Nium has bought Cypher, a crypto-native wallet and card-issuing startup backed by Y Combinator and Coinbase Ventures, taking on its founder and engineering team and winding down Cypher’s consumer app.
Nium, a cross-border payments infrastructure firm co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore, did not disclose the price.
The acquisition is Nium’s third stablecoin move in five months. In March it launched a platform for issuing stablecoin-backed cards on Visa and Mastercard through a single API, and in May it tied its payout network to Circle’s stablecoin settlement rails.
Cypher adds hands-on engineering for the crypto-native side of that push.
Nium said demand for the bridge between fiat and digital assets has come from wallets, exchanges and personal-finance apps, as well as traditional fintechs moving into digital assets, all of which need card issuing and global money movement to serve users at scale.
“Payouts get stuck in the correspondent banking flows. Trillions sit idle in nostro accounts for days at a time. Agentic payments require the value exchange and trust layers that don’t yet exist at the ecosystem level,” said Prajit Nanu, chief executive of Nium. “We’re building the critical infrastructure to drive this change, and the Cypher acquisition gives us the muscle to accelerate what we build.”
Buying the team, closing the app
Cypher’s founder, Kuberan Marimuthu, has joined Nium as vice-president of digital assets, reporting to Nanu; the company said its engineering team moved across too.
Marimuthu previously held payments and risk engineering leadership roles at Coinbase, Amazon and Zenefits, and spent four years building Cypher at the intersection of blockchain and traditional banking.
In a note to Cypher users announcing the deal, Marimuthu cast it as a continuation rather than an exit. “Four years ago, we started Cypher with a simple belief: that digital assets should become a practical part of everyday finance,” he wrote. “Joining Nium allows us to take that mission to an entirely new scale. While the current platform is winding down, the vision we started together is accelerated.”
The Cypher wallet itself will not carry on. Its services end on 6 September, so Nium is taking the people and the technology, not a live product.
Nium said its payout network reaches more than 190 countries and 100 currencies, with over 100 settling in real time, and that it is a principal issuer on Visa, Mastercard, Discover and UATP, issuing more than 41 million card tokens a year.
A discounted unicorn eyes listing
The deal lands as Nium works towards a delayed initial public offering. It last raised in June 2024, a $50 million round led by Brunei’s sovereign wealth fund that valued the company at $1.4 billion, a 30% cut from the $2 billion it commanded in 2022.
Nium, which reached unicorn status in 2021, has pushed its planned US listing to the end of 2026 after a prolonged search for a chief financial officer.
Stablecoins pull cross-border flows
Nium is moving into a market that has grown quickly. Stablecoins passed $300 billion in market capitalisation in 2026, according to Chainalysis, and cross-border payments are among their heaviest uses, particularly in emerging markets.
That has pulled established payments firms and card networks towards on-chain settlement. Visa, which invested in Nium in 2020, has run its own stablecoin settlement pilots as the networks test moving value directly on-chain.
Cypher’s existing users have until 6 September, when the app closes and its team’s work continues inside Nium.
Also, read DDSC Dirham Stablecoin Gets Central Bank Approval for VARA Exchanges.
