MoonPay Buys SEC-Registered North Capital as CME Prepares GPU Futures

MoonPay is paying in stock for US registrations it would take years to earn. CME's compute futures, due October 5, standardize the price of GPU time without making the hardware interchangeable.

MoonPay has agreed to acquire North Capital, a private-markets infrastructure firm whose affiliates are registered with the SEC as a broker-dealer, an alternative trading system, a transfer agent and an investment adviser. North Capital will become a wholly owned subsidiary once regulators approve. Both companies' boards have approved the deal.

The announcement gave no price. CoinDesk and Fortune reported an all-stock transaction worth more than $60 million. Both headlines round that to "$60 million," but the reporting beneath them gives a floor, not a fixed price.

What MoonPay is buying is a set of permissions. North Capital says its platforms have supported more than $8.7 billion of primary and secondary transaction volume, and its PPEX trading system lists more than 1,250 approved assets for secondary trading. Earning each of those registrations from scratch takes years of applications, compliance hiring and examinations. At the reported price, MoonPay is paying for time.

A company that buys rather than builds

The deal fits a pattern. North Capital is at least MoonPay's seventh acquisition since the start of 2025. In January 2025 it bought Helio, a crypto payments processor with more than 6,000 merchants, for $175 million. In March 2025 it bought Iron, a stablecoin-infrastructure platform, without disclosing a price; Architect Partners put the deal at $100 million or more. Meso, a payments start-up whose co-founders came from PayPal and Venmo, followed in September 2025. This year MoonPay paid about $100 million in stock for Sodot, an Israeli key-management firm, in April, to launch an institutional unit. It paid another $100 million in stock for DFlow, a Solana trading-infrastructure platform, in May. Fortune counted DFlow as the sixth acquisition in that run, which also included Decent.

North Capital differs from the rest of that list. The earlier targets brought technology, merchants and trading flow. North Capital brings standing in US securities markets, and that is the hard part of tokenization. A token representing a private share still needs a broker to sell it, a transfer agent to keep the legal register, a venue permitted to match trades, investor-eligibility checks and enforceable rights in the underlying company. MoonPay says it serves 35 million customers in 180 countries. None of that made it a US securities intermediary. This deal does.

"We're building the regulatory foundation to support mass adoption of tokenized real-world assets," chief executive Ivan Soto-Wright said, according to Fortune.

The economics rest on usage, not on the $8.7 billion figure. That is throughput accumulated over years, not revenue, and North Capital's fees on it have not been disclosed. The price will look cheap if MoonPay can route its retail and institutional customers toward private-market issuance and secondary trading on PPEX. It will look expensive if the registrations mainly give MoonPay regulatory comfort. Because the deal is paid in MoonPay stock, North Capital's owners share that bet.

CME standardizes the price, not the machine

On October 5, subject to regulatory review, CME Group plans to list two compute futures contracts on NYMEX, its energy exchange: Silicon Data H100 Rental Index Futures and Silicon Data B200 Rental Index Futures. Both are cash-settled against Silicon Data indexes of hourly GPU rental rates. Each contract covers 730 GPU-hours, about a month of continuous rent for one GPU, and is quoted in dollars per GPU-hour, with a minimum tick of one cent, or $7.30 per contract.

The rental rates themselves are modest. Silicon Data's H100 index, as cited by the cloud provider Spheron, rose from about $1.70 an hour in October 2025 to about $2.35 by March 2026. Silicon Data's chief executive told The Next Web in August that H100 rental prices had risen about 20% since January. At $2 to $2.50 an hour, one H100 contract carries about $1,500 to $1,800 of notional value. A lab renting a 1,000-GPU cluster for a month would need about 1,000 contracts, less than $2 million of notional, to hedge it. B200 rates are higher, but CME's own description makes the point: each contract is a month of rent on a single chip.

Pete Keavey, CME's global head of energy and environmental products, compared the launch to oil's move from spot trading to derivatives. He said the contracts "will now turn compute into a standardized, tradable commodity." The comparison is closer to electricity. A megawatt-hour at one node and hour is not worth the same as one at another, so power contracts specify location, period and quality, and many settle against an index rather than by delivery. Compute has more dimensions still: chip generation, memory, interconnect, cluster topology, software stack, region, power, latency and uptime all change what an hour is worth. A cash-settled index contract sidesteps most of that. It transfers exposure to an average rental price and does not promise any particular server.

The approach has a cost. A hedge against a broad index of non-hyperscaler H100 rental prices protects a buyer only to the extent that its own cluster's price moves with the index. For a large lab contracting specialized capacity, that link may be loose. Enough volatility gives hedgers a reason to trade. Too much basis risk sends them back to bilateral contracts.

The same constraint from two directions

MoonPay and CME are working on one problem from opposite ends. Programmable settlement is worth something only once the underlying right is legally and economically defined. MoonPay is buying those definitions for securities: registrations, transfer records, permission to run a venue. CME is writing them for compute, but only for price risk, and only through an index that averages away the differences between machines.

The sequence matters for anyone promising a market in tokenized compute. So far the pattern is standardized price first, hedging second, and only later transferable claims on a specific service with delivery terms detailed enough to enforce. Securities have reached the last stage, which is why a crypto company is paying for a broker-dealer. Compute has only reached the first.

CTOL view: We expect compute futures to trade, but not yet as a hedging market of any size. Our call: combined open interest in CME's H100 and B200 compute futures will be below 20,000 contracts at the close of the last trading day of 2026, as shown in CME's published daily volume and open-interest data. At current H100 rates, 20,000 contracts is roughly $29 million to $37 million of notional, or one month of rent on 20,000 GPUs, about the size of a single large training cluster. We are wrong if combined open interest on that day is 20,000 contracts or more. Our reasoning is basis risk: the natural hedgers rent clusters that differ from a broad rental index, and a market three months old rarely attracts them.

MoonPay Buys SEC-Registered North Capital as CME Prepares GPU Futures

A company that buys rather than builds

CME standardizes the price, not the machine

The same constraint from two directions

Sources

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