A big focus of these efforts involves stablecoins, cryptocurrencies pegged to another asset, like the U.S. dollar, so they maintain a consistent price. While stablecoins for years primarily enabled crypto trading, they’re being used more for payments – potentially unlocking faster, less expensive and more automated money movements. The total stablecoin market cap has jumped 22% year-to-date as of June, to $250 billion. Adding to their momentum, Mastercard recently announced plans to support several stablecoins on its own network.

The discussions at MoonPay’s office that day offer a peek into what this stablecoin-infused future could look like.

“We’re upgrading money for the internet,” MoonPay CEO and co-founder Ivan Soto-Wright, said alongside Grossman later that day. “Everything about MoonPay has been built around backwards compatibility to the existing financial system. So we want to plug in every single payment across every single part of the world.”

Soto-Wright and Victor Faramond, MoonPay’s chief engineer, founded the startup seven years ago, after they developed the venture-capital fund HODL.vc together.

MoonPay helps users buy and sell crypto and NFTs using credit cards, bank transfers and mobile wallets, including Google Pay. For example, if you want to buy an NFT on the OpenSea marketplace, MoonPay plugs its services into that site, so you can complete your purchase with a payment card.

The partnership with Mastercard creates obvious opportunities, Soto-Wright and Grossman said, with MoonPay integrated into more than 500 leading crypto platforms and Mastercard bringing forward its massive global scale, 3.5 billion payment cards out in the wild and thousands of partnerships across fintechs and traditional finance.

“MoonPay has this excellence of bridging the divide between the fiat and digital asset worlds,” said Mastercard’s Christian Rau, who works closely with MoonPay and other crypto partners. “We see that on the back of regulation in Europe, in the U.S., the time is ripe to combine what MoonPay can bring to the table and what Mastercard can bring to the table to unlock a lot of value for wallet users around on-ramp-off-ramp use cases and payments.”

Together, they’re looking to have new cards connect to users’ crypto wallets and enable stablecoin and crypto payments at the more than 150 million locations where Mastercard is accepted today.

This partnership isn’t new, with the companies first announcing their work together in late 2023. MoonPay is already using a variety of Mastercard services, including Crypto Credential to validate users and transactions. Mastercard has used MoonPay’s capabilities to mint NFTs for the UEFA Champions League.

In the MoonPay conference room, the next chapter of this partnership was being dreamed up. Both teams tossed around ideas about the needs and uses of the future card program, including how MoonPay could use the cards to grow its relationships with its young user base. Mastercard’s Santiago Noriega  led the discussion, drilling down on various aspects of the card. As new concepts were discussed, he would scrawl a few words on a Post-it and stick it on one of several boards on the wall. By late afternoon, the boards behind him were filled with dozens of notes.

“The new lens that comes in is stables,” MoonPay’s NJ Skoberne told the room about how crypto is changing. “That will be the difference going forward.”

MoonPay's brand color was splashed all around the office: purple walls, purple pillows, purple utility pipes, a purple disco ball nestled in a bookcase. A screen in the conference room simply said, “Bleed purple.”

In the afternoon, surrounded by all that purple – during lunch and at breaks between brainstorming sessions — conversations focused on crypto’s potential to change the future of commerce and payments. Teams from local startups and companies filtered in and out to touch base, exchange notes on crypto ideas and check out MoonPay’s new digs. A prevailing sentiment throughout the day was that the fintech boom has been huge — and yet, it’s essentially still another form of banking. Crypto, meanwhile, was something different, completely reimagining banking’s inner workings and infrastructure.

Despite those lofty expectations, the often-volatile crypto market still has a long way to go to reach mass adoption. Crypto needs the simplicity, security, scale and reliability that traditional banks and card networks already provide.

That’s where the Mastercard and MoonPay partnership comes into play.

The work coming out of that conference room that day could help bring those capabilities to the crypto ecosystem, which should benefit everyone involved.

MoonPay’s Damilola Payne may have put it best, noting that users don’t want complexity, they want results. Solving that — , whether through the new card program or any number of other ideas, could result in the mass adoption many crypto players seek.

“One of the biggest challenges that we see in crypto today is that there are so many different crypto assets,” Payne said. “You may have heard different names — Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Solana, Bitcoin — all of these different pieces. Ultimately, from a user perspective, you don't care. You have an outcome … a goal, a job to be done, and what you want to do is have the infrastructure that you use to solve all the problems along the way, so that you can get from point A to point B.”