

The combination will help Nium build and scale products for crypto-native users and deliver products that serve this customer segment while retaining the security, compliance and reliability of its existing global payments infrastructure, according to the release.

Nium has seen growing demand for card issuing, global money movement infrastructure and fiat-to-digital bridges from consumer-facing Web3 companies and traditional FinTechs, the release said.

That demand has grown since Nium launched its stablecoin-backed issuing product and extended its cross-border payment network to support funding and settlement with stablecoins, per the release.

Nium CEO Prajit Nanu said in the release that the company aims to make money move quickly and accurately, regardless of origin or destination.

“We’re building the critical infrastructure to drive this change, and the Cypher acquisition gives us the muscle to accelerate what we build,” Nanu said.

With the acquisition, Cypher founder Kuberan Marimuthu and Cypher’s engineering team have joined Nium, according to the release.

Marimuthu said in a Wednesday post on LinkedIn: “Super excited to share that Cypher is acquired by Nium. The entire team is joining hands with Prajit Nanu and team in scaling their existing money movement business in their ambitious digital asset initiatives.”

A message on Cypher’s homepage says that the company has been acquired by Nium and that Cypher is sunsetting, with its services set to end Sept. 6.

Nium announced in May that it teamed up with Circle to link stablecoin settlement with global payout infrastructure. With Nium joining Circle’s Payment Network (CPN) as a payout partner, financial institutions will be able to move funds via Circle’s USDC stablecoin and settle in local currencies across more than 190 countries.

In March, Nium launched its stablecoin card issuance platform, saying this solution is designed to let companies holding stablecoins issue spending cards on both the Visa and Mastercard networks through a single API integration. This allows the coins to be used at hundreds of millions of merchant locations worldwide.