Source: MoonPay insiders, including CEO Ivan Soto-Wright, cashed out $150M in shares as part of the crypto payment startup's $555M Series A in November 2021
The only smart people in the entire NFT fiasco were the grifter CEOs who made bag holders out of greedy VCs and Ponzi schemers who thought they were the ones doing the pump & dump. … Tweets: Pauly / @pauly0x : Reminder: @yugalabs @opensea & @moonpay were the 3 pillars of the entire fraud driven NFT bull market. All these companies are primarily backed by @a16z & @pmarca. Yuga is under formal @SECGov investigation. 3/4 founders have left and they are on their 4th CEO in 2 years. OS... https://twitter.com/... [image] Mark Temple / @marktemple_ : Choose your securing the bag secondary fighter: @isotowright vs. @johnnyboufarhat https://twitter.com/... @deeze : Moonpay was good at overpaying for culture and plastering NFTs on celeb profiles Surely that's worth a 9 figure payday https://twitter.com/... Amir Efrati / @amir : This was among the biggest secondary share sales *ever* for such a young company. RT Watson / @rt_watson : MoonPay CEO and others collect $150 million (according to The Information) during Series A... Few weeks later it seemed like a good time for same CEO to buy a $38 million mansion... not a great look. https://twitter.com/... @cryptadamist : crypto pump and dumps aren't confined to cryptocurrencies... in fact you can often pump and dump even harder using equity in a nonsense company like “Moonpay” https://twitter.com/... Aidan Ryan / @aidanfitzryan : New from me: MoonPay's CEO and other early executives reaped $150 million in secondary share sales at the peak of the crypto market. Its core payments business has since come under pressure and the company is leaning heavily into its NFT products https://www.theinformation.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
MoonPay's $555M Series A in November 2021 came at the peak of the NFT bull market, and the company leaned hard on celebrity validation to get there — weeks later it announced Justin Bieber, Gwyneth Paltrow and others had put in $86.7M at a $3.4B valuation. The new reporting shows that same round doubled as an exit: insiders including CEO Ivan Soto-Wright sold $150M in secondary shares into the financing.
That detail reframes the promotional machinery already under scrutiny. Sources have since reported MoonPay gifted celebrities BAYC NFTs during late 2021 to seed its own marketing (which the company disputes), while VICE documented how middlemen like Dapp Centre ran paid-influencer campaigns pushing legal limits. The Information's insider-sale figure lands squarely in that arc.
First-order effects
- Investors who bought into the Series A at the $3.4B valuation — including the celebrity syndicate announced months later — were effectively buying stock that the CEO and other insiders were simultaneously selling; the $150M shifted risk from MoonPay's leadership onto the new cap table.
- Soto-Wright and a16z-backed MoonPay face direct reputational damage, with critics like Pauly framing the insider sale alongside Yuga's SEC investigation as evidence of a coordinated NFT-era extraction.
Second-order effects
- The combination of insider selling and alleged NFT gifting gives regulators a concrete MoonPay case study, raising pressure on the SEC to treat promotional payments and secondary sales in private crypto rounds the way it treated SafeMoon's unregistered-securities conduct.
- Future MoonPay fundraising and any secondary liquidity becomes harder to price: buyers will demand disclosure of how much stock founders sold into prior rounds before accepting paper from the same team.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — insiders cashing out at peak valuations while retail and late-stage investors hold depreciating positions — expect limited partners and regulators to force secondary-sale disclosure requirements into private-market term sheets across crypto, closing a gap that Celsius' collapse also exposed.
- The episode deepens what separates credible crypto infrastructure from the 2021 cohort: payment companies that survived are being judged on whether their early capital structure was built for customers or for founder exits.
The trend: Crypto companies from the 2021 NFT boom are being retroactively audited — by reporters, regulators, and LPs — for whether insider enrichment and paid promotion, not product adoption, drove their headline valuations.