Howdy!

My Buffalo Bills took down the Denver Broncos in the playoffs yesterday, setting up a meeting with the Baltimore Ravens this weekend. I expect Josh Allen and co. to win by at least 30 points, and if they don’t, I’ll write a crypto newsletter.

Today, we’ve got a MoonPay-Helio deal, MNGO price action, and Wormhole governance:

MoonPay acquires Helio for $175M to grow payments services

Donald Trump is yet to take office, but the presumed increase in crypto M&A deals under his presidency already appears to be underway.

Crypto on- and off-ramp platform MoonPay has acquired Solana payments startup Helio in an all-equity deal valued at $175 million, Helio CEO Stijn Paumen confirmed today. Paumen added that the entire Helio team will be joining MoonPay. There could be more M&A action on the horizon, especially in the emerging field of crypto payments. Two other founders in the crypto payments space confirmed to me that they’ve seen recent acquisition interest.

MoonPay is a popular service for users trying to purchase crypto using bank accounts, credit cards or PayPal. Helio is more e-commerce focused, most recently making headlines for its Shopify plugin that lets merchants accept payments via the Solana network. 

In acquiring Helio, MoonPay is showing an aspiration to expand beyond buying and selling crypto into providing infrastructure for people to pay for goods and services with crypto, Ben Mills, CEO of the on-ramp company Meso, told me. By combining forces, MoonPay is becoming one of the most vaunted outfits in onchain payments, Paumen said. 

MoonPay’s Helio deal is one of the crypto sector’s more notable recent acquisitions, joining Stripe’s October purchase of the stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge for a reported $1.1 billion. It feels notable that both of these deals involved crypto payments — which is the technology’s original use case but not one that has caught on very broadly just yet.

Crypto still believes in payments. In Lightspeed’s recent Solana Founders poll, a plurality voted that payments are Solana’s most underrated sector.

Still, how big of a deal this all is remains a matter of perspective. Stripe buying Bridge was a validation for crypto because Stripe isn’t a crypto company, Mills said.

The intra-industry deal of MoonPay buying Helio “feels more like internal consolidation which is probably healthy, but doesn’t tell us much,” he added.

— Jack Kubinec

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Mango Markets just shut down, and its native token is still trading higher than it was before the election. 

Mango Markets agreed to destroy its MNGO tokens and petition to remove them from trading platforms as part of an SEC settlement in September. Over the weekend, it said it would finally be winding down the platform.

MNGO is down 96% from its 2021 high, so it was the deadest of dead cat bounces, but I still find it funny that the token has yet to drop below its pre-election levels. Maybe someone out there is hoping for a Mango v2 — they’d just better hope Avi Eisenberg doesn’t get his sentence commuted.

— Jack Kubinec

In December, Blockworks Research introduced a Delegate Code of Conduct proposal on the Wormhole Governance Forum, aiming to set clearer accountability and transparency standards for delegates. The initial draft included key measures like conflict-of-interest disclosures, voting rationales and participation benchmarks designed to ensure that governance reflects community priorities.

Some respondents view it as a necessary step toward professionalizing governance and fostering trust, while others have raised concerns about its practicality and enforceability. Feedback has also suggested that rigid standards might discourage participation from smaller or newer delegates, potentially limiting diversity in governance.

Takeaway: For Wormhole users, this initiative represents a potential push toward more transparent and user-aligned governance. If adopted, it could reduce ambiguity in decision-making and build trust across the community, making governance outcomes more predictable and aligned with user expectations.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Stijn Paumen, co-founder and CEO of Helio: