MoonPay cofounder and CEO Ivan Soto-Wright, along with other executives at the crypto payments company, sold $150 million of company shares in November 2021, just months before the bottom of the crypto market fell out.
The sale occurred during a mammoth Series A funding round led by Tiger Global Management and Coatue Management. In its first outside fundraising round, MoonPay, which facilitates crypto purchases with dollars and other fiat currency, raised $555 million at a $3.4 billion valuation, but only $405 million went to shares for investors, according to a person familiar with the situation, cited by The Information.
One month after the funding round, Soto-Wright, a former DJ and investment firm founder, bought a waterfront Miami Beach mansion owned by Chris Bosh, a retired NBA star who played for the Heat. The property was listed at $42 million and sold for $38.5 million.
MoonPay hadn’t previously disclosed the $150 million secondary sale publicly. Three former employees told The Information that they were unaware of the ability to sell their shares during the funding round. A spokesperson for MoonPay did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune.
The cash grab by the startup’s executives came shortly before the crypto market crashed in the first half of 2022. While secondary sales of equity during funding rounds were not uncommon at the time, investors and employees have critiqued the selloffs by executives during 2021, especially as venture capital funding—especially in the world of Web3—has slowed to a trickle in the past year.
Founded in 2019, MoonPay saw meteoric growth with the rise of the most recent crypto bull market. In 2021, the startup told investors that it would generate $150 million in net revenue for the year. Even Paris Hilton advertised the company while chatting with Jimmy Fallon about non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, on The Tonight Show in January 2022.
Just months later, the startup’s outlook grew dimmer. The total volume of transactions from MoonPay’s largest partners, which include MetaMask and OpenSea, dropped between 50% and 70% from early 2022 to early 2023, according to The Information. And by the end of 2022, Tiger Global Management, one of the two firms to lead MoonPay’s Series A funding round, lowered its valuation of the company to $2.8 billion.
