MoonPay Acquires Meso and Hires Its PayPal-Veteran Founders

Cryptocurrency company MoonPay says it has acquired payment firm Meso.

“This acquisition represents a major milestone in our evolution to a global payments network connecting banks, card networks, stablecoins and blockchains under a unified regulatory framework,” the company said in its announcement Monday (Sept. 15).

Under the deal, Meso’s co-founders Ali Aghareza and Ben Mills will join MoonPay, the announcement added.

Agherza, Meso’s chief technology officer, will take on the same role at MoonPay. He was part of the original engineering team at Braintree, which was later acquired by PayPal, where he went on to lead engineering.

Mills will become MoonPay’s senior vice president of product, overseeing the company’s global product organization. He is also a veteran of Briantree, and served as head of product for PayPal’s Venmo, and held leadership roles at Thinkful and Chegg. The latter acquired the former in 2019.

Ivan Soto-Wright, MoonPay’s co-founder and CEO, said the acquisition represents a turning point for the company.

“We’ve built trusted ramps that brought millions into crypto, now we’re building the global network that will move money across every form and in every market,” he said. “Ali and Ben’s track record at Braintree, Venmo and PayPal makes them the ideal leaders to help us connect banks, card networks, stablecoins and blockchains into one system.”

The Meso deal is the latest in a string of acquisitions for MoonPay this year. The company began 2025 with the purchase of Helio, a cryptocurrency payment processor that supports Solana and other blockchains.

And in March, MoonPay acquired Iron, a company whose application programming interfaces provide solutions for enterprises, markets, merchants, FinTechs and payment processors.

In other cryptocurrency news, PYMNTS spoke last week with Liat Shetret, vice president of global policy and regulation at blockchain analytics company Elliptic, following the announcement that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) were combining their regulatory focus.

Shetret called it “almost a healing moment … an opportunity to put confidence in the industry and to those that are looking to innovate here in America.”

“Up until a few months ago, we saw almost reconnaissance missions of crypto businesses looking in other jurisdictions,” she added. “They were leaving the U.S., and they were looking at Europe, they were looking at Asia, they were looking at the Caribbean. They were looking at all these different jurisdictions to find regulatory clarity, to find regulatory understanding.”

But that’s shifting, Shetret added, amid new excitement “around bringing it back home, bringing it back to America.”