August 9, 2026
The first two posts in this series covered the token, how the peg holds, and the law, what the GENIUS Act requires from an issuer. Neither touches the step most people actually hit first: turning money sitting in a bank account into a stablecoin sitting in a wallet. I recently created an account with MoonPay to buy USDC, and identity verification is as far as I’ve gotten so far. Going through it is a good excuse to describe what an on-ramp is actually doing, since it’s a different layer of infrastructure from the token itself.
Not the issuer, a payments layer in front of it
MoonPay doesn’t mint USDC. Circle does that, under the reserve and redemption rules described in the last post. MoonPay’s job is narrower: take a card payment or bank transfer, source USDC from its own liquidity, and send it to the wallet address you give it. In a wallet’s UI it shows up as a single “buy crypto” button, but there’s a company sitting between your bank and the token, briefly taking custody of your money before handing over the asset. It’s the same role a payment processor plays for any other purchase, applied to an asset that happens to live on a public ledger instead of a bank’s internal database. This is also why MoonPay shows up as the embedded buy option inside wallets like MetaMask, Trust, and Phantom rather than as a destination people navigate to directly: it’s infrastructure other products plug into, not really a consumer brand on its own.
KYC is where the law becomes a form
Before any of that can happen, MoonPay verifies who you are: government ID, basic personal details, and in most flows a selfie for a liveness check. This isn’t caution on MoonPay’s part, it’s a direct consequence of AML/KYC obligations that apply to anyone converting fiat into crypto through a regulated channel, the same category of requirement the GENIUS Act post described from the issuer’s side. A stablecoin’s protocol has no concept of identity, a wallet address is just an address, but the moment fiat currency enters through a bank rail, whoever operates that bridge has to know who you are. That’s the actual point where regulation touches a technology built to route around needing anyone’s permission: not in the smart contract, but in the account creation form.
Fees track payment-rail risk, not the cost of the token
The economics are worth being specific about because the interface makes them easy to miss. MoonPay’s disclosed fee runs roughly 1 to 4.5%, depending on the payment method, with card payments at the top of that range and bank transfers near the bottom. On top of that fee, the exchange rate quoted typically embeds an additional spread, so the effective cost of a card purchase can land well above the headline percentage. This isn’t unusual for a payment processor: card payments carry chargeback risk that a bank transfer doesn’t, so they’re priced higher. What’s easy to lose track of is that none of this fee funds the stablecoin itself, USDC’s peg mechanism doesn’t care how you acquired the token. It’s entirely the cost of the on-ramp: compliance overhead, payment processing, and the spread the service keeps for taking on settlement risk between your payment clearing and the token landing in your wallet.
The network choice happens at the same step
Buying USDC also means choosing a chain. MoonPay supports it across Ethereum mainnet and a handful of EVM networks (Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon among others), plus non-EVM chains for other assets. This choice is easy to gloss over in the interface but has real consequences: mainnet settlement is slower and gas costs meaningfully more than an L2 like Base, and if the destination wallet or app only supports a specific network, sending USDC to the wrong one is a mistake that isn’t trivially reversible. The on-ramp doesn’t make this decision for you, and it’s the one step in the flow that has nothing to do with regulation or payments: it’s purely about which ledger you end up on.
Two posts ago this series was about a peg mechanism, the last one was about a federal licensing regime. Setting up an account to actually buy the thing makes clear that most of the friction, and most of the actual regulatory contact, sits in this on-ramp layer rather than in the token or its issuer.