MoonPay is thrilled to announce our strategic acquisition of Meso, a pioneer in bridging traditional finance and crypto.
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, including MTLs, BitLicenses and MiCA approval.
Meso’s co-founders will join MoonPay, bringing unmatched experience in scaling payments systems used worldwide:
- Ali Aghareza, Meso’s Chief Technology Officer, will become Chief Technology Officer at MoonPay. Ali was part of the original engineering team at Braintree, later acquired by PayPal, where he went on to lead engineering. He co-founded Meso in 2022, building the company into a trusted infrastructure partner for fintech and crypto platforms.
- Ben Mills, Meso’s Co-founder, will take on the role of Senior Vice President of Product, leading MoonPay’s global product organization. Ben brings a track record of building category-defining payments products, having served as Head of Developer Experience at Braintree, Head of Product at Venmo and in leadership roles at Thinkful and Chegg. He also drove payments innovation at Solana before co-founding Meso.
“This acquisition marks a turning point for MoonPay,” said Ivan Soto-Wright, MoonPay’s co-founder and CEO. “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. 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.”
With Meso, Helio, and Iron, MoonPay now brings together the critical components needed to create a single, global payments network.
For consumers and businesses, this means one trusted way to pay, get paid and interact with money in any form.
To learn more about Meso, visit meso.network