Helio
About
Helio (rebranded as MoonPay Commerce after MoonPay's 2025 acquisition) is a crypto payments platform that lets merchants and creators accept crypto payments directly via shareable pay links, embeddable checkout widgets, and a Shopify Solana Pay plugin. It supports Solana, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Base, Polygon and hundreds of digital currencies, settling instantly and peer-to-peer without custodying funds — no chargebacks, no intermediaries.
Where Does Yield Come From?
Helio (now called MoonPay Commerce) is a payment-processing tool for merchants — not a yield-generating DeFi protocol. So there is no structured way for liquidity providers or depositors to earn yield here.
Instead, revenue comes entirely from merchant transaction fees:
- Standard fee: 2% per transaction
- Reduced fee: 1% for merchants who hold a HelioX Pass NFT
- Optional add-ons: 0.25% for on-chain token swaps, and 0.50% for automatically converting crypto to fiat (regular money) settlement
The "earners" in this system are merchants. They benefit from lower processing costs and zero chargeback risk (no one can reverse a payment), compared to traditional credit-card networks. But there is no native token staking, no lending returns, and no liquidity-mining rewards built into the protocol.
Funds flow directly from buyer to merchant on the blockchain. Helio never holds onto users' money or lends it out to others.
Audits
| Audit / Date | Findings | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
Ackee Blockchain16-05-2022 - 20-05-2022 |
| The audit revealed four critical vulnerabilities enabling asset lockup or theft, but all findings were promptly acknowledged and fixed by Helio, with the final fix review surfacing only minor informational items. |
Ackee Blockchain16-05-2022 - 20-05-2022 |
| This audit uncovered critical arithmetic and access-control flaws that could lead to token theft or permanent asset lockup; all critical and high-severity issues were fixed in a subsequent review, but the volume of critical findings underscores that a full re-audit after remediation was warranted. |
Backers
No information about investors, funding rounds, amounts, or backers was found on any official source fetched (hel.io, helio.money, moonpay.com newsroom, Ackee audit pages). The only disclosed capital event is MoonPay's acquisition of Helio in January 2025, which was a strategic acquisition — not an investor round — and no financial terms were publicly disclosed.
Legal
Legal form
Private limited company (Ltd)
Registration jurisdiction
England and Wales, United Kingdom (company number 13836904)
Status and notes
The operating entity is Helio Fintech Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of MoonPay Inc., registered in England and Wales (company no. 13836904). Registered office: 16 Great Queen Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2B 5AH, United Kingdom. Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and NFT Purchase Terms & Conditions are published at docs.hel.io. The hel.io footer states “© 2025 MoonPay · All rights reserved” and links to these legal documents. Governing law is English law per the Terms of Service.