Crypto payments company MoonPay partners with Universal, Fox Corp., Death Row Records, and others to create NFT collections on its HyperMint service
Crypto payments company MoonPay is partnering with major entertainment brands as it expands further into the struggling nonfungible token market.
Context & Ripple Effects
MoonPay built its name as a fiat-to-crypto on-ramp, raising a $555M Series A led by Coatue and Tiger Global at a $3.4B valuation, then adding celebrity backers like Justin Bieber and Gwyneth Paltrow in an $86.7M extension. With the NFT market cooling, HyperMint marks the pivot from selling payment rails to selling turnkey minting infrastructure directly to entertainment brands.
The Universal relationship is the proof point: the same partner behind this announcement went on to run a Halloween Horror Nights NFT scavenger hunt across its Orlando and Hollywood parks with plans to mint up to 7 million tokens, showing what these brand deals convert into once signed.
First-order effects
- Universal, Fox Corp., and Death Row Records get branded NFT collections without building their own crypto or wallet infrastructure, while MoonPay gains recurring B2B revenue beyond per-transaction card fees.
- MoonPay's brand-facing sales motion now runs through marquee IP names rather than retail crypto buyers, shifting its customer base from consumers to studios and labels.
Second-order effects
- Rival NFT platforms must match the bundled payments-plus-minting offer — MoonPay's later tie-up letting Magic Eden users pay by credit card, Apple Pay, or Google Pay shows marketplace distribution becoming part of the same package.
- The celebrity-gifting controversy around Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs reportedly used to promote MoonPay raises the reputational bar for how these brand partnerships are marketed and disclosed.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, crypto firms consolidate into white-label infrastructure layers for media — payments, minting, and eventually institutional-grade security, as signaled by MoonPay's later ~$100M all-stock acquisition of Sodot — leaving brands to rent Web3 capability rather than build it.
- Entertainment NFT programs surviving the market downturn would depend on this kind of managed infrastructure, structurally separating token issuance from speculative trading venues.
The trend: Crypto payments companies are repositioning from consumer on-ramps into full-stack, white-label Web3 infrastructure vendors for media brands and institutions.