Musings on Blockchain from the Investor Trenches
Three payment giants, one direction
Mastercard, Visa and Stripe all announced new stablecoin initiatives this week. Each addresses a practical problem: moving and spending money with fewer delays, fewer currency conversions or less capital sitting idle.
Mastercard launched its Global Money Platform, combining traditional currencies and stablecoins through BVNK, the infrastructure business it acquired in August. The platform helps businesses manage cross-border payments while reducing the need for separate pools of prefunded cash.
Visa moved USDC funding for cross-border payouts into commercial use through Inyo Global. Stripe announced a collaboration with Plasma, a new layer 1 blockchain focused on stablecoins, to develop cards supporting multiple currencies and reduce unnecessary conversions.
At Legends4Legends two weeks ago, Haseeb Qureshi illustrated these economics through Rain, a fast-growing company in Dragonfly’s portfolio that provides infrastructure for stablecoin-powered cards and payments. Card programmes traditionally keep cash buffers to cover nights, weekends and bank holidays. Settling in stablecoins allows money to move outside banking hours, reducing idle capital and improving margins.
Businesses such as BVNK, Rain and Plasma are helping turn that economic advantage into products. The established payment networks are bringing the reach to make them widely available.
This week’s market
BGCI Index
-1.84%
Bitcoin
-1.02%
Ethereum
-1.12%
Solana
-3.88%
All figures are week-to-date as of 16 October, 15:38 CEST
Theta Blockchain Ventures content
•On 1 October, Legends4Legends brought together investors, founders and policymakers at EYE Amsterdam to discuss blockchain’s transition from speculation to institutional adoption. (watch here)
Blockchain news
•Visa Direct moves stablecoin payments into commercial deployment (learn more)•Mastercard launches “Global Money Platform” to merge fiat and stablecoins (learn more)•Plasma and Stripe partner to develop multi-currency stablecoin-backed cards (learn more)•BNY and Citadel Securities complete Treasury repo in first use of tokenized assets on major triparty platform (learn more)•Federated Hermes joins Wall Street’s tokenization push with plans for first onchain fund shares (learn more)•Morgan Stanley expects to support tokenized equities in Q1 2027 (learn more)•Nasdaq CEO says tokenization could unleash tens of billions in trapped Wall Street capital (learn more)•CFTC proposes bringing prediction-market event contracts under swap rules (learn more)
Relevant financial updates
•DATA Network*, an AI training-data provenance and licensing protocol, has received a $30mln strategic investment from Sui Foundation•Fission*, a tokenized asset liquidity platform, has raised $10mln in a Series A round led by Pantera Capital with investments from Circle Ventures, Borderless Capital, and Ari Rubenstein•Multiliquid*, an institutional liquidity protocol for atomic swaps between tokenized assets and stablecoins, has raised $8mln in a Seed round led by Polychain with investments from Wellington, VanEck, Strobe Ventures, and 4 others•Zaria, a real-time loan servicing and collateral management platform for digital-asset-backed lending, has raised $5.2mln in a Seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners•Kraken owner Payward has acquired Lithuania’s Saldo Bank for an undisclosed amount
*Underlying TBV portfolio position | Prices as per 16/10
Interesting things to read and listen to
•The IMF examines what tokenization needs to scale, from legal certainty to interoperability (read here)•Stanford’s Dan Boneh joins the a16z crypto podcast to discuss whether AI could break cryptography and how it could strengthen security (listen here)
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Lasse Clausen, Founding Partner, 1kx
Best wishes,
John
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