MoonPay to acquire North Capital, adding a secondary venue for nontraded alts

MoonPay, the fintech best known for crypto payments, has agreed to acquire North Capital Investment Technology, the Utah firm that supplies brokerage, escrow, clearing, custody and secondary trading services to private securities issuers, the companies said in a Sept. 23 statement. Terms were not disclosed; CoinDesk and Fortune reported a price of about $60 million in stock, and North Capital will become a wholly owned subsidiary of MoonPay at closing.

The part of North Capital's stack that matters to fund sponsors is PPEX. North Capital Private Securities Corp., one of two FINRA-member broker-dealers the company operates, runs the SEC-registered alternative trading system for private and other exempt securities, designed for nontraded REITs, business development companies, Delaware statutory trusts and private funds. Those are the products sold into the wealth channel by interval funds and tender-offer sponsors, and their current liquidity valve is the sponsor's own repurchase window. A venue that can print a price on those shares is a different proposition from a queue that decides only who gets paid this quarter, which is why a payments company's purchase matters to fund sponsors.

The scale is early. PPEX counts more than 1,250 approved assets available for secondary trading and has executed more than 84,000 trades so far this year, with 2026 volume already surpassing the whole of 2025, according to the companies. North Capital's platform has supported more than $8.7 billion in primary and secondary transaction volume, the vast majority from primary offerings, which leaves PPEX a small slice of an origination book, growing this year against a base the companies did not quantify.

The company cites the constraints: limits on the number of investors, disclosure and advertising rules, Investment Company Act of 1940 registration requirements and Rule 144 resale restrictions, and it adds that getting every nontraded product to open, transparent markets will take time. Interval funds are registered under the 1940 Act, one of the constraints named, which makes PPEX's near-term use for this wrapper price discovery at the margins rather than a standing alternative to a repurchase window. North Capital holds more than 52,000 brokerage accounts and has facilitated more than 3,500 escrow accounts, according to the company, with clients drawn largely from real estate sponsors and Regulation A+ issuers: the demand side of the DST and nontraded REIT programs that populate semi-liquid shelves.

IVF's records list North Capital at 12 employees and $366 million in regulatory assets as of Sept. 26, so what changes hands is a compact regulated footprint—a clearing and carrying operation, an ATS and an SEC-registered investment adviser—under a payments company. The companies said North Capital's entities and brand names will continue. North Capital's own view is that getting every nontraded product to open, transparent markets will take time. What the deal does not settle is whether a secondary print in a fund sold on quarterly liquidity at a fixed share of the book becomes a reference price sponsors have to answer to.