Cross-border payments infrastructure provider Nium has acquired Cypher, a crypto-focused non-custodial wallet and issuing company.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
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Cypher was founded by Kuberan Marimuthu and has received backing from Y Combinator and Coinbase Ventures.
Over the past four years, the company has developed products linking blockchain-based services with conventional banking systems.
Following the deal, Marimuthu has joined Nium as vice president of digital assets and will report to chief executive Prajit Nanu.
Before founding Cypher, Marimuthu held engineering leadership roles in payments and risk at Coinbase, Amazon and Zenefits.
Cypher’s engineering team has also moved to Nium.
Nium said the acquisition adds digital asset expertise to its infrastructure business.
The deal also brings the company operational experience in building and scaling products for crypto-native users, while addressing the technical demands of the blockchain ecosystem.
According to Nium, this will help it develop products for this customer segment more quickly, while extending the security, compliance and reliability standards already built into its global payments infrastructure to on-chain transactions.
The company said the addition of Cypher will support the security, compliance and programmability needs of Web3 businesses and the wider financial services sector.
Nanu said: “Agentic payments require the value exchange and trust layers that don’t yet exist at the ecosystem level. We’re building the critical infrastructure to drive this change, and the Cypher acquisition gives us the muscle to accelerate what we build.”
Nium’s cross-border payout network supports 100 currencies across more than 190 countries. More than 100 of those markets offer real-time settlement.
Nium is a principal card issuer on Visa, Mastercard, Discover and UATP. It issues more than 41 million card tokens each year.
It also holds regulatory licences and authorisations in more than 40 countries.
