MoonPay Acquires Onchain Trading Platform Rhythm

MoonPay has acquired Rhythm, an onchain trading signals platform designed to help users discover opportunities, execute trades and manage risk in fast-moving crypto markets, according to MoonPay's announcement.

This is MoonPay's eighth deal in two years, following Glide, Entendre, Dawn Labs, DFlow, Sodot, Meso, Iron and Helio, according to Dealbook, as the company stitches together a full-stack crypto and stablecoin platform.

The acquisition brings Rhythm's technology and all three co-founders, Joseph Murphy, James Miller and Lincoln Barnett III, to MoonPay, along with experience spanning product development, engineering, DeFi and onchain trading.

Rhythm was the first investment made through MoonPay Labs, the accelerator MoonPay launched in April 2025 to back early-stage Web3 technical founders with pre-seed capital, product guidance and market entry support. Unlike typical cohort-based accelerators, MoonPay Labs takes only five teams a year, which made Rhythm's graduation to a full acquisition a more direct bet than the program's usual advisory role.

The three founders bring track records in adjacent trading infrastructure. Murphy, Rhythm's chief product officer, previously co-founded Minty Finance, where he helped build high-frequency DeFi trading software that powered more than $7 million in executed trades, and before that founded Mirage Software, an automated checkout venture that facilitated more than $50 million in customer spending. Barnett, chief executive, is a DeFi trader and operator who has advised high-growth startups on fundraising and go-to-market strategy since 2017 and led Rhythm's own fundraising and platform strategy. Miller, chief technology officer, was previously a full-stack engineer at Spendesk and a Minty Finance co-founder alongside Murphy, with earlier infrastructure work at Hardly Any Holdings, NFT Access and other startups.

The acquisition lands as MoonPay has been raising its profile with a broader set of financial backers. In December 2025, Intercontinental Exchange, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, was reported to be in talks to invest in MoonPay at a valuation of nearly $5 billion, according to Bloomberg, a marked step up from the company's earlier private valuations. That interest follows years of MoonPay courting backers well outside crypto's usual venture circles, including a 2022 round that drew $87 million from more than 60 investors in music, sports and entertainment.

Buying Rhythm outright, rather than leaving it as a Labs portfolio company, signals MoonPay wants trading discovery and execution tools built directly into its own product rather than accessed through a third party it merely backs. For a company that built its business on fiat-to-crypto onramps, adding a signals and execution layer pushes MoonPay further into the trading stack itself, an area increasingly contested as consumer crypto apps compete on more than just onramp fees.