Nium acquires Cypher to expand fiat-to-on-chain money movement infrastructure

Nium has acquired Cypher, a crypto-native non-custodial wallet and issuing company, and is positioning the deal as another step toward a payments stack that moves money between fiat and digital assets. For PSPs and fintechs selling into Web3, the point is simple: card issuing, cross-border movement, and stablecoin rails are getting bundled into the same infrastructure conversation.

1. Nium said the acquisition expands its role as a core infrastructure layer for the “converging payments ecosystem” — in other words, compliant money movement and value exchange across fiat and digital assets. The company has already launched a stablecoin-backed issuing product and extended its cross-border payment network to support funding and settlement with stablecoins.
2. That move has reportedly attracted demand from consumer-facing Web3 companies and traditional fintechs expanding into digital assets. Nium’s pitch to those customers is not just settlement; it is the combination of card issuing, global money movement infrastructure, and fiat-to-digital bridges that can handle scale.
3. Cypher brings four years of product-building at the intersection of on-chain and traditional banking. The company was founded by Kuberan Marimuthu (Kube) and backed by Y Combinator and Coinbase Ventures.
4. As part of the deal, Kube has joined Nium as Vice President of Digital Assets and reports to CEO Prajit Nanu. Cypher’s engineering team has also joined Nium, which gives the acquirer the people who actually built the stack, not just the logo.
5. Nium said Cypher’s experience will help it move faster on products for crypto-native users while operating within the security, compliance, and reliability framework already embedded in Nium’s global payments infrastructure. That framework is now being extended to on-chain transactions.