Bolt Taps Toffee to Bring Global Payment Infrastructure to Game Studios and App Developers

Partnership brings full-stack Merchant of Record services to stakeholders in the global digital goods economy across 190+ countries

Bolt, the checkout, identity and payments leader powering faster, smarter commerce, and Toffee, a leading Merchant of Record platform for digital goods backed by a16z Speedrun, announced a strategic partnership to bring compliant, end-to-end payment processing to game studios and app developers worldwide. The partnership encompasses more than $300 million in signed processing commitments.

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Under the agreement, Bolt will refer game and app developers to Toffee for Merchant of Record services, giving those developers a single infrastructure partner to handle tax collection and remittance, local payment methods, regulatory compliance, fraud prevention and global settlement across more than 190 countries.

“The digital goods market needed a partner who had actually operated inside games at scale, not just built a web shop checkout,” said Kyle Sye, Head of Games at Bolt. “Toffee was processing in-app payments before the major platforms opened up to alternative providers, which means they have solved compliance, fraud and payment challenges that most of the market has only just started to encounter. That depth of experience is what made this partnership the right move for our game studio clients.”

The collaboration addresses a specific gap in how digital goods are sold. Physical commerce and web shop payments are well-served markets but in-app purchases are not. Managing payments inside a game requires handling virtual currency compliance, in-app fraud patterns, and refund rules that differ materially from standard ecommerce. Toffee has operated in that environment for more than two-and-a-half years, processing in-app payments before Apple and Google opened their platforms to third-party payment providers in 2024. That operational history inside live games is the foundation of the partnership.

Global in-app purchase revenue reached $167 billion in 2025, growing more than 10% year-over-year. The broader digital goods market — spanning online games, virtual goods, streaming and digital content — was valued at $124 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $511 billion by 2031. Regulatory shifts, including the EU Digital Markets Act and evolving app store policies, are accelerating developer demand for alternative payment infrastructure. Toffee’s platform was built to serve that demand, originally for real-money gaming and now extended to the broader freemium market.

“Building Merchant of Record infrastructure for in-app payments, starting in real-money gaming, gave us direct experience with a set of problems that most payment providers have not had to face,” said Dmitry Vysotski, Co-Founder and CEO of Toffee (Linq). “Virtual currency compliance, in-game fraud patterns, and the refund mechanics inside live apps are fundamentally different from web commerce. Partnering with Bolt gives game studios and app developers a path to global distribution that handles all of that complexity from day one. With more than $300 million in committed processing volume through this partnership alone, we are scaling rapidly as we prepare for our next phase of growth.”

Beyond the Bolt partnership, Toffee has a growing pipeline of game studio and app developer integrations as demand for independent Merchant of Record infrastructure accelerates across the digital goods economy.

Bolt and Toffee will be at the Game Developers Conference (GDC Festival of Gaming) in San Francisco, March 9-13, where representatives from both companies will be available to meet with game studios and app developers.

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