Helio

TLDR: Helio launched in 2022 as a Solana-native crypto payment processor, built the infrastructure that let thousands of merchants accept digital assets at checkout, processed over $1.5 billion in transactions across 6,000+ merchants, and was acquired by MoonPay in January 2025 for $175 million. It now operates as MoonPay Commerce, the unified crypto payments division of MoonPay.

What Helio Built

Helio set out to be the Stripe of crypto — a payment layer that let any merchant, creator, or developer accept cryptocurrency at checkout without building blockchain infrastructure themselves. The founding premise was that merchants bear an enormous cost under traditional payment rails: U.S. businesses absorb roughly $200 billion per year in card processing fees and another $100 billion in chargebacks. Crypto payments, settled directly on-chain and irreversible by design, attack both problems at once.

The platform launched on Solana in 2022, picking the chain deliberately for its sub-cent transaction fees and sub-second finality. That choice proved durable: by the time of the MoonPay acquisition, 80% of all Helio transaction volume still ran on Solana. The remaining 20% was split across Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Layer 2s, reflecting the team's gradual multi-chain expansion.

Core Products

Pay Links are the simplest entry point. A merchant creates a shareable URL tied to a product, subscription tier, or digital good; buyers click, connect a wallet, and pay. No embedding, no code required.

Checkout Widget is the embeddable version — a customizable, brandable payment interface that drops into any website or app via Helio's npm packages (@heliofi/*). The widget handles wallet connection, token selection, and on-chain confirmation.

Subscriptions extend the model to recurring payments. Merchants configure billing intervals and amounts; Helio handles the on-chain execution automatically, removing the manual renewal friction that was common to crypto billing.

Deposits serve a different use case: letting users move supported tokens into an application's balance. This targets gaming platforms, embedded wallets, and trading apps that need to top up user accounts without routing through centralized exchanges.

Solana Pay for Shopify was among Helio's most visible integrations, enabling seamless crypto checkout directly inside Shopify's merchant dashboard and powering a category of e-commerce that previously had no clean crypto checkout path.

Beyond these core products, Helio built a merchant utility toolkit: affiliate and referral link tracking, split payments across multiple wallet addresses, gated memberships linked to Discord or Telegram community access, timed sales with countdown launches, and NFT-based discount tiers through the HelioX Pass.

Developer Infrastructure

For technical teams, Helio published a full REST API at api.hel.io/v1, React component libraries via npm, webhooks with HMAC-SHA256 signature verification, devnet testing environments, a Stripe integration for merchants wanting on-chain payments alongside card flows, and a Google Sheets connector for lightweight reporting. The documentation site at docs.hel.io covers headless payment flows, autofill parameters, Framer embedding, and an emerging category the team calls agentic payments — autonomous payment settlement via the x402 protocol designed for AI-driven workflows.

Scale and Notable Clients

By the time MoonPay announced its acquisition in January 2025, Helio had processed over $1.5 billion in cumulative transaction volume across more than one million users and 6,000+ merchants. Notable deployments included Magic Eden NFT pre-sales, Solana Breakpoint ticket sales, Solana Mobile phone sales, and payments for Blueprint, the health company founded by Bryan Johnson. The Solana Foundation, Ledger, Jupiter, Fortune Media, CoinMarketCap, and Solscan all appeared in the client roster disclosed at the MoonPay Commerce launch.

Pricing

Helio charged a flat 2% transaction fee on all payments, dropping to 1% for merchants or buyers holding a HelioX Pass NFT. Optional add-ons carried separate fees: token swaps at 0.25% and auto-offramp (crypto-to-fiat conversion) at 0.50%. High-volume enterprise merchants could negotiate custom pricing. The HelioX Pass NFT tier has carried over into MoonPay Commerce unchanged.

Acquisition and Rebranding

MoonPay announced the acquisition on January 13, 2025, at a deal value of $175 million — the largest acquisition in MoonPay's history at the time. MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright framed it as advancing the company's vision for payments: "Helio's technology and expertise strengthen our ability to deliver efficient, secure, and scalable solutions for crypto commerce, trading infrastructure, and marketplaces." At the time of the deal, MoonPay reported approximately 20 million users on its consumer-facing exchange and fiat on-ramp platform.

Helio co-founder Stijn Paumen joined MoonPay as part of the transaction, continuing to lead the payments infrastructure effort. The Helio team operated the payment infrastructure through 2025 while full integration work proceeded.

In October 2025, MoonPay formally launched MoonPay Commerce — a unified platform combining MoonPay's existing fiat on-ramp infrastructure with Helio's merchant checkout tooling. The hel.io domain now redirects to the MoonPay Commerce product page; docs.hel.io and api.hel.io remain the active technical endpoints for existing integrations. Existing Helio merchants were transitioned automatically to MoonPay Commerce accounts.

What MoonPay Commerce Adds

The combined platform extends Helio's original scope in several meaningful directions. Card-to-crypto payments now allow non-crypto users to pay with a credit or debit card while merchants receive cryptocurrency — a conversion layer Helio lacked natively. Settlement flexibility covers crypto, stablecoins, or fiat (USD and EUR via auto-offramp), widening the audience to merchants who want crypto revenue but operate in fiat-denominated businesses.

Supported chains have grown to include BNB Chain, Arbitrum, and Base alongside the original Solana, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Polygon. Accepted tokens span USDC, USDT, SOL, ETH, and BTC as core options, with hundreds of additional tokens available and a path for merchants to request unlisted tokens through a paid addition service.

Solana's Role

Solana remains the primary settlement layer under MoonPay Commerce, accounting for the majority of transaction volume. The combination of near-zero fees, sub-second finality, and deep native USDC liquidity gives Solana a structural cost advantage for high-frequency merchant payments that most competing chains cannot match. Helio's early bet on Solana as the merchant payments chain — made in 2022 before the ecosystem had its current depth — has proven correct, and that infrastructure is now embedded within one of the larger crypto finance companies operating today.