Ether.fi Taps MoonPay to Power Self-Custodial Neobank with Unified Payments Stack

Ether.fi is moving its core payments infrastructure to MoonPay’s integrated stack to streamline how users fund, move, and spend digital assets. For fintech professionals, this represents a significant shift toward "invisible" crypto rails, merging self-custodial security with the seamless user experience of traditional neobanking apps to drive mass-market adoption.

What was announced

Ether.fi is consolidating its payment functions—funding, internal transfers, and cashing out—onto MoonPay’s single integrated stack. Unlike many neobanks that source these functions from multiple vendors, this partnership aims to eliminate the overhead and compliance friction associated with fragmented integrations. By using a single provider, the platform can offer a unified identity check process, preventing users from having to verify their identity separately for cards, bank accounts, and onramps.

The technical shift supports ether.fi’s card product, which has seen significant growth since its launch in April 2025. According to Paymentscan data, the card processed $123.7M in spend during September 2026 across 1.5M transactions and 48,162 active addresses. This represents a more than five-fold increase from the $24.1M recorded in September 2025. Since its inception, the card has handled a total of $918.1M in spend across 11.6M transactions.

A notable aspect of this growth is its independence from broader crypto market volatility. While bitcoin fell approximately 27% over the last twelve months—including double-digit drops in November 2025 and early 2026—ether.fi’s monthly card volume rose in 13 of the last 15 months. The resilience of these figures suggests the product is being utilized for non-speculative, daily expenditures such as rent and groceries, where the underlying stablecoin balance is treated as functional cash on blockchain rails.

"The platforms that win will be the ones that make money move simply. Ether.fi is exactly the kind of platform our infrastructure was built for and this partnership shows what’s possible when a neobank chooses full functionality with no compromises for their users."

Ivan Soto-Wright, CEO and Founder of MoonPay.

The companies involved

Ether.fi is a crypto neobank designed around a single account for the management of digital assets. The company distinguishes itself through a self-custodial model, ensuring that users retain control of their private keys. Under this structure, ether.fi cannot move or seize assets within a user's wallet. By utilizing crypto rails for fund movement, the company bypasses the traditional chain of correspondent banks, which typically slows down international transfers. This self-custodial approach also alters the regulatory requirements for the firm; because it does not hold user funds in a traditional sense, it does not require a banking license in every market it enters, instead relying on MoonPay’s licensed infrastructure to handle fiat-to-crypto transitions at the edges.

MoonPay is a global financial technology company that provides the infrastructure for moving value between fiat currencies and digital assets. Its integrated stack is designed to handle the complexities of compliance, identity verification, and payment processing within a single interface. This allows partner platforms to offer a more cohesive user experience, where verification data can carry across different products within the same app, subject to local regulatory requirements.

What FF News has reported before

FF News has closely monitored the intersection of decentralized finance and mainstream payment utility. In September 2026, we reported on similar efforts to bridge the gap between digital assets and everyday settlement in Rhino.fi Launches Native Bitcoin Deposits for Seamless Stablecoin Settlement Across 30+ Chains. That development mirrored the current industry push to reduce friction for users moving between different chains and asset types. Both announcements reflect a broader trend where fintech providers are prioritizing "invisible" infrastructure to make blockchain-based transactions as simple as those found in traditional banking apps, focusing on stablecoin utility for both business and consumer use cases.

What this means

This partnership highlights a maturing phase in the fintech sector where blockchain is treated as a backend efficiency tool rather than a speculative asset class. By decoupling transaction volume from the price of bitcoin, ether.fi is demonstrating that self-custodial stablecoin accounts can compete directly with traditional neobanks for daily spending. This puts significant pressure on legacy providers who are still tethered to the slower, more expensive correspondent banking system. Furthermore, the move toward a single-stack integration for KYC and payments suggests that the "modular" fintech era may be giving way to a more consolidated approach, where reducing user friction is the primary competitive advantage.