MoonPay Acquires Cross-Chain Routing Startup Descent, Launches Institutional Trading Platform

MoonPay acquired cross-chain routing startup Descent and launched MoonPay Trade, an institutional platform providing banks and fintechs a single API to access tokenized assets, stablecoin liquidity and DeFi across more than 200 blockchains. The deal and product aim to reduce multi-chain complexity via Descent’s smart order routing—lowering costs and latency—and could accelerate institutional experimentation and on‑ramping into crypto markets. The move strengthens MoonPay’s position bridging traditional finance and DeFi, potentially increasing institutional flows into tokenized assets and stablecoins, and benefiting core crypto liquidity and adoption (noted for Bitcoin and Ethereum exposure).