Crypto Payments, a €100k Card and the MiCA Push — Tothemoon

The best moment of my interview with Evgenii Ovsiankin happened before the camera understood what was going on. He is the Chief Legal Officer of Tothemoon, and you would never guess it. No hedging, no lawyer’s caution, just a fast, funny, disarmingly honest read on a part of crypto most executives dress up in buzzwords. When I asked him the obvious question, why on earth name a regulated crypto company “Tothemoon”, a phrase that still smells of 2017 ICO hype, he did not reach for a brand deck. He laughed and told me the truth.

That candour set the tone for an interview that was really about one thing: turning crypto from something you speculate on into something you can actually pay, get paid, and run a business with. We sat down on the floor at Money 20/20 Europe in Amsterdam, and the more he talked, the clearer it got that the company behind the silly name is doing serious, unglamorous work.

“Honestly? Our investor acquired the domain previously and was trying to find a way to use it. For the guys who’ve been in crypto since 2017, when ICOs were popular, it sounds a bit scammy. But we’re not scam, definitely.”

What Tothemoon actually does

Strip away the name and Tothemoon is a full-stack crypto platform aimed at businesses as much as individuals. Ovsiankin ran through the menu without pausing for breath, and it is a long one. The company helps merchants accept crypto payments through a widget that sits alongside normal fiat and card checkout. It runs an OTC desk for moving large volumes without slipping the market. It does classic spot trading, staking, and what he kept returning to as a real pain-point solver: mass payouts in crypto.

That last one is worth slowing down on because it is the kind of thing that sounds boring and is actually transformative. If you need to pay vendors, service providers or staff across a dozen countries, the traditional route means stitching together a patchwork of bank partners, each with its rails, delays, and fees. Paying them in crypto collapses that complexity into one flow. It is not a trading story. It is a plumbing story, and plumbing is where adoption actually happens.

For consumers, the headline product is the card. It carries a competitive 0.50% rate, daily limits up to €100,000, and slots straight into Apple Pay or Google Pay, as the company lays out on its card page. The full history is public too: Tothemoon is the renamed version of the exchange formerly known as Cryptology, which rebranded in November 2024 after operating since 2017.

Speed, reliability, security, and the part regulators care about

I put the three-part test to him that I put to every payments company in this space. Crypto’s whole promise over traditional finance is that it can be faster, but speed is worthless without reliability and security. Where does Tothemoon actually stand on all three?

His answer was the most lawyerly stretch of the conversation, in the good sense. The company runs external audits of its systems and regular penetration testing, and partners with blockchain-monitoring providers for the compliance obligations every regulated crypto business now carries. He listed the alphabet soup without flinching, KYC and KYB on the onboarding side, and DORA, the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act, on the IT-resilience side. For a Dutch or European business weighing a crypto partner, those are not nice-to-haves. They are the baseline.

Then he made the claim that anchors all of it, and I want to quote it precisely because it matters:

“We’re applying for the real strict licenses across the world. Currently we’re on the final stage of getting the MiCA license in Cyprus. To me, that is the best argument that proves all users can rely on us.”

To be clear about what that means: a MiCA licence in the final stage is a licence in progress, not yet granted. Under the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, a national regulator (here, Cyprus) authorises a crypto-asset service provider, and that authorisation can then passport across the EU. It is precisely the credential that separates a serious 2026 platform from the ICO-era ghosts the company’s own name jokingly evokes. I would tell any reader to verify the licence has actually been granted before treating it as done, but the direction of travel, toward real European authorisation, is the right one and worth holding him to.

No tickets. Just ping us.

The line that made the interview, though, was about something deceptively simple: support. Ovsiankin described it almost as an afterthought, which is what made it land.

“You don’t need to raise a ticket and wait a couple of months for an answer. You ping us in Slack or any other channel, we jump on a call, and we solve your problem immediately. If it’s technical, we invite our CTO and allocate enough resources to handle it.”

Anyone who has ever been trapped in a support queue while their funds sat frozen knows why this is a feature and not a throwaway. In crypto, where transactions are final and minutes matter, the gap between “open a ticket” and “the CTO is on the call” is enormous. It is also a quiet admission about who Tothemoon really wants: corporate clients who need a human, fast, and who will pay for the privilege of reaching one. He said it himself. They love their corporate clients, and they structure products around them.

Why this is relevant for the Dutch and European reader

It is easy to be cynical about a company called Tothemoon. The name is a dare. But look past it, and you see the shape of where European crypto is actually heading: away from speculation and toward boring, regulated utility. Accepting payments. Paying staff across borders. A card that works in Apple Pay. A licence under MiCA. Support that answers.

That is the unsexy frontier of adoption, and it is the same thread running through this entire Money 20/20. The companies that last will not be the ones with the loudest token. They will be the ones that make crypto usable for a business in Rotterdam or a freelancer in Amsterdam without that person ever needing to care how the blockchain works. Ovsiankin’s honesty about the name was the tell. A company confident enough to laugh at its branding is usually confident about the thing underneath it. The licence, when it lands, will be the proof.

This interview was recorded live at Money 20/20 Europe 2026 at the Amsterdam RAI. For more conversations with the people driving crypto adoption, watch the full Cryptofocus series, and read our companion interview with Musqet’s David Parkinson on turning Bitcoin into everyday money.