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How many stablecoin cross-border B2B companies are actually funded? I reviewed 589 companies from the @VerdaVentures Stablescape list and checked each one individually for confirmed funding rounds across all available sources. I also removed projects that had been misclassified into the category, which left 568 real ones. Result: 193 of 568 ( 34% ) have a confirmed funding round. 375 ( 66% ) show no public evidence of outside capital. Of the 193 funded: - 159 disclosed the amount - $4b in total, median $7m per company - 34 raised money but did not disclose the size What else the check revealed: 1/ Capital is concentrated at the top. 64 companies at Series A or later account for 76% of the $4b disclosed. The long tail of ~ 375 companies is either bootstrapped, pre-launch, or already dead. 2/ Market maps overstate the sector. "589 companies building stablecoin rails for cross-border payments" sounds like a crowded market. The real investable universe is under 200 companies, and the one with meaningful traction is smaller still. 3/ Africa is large by headcount, thin by capital. 90 companies, 51 of them in Nigeria - the third-largest region by count after North America and Europe, but with the lowest funded share among major regions ( 30% ) and the smallest median round ( $3m vs $9.5m in North America ). What this means for investors The category has the structure of an early-stage sector. Of 568 companies, 194 were founded in 2025-2026, and 2025 was a record year for rounds - 79 vs 40 in 2024. At the same time, capital is already concentrated: 64 companies at Series A or later hold 76% of disclosed funding. The market is young in composition and mature at the top - the classic picture before a wave of seed deals, when the infrastructure leaders are set and the next layer has not yet been selected. 375 companies without public funding are not 375 opportunities. Most of them will never get past a landing page. But this tail contains the 2024-2026 cohort that has not yet raised institutional money: 217 teams. For a pre-seed/seed fund, that is the pipeline - and it should be screened on traction, not on the existence of a website. The practical takeaway: deal competition at Series A in this category is already high - 60+ companies and large checks. At pre-seed/seed it is low, because two-thirds of the market has no investor at all. If the fund's thesis is stablecoin rails for cross-border settlement, the entry window right now is not at the top but in the tail, and the filter should be onchain volume, not a position on a market map. Caveat: public sources only, so quiet rounds are not visible - 34% should be read as a lower bound.

If you want to build a product with stablecoin payments, all you need to do is build a stable product with good service, support, and transparent fees. That’s it - there’s no need to mask a weak product with hundreds of new features, like AI where it’s not needed, or bots that are supposed to make life easier but instead create more hassle for the customer and the development team. Everything should be simple and easy to understand, even for a 10-year-old.

🔥 Hot take: Stablecoin payments are a deposit business disguised as a payment business. The entire economy revolves around float: whoever holds the balance earns money on T-bills. Payments are simply a way to draw the balance toward oneself. That’s why issuers and exchanges will prevail, while pure payment startups without access to the float will be nothing more than resellers with margins that shrink to zero year after year.

. @AxiymFinance is the largest payments player on @avax. Its cumulative volume has crossed $2B+ - 55% of the $3.8B+ processed by 29 payment projects on the network since Nov 2024. That's 3.5x more than #2 Robinhood ($599M) and more than all other projects combined.

Seven weeks after the chart, Circle is back where it started. It ran +31% into early September, then gave almost all of it back. Since 19 Aug: @circle +2.9%, @Visa +2.6%, @Mastercard +0.2%. Most of the round trip was two sessions: the Senate stalled the CLARITY Act, then the Fed hiked for the first time since 2023. Higher rates lift Circle's reserve income - the stock fell anyway. Data used: @artemis

Revolut's record USDT week looked like $855M onchain. Without internal transfers, client flow was ~$76M. Try doing that with Visa or Mastercard numbers. Onchain, anyone can. For the onchain part of this market, self-reported volume is now a claim, not a fact.

How $855M Became $76M: What Actually Happened to USDT on Revolut In July, a week after @Revolut announced it would delist $USDT for EEA clients, I published a chart with a record: $855M of weekly USDT volume on Revolut wallets. The number travelled, it was cited, and it looked logical - users taking their money out before it gets taken out for them. Two months later I recomputed the same series: the same week came out at $76M. The difference is not a query bug. The difference is what I was measuring. What the raw data contained Wallet volume is the sum of every transfer a wallet takes part in. For a custodial platform, that is three different flows that look identical: client transfers, movements between the company's own wallets, and settlement with liquidity providers. Once I separated them, it turned out that on the peak week of 13 July roughly $780M moved between Revolut's own addresses - mostly between the hot wallet and a settlement wallet, in near-equal amounts in both directions. This loop was not created by the delisting: it was already running at $220 - 330M a week in mid-June, and during the delisting it simply peaked. Client USDT transfers that week, across all chains, were about $76M. The second loop was just as instructive. Around $80M a week moved between Revolut and a deposit address at @BitstampUK, its liquidity provider since 2017. That is two-way settlement of client orders: net close to zero, gross in the tens of millions. It ran for years and stopped completely on 24 August. In the raw data this looked like "USDC volume halved". In the clean data, it is a change in treasury operations that clients never noticed. What the clean data shows The delisting passed without panic. In the announcement week, client USDT flows were $150M - less than in any week of May. Then a gradual decline: $76M, $107M, $68M, and from early August, once deposits were closed, $25M. In September USDT on Revolut is effectively switched off: two consecutive weeks without a single withdrawal on Tron, a few hundred transfers on @ethereum instead of tens of thousands. The residual $200k a week still arriving at old @trondao addresses is users who did not notice the delisting. @USDC over the same period grew from ~$50M to ~$85M a week, up 70%. Active counterparties went from 12,000 to 32,000-37,000. Since August USDC has been the primary stablecoin on Revolut, and this happened without an on-chain outflow: users were moved inside the product. So the real story is the opposite of the one I told in July. Not "clients fleeing USDT", but "Revolut moved its clients to USDC, and they stayed". Why this matters beyond Revolut The mistake was not in one query but in the methodology I applied to the entire dataset of 75 payment projects. For @Revolut, internal transfers added 15-30% to volume in a normal spring week, exceeded client flows several times over by mid-June, and made up 91% at the peak. There is no reason to assume other custodial players are any different. Any leaderboard built on raw wallet volume compares not payment activity, but payment activity plus operational noise - and every player's share of noise is its own. The rule I take from this: for a custodial player, volume is not published until it is split into client, internal, and LP settlement. Internal is cut by address list. Settlement is cut by counterparties with mirrored flows. What remains is what deserves to be called volume.

Arc's first week: $6.8B moved, and the supply shrank @arc official account reports $6.8B of USDC transferred in the chain's first week and $624M of USDC circulating on it. Both numbers are accurate. Neither tells you whether money is arriving. At the end of launch day, @USDC on Arc stood at about $650M. A week later, it was $624M. All of the net inflow came on day one. Since then, slightly more has left than arrived. Routing counts the same dollar more than once Launch-day figures vary with method. Counting every native USDC transfer, September 16 moved $2.9B. About $515M of that was new money entering the chain. The first gap is mechanical. On Arc, USDC is the native asset, so every swap and every routing hop that touches it shows up as a native USDC transfer. A trade routed through an aggregator can move the same dollars three, four, five times inside one transaction. Each hop is a transfer. Each transfer is counted as volume. Count every transaction once, by its largest USDC transfer, and launch-day volume falls from $2.9B to $1.83B. This is not a launch-day anomaly. Across the first week, raw volume ran 1.3 to 2.0 times above economic volume every single day. It is a structural feature of the chain, and any comparison with other networks that ignores it is off by up to half. One pile of dollars, many hops The second gap is concentration. On September 16, about $538M of USDC was minted on Arc. $435M of it went to a single address, in 27 mints. That address, like the accounts that minted to it, holds a minter role on Arc's USDC contract. Within seconds to minutes, it forwarded the funds down a chain of wallets and into a handful of contracts. Some mints were forwarded almost to the dollar, three or four seconds after they landed. Each of those hops shows up as volume. A large share of the day's "big money" was one allocation from the issuance side, counted at every step of its distribution. The week after The first week in numbers, by our count for September 16 to 23: $6.5B in raw volume, $4.2B in economic volume, $492M in net new USDC. All of the net inflow arrived on day one. From September 17 to 23, net flows were negative $22M. Daily senders fell from 326k on launch day to 63k. Volume kept moving. Capital stopped arriving. Under the flat line, the two ways into Arc are moving in opposite directions. @circle cross-chain rails, CCTP and Gateway, have been a net outflow since launch day: $32M came in from other chains, $80M left, a net of negative $48M over the week. The direct issuance path, accounts holding the USDC minter role minting on Arc itself, added about $38M. The remaining outflow, about $12M, came from burns through smaller contracts. Both main channels run through Circle's own infrastructure. Dollars are leaving Arc for other chains through one door, and new ones are being issued through another. The wrong scoreboard None of this makes Arc a failure. It was built for settlement between financial institutions, not for retail velocity. Its founding validators include BlackRock, DTCC, Visa and Mastercard, not farmers chasing points. But it means transfer volume is the wrong scoreboard for it. Volume on a stablecoin chain measures how fast dollars move, not how many dollars chose to stay. The number that matters is net new USDC, and who is minting it. If issuance keeps backfilling while cross-chain flows bleed, Arc is not failing to attract retail. It is quietly becoming what it was designed to be: a wholesale settlement chain, still being measured with retail metrics. Data: native USDC transfers on Arc, September 16-23, 2026, via Dune (EIP-7708 system emitter; the 0x3600 ERC-20 interface is excluded to avoid double counting). Volume excludes mints and burns. Cross-chain flows are mints via CCTP MessageTransmitterV2 and Gateway Minter, and burns via TokenMessengerV2, Bridge Kit and Gateway Wallet. Circulating supply figures are from Arc's official account and launch-day reports. Figures are preliminary.

In 1980, the Independent Bankers Association of America wrote to the Senate: Money market funds would drain deposits, essentially undermine lending, and hit small banks the hardest. In 2026, that same banking lobby is saying the exact same thing about the yields on stablecoins in the CLARITY Act - which has now failed spectacularly. Stablecoins currently total about $305B, which is roughly 1.6% of deposits. That’s roughly where MMFs stood in 1979. The conclusion isn’t that banks are wrong and can simply be ignored, but rather that the answer to competition over yields has never been to ban paying yields. The answer was to allow everyone to pay them. That’s just how it is 🤷‍♂️

Payment companies are competing on the speed of their settlement processes. Although this is only one of three stages in a corporate payment, stablecoins have long since won this race. The other two stages involve local banks, where speed of access is the deciding factor. It won’t be the best protocol that wins, but rather the company with licenses, banks in every market, and a backup plan.

Following up on my previous post about the next big trend in stablecoin payments, I’d like to share my forecast for the future of agentic payments. To date, AI agents have processed more than 236 million transactions since October 2025. This includes an initial peak of 4m, a 99% drop, and a gradual recovery to 2m per day. And this is only the portion we can track on-chain (thanks @artemis); a lot of data remains outside our scope, such as data from Google, Skyfire, Mastercard Agent Pay, Visa Intelligent Commerce, and so on. Forecast: I see accelerated growth to ~5b cumulatively by December 2028 (~21x). The cumulative growth rate accelerates linearly from ~4.5% (current organic rate) to ~19%, peaking at ~5b transactions by the end of 2028 (~21x). Milestones: ~290m (Dec 2026), ~860m (Dec 2027). Interestingly, @coinbase released an article today explaining that AI agents are already researching, making decisions, and taking action on their own. To function fully within the economy, they need to be paid, receive money, and hold assets. @coinbase is making a major bet on this sector for the coming years, which confirms my forecast regarding the “agentic” narrative over the next two years.

According to my forecast, in 2027–2028, the biggest trends in stablecoin payments will be Agentic/M2M payments, orchestration, FX & EM corridors, B2B treasury & payroll, and compliance. These are the areas to watch, because very soon they will radically transform the stablecoin market. Read full article 🔻