Nium has acquired Cypher, a non-custodial crypto wallet and issuing company, to expand its fiat-to-on-chain money movement infrastructure.
The company stated that the move responds to demand from consumer-facing Web3 companies and traditional fintechs entering the digital asset space, including wallets, exchanges, and personal finance applications, which require card issuing, global money movement, and fiat-to-digital bridging capabilities.
Bridging fiat and digital asset infrastructure
According to Nium, the acquisition brings operational experience in building and scaling products for crypto-native users, along with familiarity with the technical requirements of blockchain networks. In addition, the company said this is intended to allow it to develop products for this customer segment with greater speed. Nium framed the deal as an extension of the security, compliance, and reliability standards already embedded in its cross-border payments infrastructure to on-chain transactions.
Cypher was founded four years ago and has built products at the intersection of on-chain and traditional banking. The company was backed by Y Combinator and Coinbase Ventures. Its founder, Kuberan Marimuthu, previously held engineering leadership roles in payments and risk at Coinbase, Amazon, and Zenefits.
Commenting on the acquisition, Prajit Nanu, CEO of Nium, said money should move with the same speed and precision as data, regardless of its origin, destination, or the parties involved. He also pointed to inefficiencies in correspondent banking flows and funds held in nostro accounts, and said agentic payments require value exchange and trust layers that do not yet exist across the ecosystem at scale. He said the Cypher acquisition adds capacity to Nium's efforts to build this infrastructure.
Strategic implications
The deal reflects a broader pattern in the payments sector, where infrastructure providers are combining traditional card issuing and cross-border payment rails with crypto-native capabilities to serve companies operating across both fiat and digital asset systems. Through the process of integrating Cypher's non-custodial wallet and issuing technology, Nium adds digital asset capabilities to its existing infrastructure layer, which it positions as supporting compliance, programmability, and orchestration of money movement across multiple currencies and blockchain networks. The company did not disclose the financial terms of the transaction.
