Moonpay's ambitions go beyond payments

Known for allowing consumers to buy crypto with major payment methods and for helping celebs snap up NFTs, Moonpay has ambitious plans to move beyond its core business.

Why it matters: Moonpay reached mainstream vernacular last year by inking deals with celebrities and major studios such as Universal. But its end-game is much more than just the consumers' discretionary spending.

CEO Ivan Soto-Wright spoke to Axios about the company's ambitions last week, noting an interest in perhaps one day putting medical records on the blockchain.

This conversation has been edited for clarity.

Moonpay raised $87 million in its last funding round from celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Justin Bieber. Tell me a little more about your strategy in working with Hollywood.

• I think about the next stage is how do we take this stuff mainstream. There's different sides of the [end-customer] funnel. One was already existing people: Crypto geeks — I'm one of them, right? Then there's literally a grandma sitting at Universal Studios in Florida.
• A lot of where this industry is moving ... it's also about new forms of intellectual property. So why not work with the people that create the most social property in the world?

Are you interested in other NFT use-cases? There's been some buzz, for example, about using NFTs to represent mortgages or other private assets.

• There's some really promising use cases around NFTs, specifically for things like: medical records is one that I'm very excited about. But I think the challenge there is you have HIPAA compliance — you have a lot of regulatory hurdles to hop through.
• So I think in the entertainment and gaming industry — that's where you're going to see adoption happen faster because the barriers to entry are much lower. I know we will eventually get there. Same with mortgages.

So maybe one day we'll see you in, say, medical records — even though it's hard to imagine a company doing both HIPAA compliance and NFTs for universal under the same roof.

• 100%. With infrastructure, it's a new file format. It sounds crazy. But in the same way that AWS can be configured in many different ways across many different industries, that's kind of the way that you need to think about Hypermint (Moonpay's NFT minting platform).
• I think there will be companies that may be specialized towards very particular use cases. But the point is, we wanted it to be pretty interoperable.