Tech Visionaries Bieber, Paltrow Dump $87 Million Into Crypto Exchange

MoonPay, a software for getting cryptocurrency and NFTs, introduced on Tuesday that it has collected $86.7 million in a brand new funding spherical. The checklist of buyers contains greater than sixty celebrities together with Bruce Willis, Diplo, Eva Longoria, Justin Bieber, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Paris Hilton.

MoonPay, which launched in 2019, dubbed itself “the PayPal of the crypto space,” and stated it might simplify the buying of crypto items by permitting customers to make use of bank cards and fee providers like Apple Pay. Users can to purchase cryptocurrency on the app by way of exchanges like Coinbase, or buy NFTs on OpenSea. In 2021, MoonPay accomplished a $555 million Series A financing spherical, led by enterprise capital corporations, that valued the corporate at $3.4 billion.

Purchasing crypto with a bank card is not commonplace just yet. To buy crypto, you usually first want to affix an alternate. Some bigger cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinbase don’t settle for bank cards, whereas some solely take Visa or Mastercard. Even worse, consumers could incur two kinds of fees when utilizing bank cards—service charges from the alternate and money advance charges from the bank card firm.

MoonPay has gone all in on movie star endorsements as a means of attracting new clients, recruiting celebrities—together with Eva Longoria, Jimmy Fallon, and Snoop Dogg—to make use of their service so as to buy Bored Ape NFT’s; when the celebs crow about their inexplicable purchases on social media, they give MoonPay a mention. The firm was even given a shoutout within the music video for The Weeknd and Post Malone’s new collaboration, “One Right Now.”

Longoria, Snoop Dogg, Malone and The Weeknd are all listed among the many “60 high profile strategic investors” in MoonPay’s funding announcement, as are Anthony Kiedis, Ashton Kutcher, Gal Gadot, James Corden, Jason Derulo, Kate Hudson, Maria Sharapova, Matthew McConaughey, Scooter Braun, Steve Aoki and others.

Gizmodo has reached out to MoonPay to search out out if and the way these celebrities are being compensated for selling the app; the corporate didn’t instantly return requests for remark, however we’ll replace this story in the event that they do.