Helio

TLDR: Helio is a Solana-native crypto payment gateway that lets merchants accept digital assets through pay links, checkout widgets, recurring subscriptions, and a purpose-built Shopify plugin. Founded in 2022 by serial entrepreneurs Stijn Paumen and Jim Walker, the platform scaled from $10 million processed at launch to over $1.5 billion by early 2025, when MoonPay acquired it for $175 million — its largest-ever deal. The platform now operates under the MoonPay Commerce brand while retaining the Helio team, product suite, and hel.io domain.

What Helio Does

Helio is a merchant-focused crypto payment processor. Its core premise is simple: merchants should be able to accept cryptocurrency without managing wallets, bridging assets, or integrating complex infrastructure. Helio abstracts that complexity into a dashboard-driven product with no-code setup for small sellers and a full API and SDK layer for developers.

At the point of sale, buyers pay with crypto — SOL, USDC, BTC, ETH, and thousands of other tokens — and merchants can receive the proceeds in their preferred currency or stablecoin, including automatic fiat conversion to dollars or euros. Payments settle near-instantly on-chain, eliminating the multi-day settlement windows of traditional card networks, and chargebacks are removed entirely. Helio charges a 0.75% merchant fee, substantially below the 3% standard on credit card rails.

Core Product Suite

Pay Links are the platform's entry point: shareable URLs that any merchant can create in minutes for products, services, content, or one-time donations. No website required.

Checkout Widget is an embeddable UI component that drops a crypto checkout into any existing web storefront. Merchants can theme and brand it to match their site.

Subscriptions — launched in February 2025 — extend Helio's model to recurring billing. Merchants configure subscription terms; the protocol collects recurring crypto payments automatically without requiring buyer intervention each cycle.

Solana Pay Shopify Plugin is the highest-profile product in Helio's history. In January 2024, Helio assumed ownership and development of the official Solana Pay plugin for Shopify, putting crypto payments at the checkout of millions of Shopify stores. The plugin processes payments in USDC directly on Solana with no intermediary. Over 200 Shopify stores adopted it within three months of Helio's takeover. During Solana Mobile's Chapter 2 phone launch, the plugin processed more than 20 sales per second and saved Solana Mobile over $1 million in payment processing fees compared with card alternatives. A 98% transaction success rate was recorded in the Solana case study.

Discord Memberships allow community managers to gate Discord server access behind crypto payments, enabling subscription-based community models.

Deposits product serves gaming platforms and apps with embedded wallets, letting users fund accounts with any supported token.

Trading APIs — introduced in May 2025, after the MoonPay acquisition — extend Helio's infrastructure to marketplace and trading volume use cases, reflecting MoonPay's broader commerce strategy.

Supported Networks and Tokens

Helio launched as a Solana-first platform and retains Solana as its primary chain, holding an on-chain program at address ENicYBBNZQ91toN7ggmTxnDGZW14uv9UkumN7XBGeYJ4. Over 2024, it expanded to multichain. Current supported networks include Solana, Ethereum, Base, Polygon, and Bitcoin. The platform supports thousands of tokens across these chains, with USDC on Solana, SOL, ETH, BTC, and MATIC among the highlighted assets. There is no proprietary Helio token.

Growth Trajectory

When Helio raised its $3.3 million seed round in April 2023 — co-led by Peak and Lightspeed Faction, with participation from RockawayX, Solana Labs, and angel investors — it had processed over $10 million across roughly 900 merchant customers. By the time MoonPay acquired the company less than two years later, those figures had grown to $1.5 billion processed and more than 6,000 merchants, with millions of end users reached through merchant storefronts. Notable merchants have included Magic Eden for NFT pre-sales, Solana Breakpoint for event ticketing, Pudgy Penguins for Solana Pay integration, and BAXUS for customer rewards.

The MoonPay Acquisition

In January 2025, MoonPay — the fiat-to-crypto on-ramp platform — acquired Helio for $175 million in its largest-ever acquisition. The deal was announced January 13, 2025. The acquisition combines Helio's on-chain merchant payment rails with MoonPay's existing fiat on-ramp business, allowing MoonPay to offer merchants an end-to-end payment stack: customers who do not yet hold crypto can on-ramp via MoonPay and complete the purchase through Helio in the same flow.

Helio retained its team, brand, and product suite under the acquisition. The platform operates at hel.io and is now marketed as MoonPay Commerce. As of mid-2026, Helio has approximately 35 employees.

CEO Stijn Paumen said at the time: "Joining forces with MoonPay, we're excited to accelerate our mission and unlock crypto's potential." MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright described the deal as "an important step in advancing our vision for the future of payments."

Founders and Team

Helio was co-founded by Stijn Paumen (CEO) and Jim Walker (CTO), both described as serial entrepreneurs based in London. Jim Walker has spoken publicly about the product's merchant-first design philosophy, emphasizing that adoption of digital currency payments should be "not just easy but also cheaper than traditional payment methods."

Solana Ecosystem Fit

Helio is one of the most commercially active builders on Solana's payments infrastructure. Its Shopify plugin gave Solana Pay meaningful retail-scale distribution. Its program on Solana mainnet processes SPL token transactions for e-commerce, subscriptions, event ticketing, and digital goods. The platform's history of serving Solana ecosystem events — Breakpoint tickets, Solana Mobile hardware launches — and its seed backing from Solana Labs underscore its alignment with the broader Solana ecosystem. Even after expanding to Ethereum, Base, Polygon, and Bitcoin, Solana remains Helio's primary settlement layer and the chain where its on-chain infrastructure is deployed.