What do Questlove, Matthew McConaughey, and Gwyneth Paltrow have in common?
Well, sure they’ve all been on “The Tonight Show.” And as of today they’re also all investors in MoonPay.
MoonPay announced today that the three have joined Steve Aoki, Justin Bieber, Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, Brie Larson, Gal Gadot, Eva Longoria, Paris Hilton and others (most of them major celebrities) in providing $86.7 million in funding to the payments infrastructure company. Hell, even Bruce Willis pitched in.
According to MoonPay, “The strategic investors represent industries on the cusp of transformation by Web3 technology.”
As Paltrow—who already promotes the Bitcoin payments feature for Cash App—put it in a press release, “Web3 is inspiring the entertainment industry, and commerce in general, to reimagine the way we create community, connect with fans, build value and manage intellectual property.”
Aoki, who’s been building out his brand via Ethereum NFTs and the metaverse, said, “It won’t be enough to release new [NFT] drops and hope it works; you’ve got to be way more participatory. Web3 makes that possible.”
It’s been a rapid rise for MoonPay, which was founded in 2019. In December, it raised $555 million in a Series A round led by Coatue and Tiger Global Management, bringing its total valuation to $3.4 billion. The service claims 10 million users across 160 countries.
Its basic utility is that it integrates with other crypto services to let users buy crypto with a credit card or debit card. The service processes NFT transactions for OpenSea and is probably best known for facilitating celebrity purchases of Bored Apes. It also facilitates purchases on Bitcoin.com and payments for plenty of other platforms. If you’ve ever tried to buy a token not yet listed on Coinbase or other major exchanges, chances are that one of the most straightforward options was using MoonPay to get it.
That ubiquitousness and ease of use is precisely what several of the investors have noticed.
Michael Ovitz, co-founder of Hollywood powerhouse firm Creative Artists Agency, which represents several of the named investors, touted MoonPay’s tech, saying “it lowers the barrier of entry to the crypto economy.”
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