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Nium has acquired Cypher, adding a crypto-focused wallet and issuing business to its payments infrastructure operations.
Cypher founder Kuberan Marimuthu has joined Nium as Vice President of Digital Assets, reporting to Chief Executive Officer Prajit Nanu. Cypher's engineering team also moved to Nium as part of the transaction.
The acquisition adds a business focused on non-custodial wallets, card issuing and on-chain transactions, along with staff experienced in building products for users moving between traditional payment systems and blockchain-based services.
Demand from consumer-facing Web3 companies and established fintech groups has increased since Nium launched a stablecoin-backed issuing product and expanded its cross-border payments network to support funding and settlement with stablecoins.
That demand reflects a broader shift in digital finance, as wallet providers, exchanges and personal finance apps seek to connect card programmes, cross-border transfers and digital asset transactions through a single operational setup.
Founded by Marimuthu and backed by Y Combinator and Coinbase Ventures, Cypher has spent the past four years building products at the intersection of on-chain services and traditional banking.
Marimuthu brings experience in payments and risk engineering from Coinbase, Amazon and Zenefits. His appointment gives Nium a senior executive focused specifically on digital assets as it expands beyond conventional cross-border payments.
Nium operates a cross-border payout network supporting 100 currencies across more than 190 countries, with more than 100 markets settling in real time. It also issues cards across Visa, Mastercard, Discover and UATP, and generates more than 41 million card tokens each year.
Nium holds regulatory licences and authorisations in more than 40 countries. That network is central to its effort to connect fiat payment rails with digital asset transactions while keeping compliance controls within one system.
Digital assets
Stablecoins have become a growing focus for payments companies because they can move value across borders without relying solely on traditional correspondent banking routes. For infrastructure providers, that creates a need to support both established payment methods and blockchain-based settlement.
Nium is positioning itself around that convergence. Customers increasingly want access to bank transfers, wallets, cards and stablecoin settlement without managing separate providers for each part of the flow.
The Cypher acquisition suggests Nium sees wallet technology and on-chain transaction design as a core part of that strategy rather than a peripheral add-on. Non-custodial wallet services, in particular, have become important in parts of the digital asset market where users want direct control over funds instead of relying on a central intermediary.
Leadership move
Nanu linked the deal to broader inefficiencies in global payments and the need for stronger links between fiat and digital systems.
"Money should move as fast as and with as much precision as data, regardless of origin or destination, be it human or machine, consumer or business, local or cross-border, wallet or bank account," said Prajit Nanu, Chief Executive Officer of Nium.
"Today it doesn't. 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. We're building the critical infrastructure to drive this change, and the Cypher acquisition gives us the muscle to accelerate what we build," he said.
The reference to agentic payments points to a growing industry discussion around automated transactions initiated by software agents and other machine-driven systems. Such models would require payment networks that can handle programmable transfers, identity checks and settlement across multiple asset types.
For Nium, the Cypher acquisition adds specialist product and engineering expertise at a time when fintech groups are testing how stablecoins, digital wallets and card-based payments can work together in mainstream services. Adding Cypher's team also suggests Nium wants to build those products in-house rather than rely solely on partnerships.
Nium is co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore, and its network spans bank accounts, wallets and cards. Marimuthu now leads its digital assets push as Vice President of Digital Assets.