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The crypto industry has long sought a ‘killer app’ to bring digital assets into the mainstream. Recently, though, some point to the growing popularity of stablecoins like Tether and USDC to say that long-sought use case is here already. Designed to trade on a 1:1 basis with major currencies like the dollar, stablecoins have found growing adoption in fields like cross-border remittances and DeFi payments—and some say this just the beginning.
A startup called Bridge, cofounded by Square and Coinbase alumni Zach Abrams and Sean Yu, wants to take stablecoins to the next level. Drawing on their extensive experience in fintech, Bridge aspires to build a future global payment network around stablecoins in order to challenge everything from Swift to credit cards.
And unlike other crypto-native firms developing within the stablecoin ecosystem, Bridge has the backing of some of the top generalist venture firms in Silicon Valley, including Sequoia, Ribbit, and Index, along with the blockchain-focused Haun Ventures. The company has raised $58 million in previously unannounced funding, including a fresh round of $40 million led by Sequoia and Ribbit, and customers including SpaceX and Coinbase.
“Fintech is deeply rational,” said Abrams in an interview with Fortune. “If you can do something that is faster, cheaper, and more economical, you win.”
Stablecoin explosion
While stablecoins have seen massive growth over the past two years—industry leader Tether has a market cap of around $118 billion, while USDC sits at $34 billion—the asset class has also had to contend with incidents that called into question whether they are truly ‘stable.’
In 2022, the collapse of TerraUSD—a so-called algorithmic stablecoin that maintained its $1 peg through a related cryptocurrency, as opposed to a fiat reserve—triggered a broader meltdown in crypto, leading to regulatory investigations and congressional hearings. Then in 2023, USDC briefly lost its peg on secondary markets upon disclosing that its issuer Circle had parked billions of its reserves with the collapsing Silicon Valley Bank (USDC quickly recovered on news the FDIC would backstop the bank’s deposits.) And Tether, still the market dominator, has long faced accusations of opaque accounting.
Despite the challenges, and continued lack of federal legislation that would provide regulation for the nascent sector, stablecoins have managed to roar back, though there are still open questions of how much volume comes from real users, as opposed to bots and large-scale traders. TradFi companies like PayPal and VanEck have launched or backed their own stablecoins, while others such as Stripe have begun to integrate products like USDC into their offerings.
Still, the challenge for many companies who want to use stablecoins is building on-ramps and off-ramps to move fiat currency into and out of the crypto ecosystem, while also facilitating transfers across different types of stablecoins and blockchains. Dollar-backed options like USDC and Tether may be the most popular, but there are countless others with pegs to the Mexican peso or a basket of assets—and a single stablecoin might be issued across a dozen different blockchains.
In an interview with FortuneHaun Ventures partner Chris Ahn—who first invested in Bridge’s seed round while working at Index—said there would be no need for Bridge if there were just one stablecoin on a single blockchain. Bridge’s value add, he said, is allowing developers to seamlessly move between fiat and stablecoins, and across different blockchains.
The pitch is simple. “We built Bridge as a low-level set of APIs that would enable companies to use a stablecoin rail without thinking about it,” as Abrams put it. But why would companies want that?
As crypto advocates like to point out, moving around fiat currency is slow and expensive—you often need to wait for bank operating hours for large transactions, and cross-border payments can come with massive fees and interminable waits. Stablecoins, at least in theory, offer low fees and instant settlement.
In Bridge’s ideal future, stablecoins will operate as the global payments rail, and Bridge will allow developers to seamlessly integrate. In that sense, you can think of it as a Web3 analog to Stripe, which helps businesses accept online payments, or Plaid, which makes it easy to connect an app to a bank account.
Investors told Fortune that Bridge stands out from other crypto-native firms because of the fintech experience of its founders, who worked at startups including Brex and Square. They believe this will help Bridge serve not only crypto firms, but also companies that operate primarily in fiat.
Bridge already has high-profile customers including including Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which uses Bridge to collect payments in different jurisdictions in different currencies and move them through stablecoins into its global treasury. Bridge also works with crypto companies, such as the blockchain Stellar and the Bitcoin app Strike, to provide the infrastructure for their own stablecoin payment features.
One client, Abrams’s former employer Coinbase, uses Bridge to help users transfer between Tether on Tron and USDC on Base, its own layer-2 blockchain. “The work that they’re doing helping traditional businesses come on-chain is super important,” Jesse Pollak, the creator of Base and Abrams’s former coworker, told Fortune. “All businesses are going to have all their assets on-chain, because it’s going to be faster, cheaper, and more globally available.”
Bridge has processed over $5 billion in annualized payment volume to date.
A major focus for the company will be on the compliance side. While software development will consume a good deal of its new resources, Bridge also has to build relationships with global financial institutions to enable on- and off-ramps into different currencies, as well as blockchains and stablecoins for integration. Abrams said that Bridge also has money transmitter licenses in 48 states, a VASP license from Dubai, and is applying for further licensure in New York, Europe, and elsewhere.
While stablecoins may not have yet gained trust among non-crypto companies, Abrams said that the growing landscape of regulation—and the basic economics—will win over business. “My interest comes from moving money,” he told Fortune. “It’s less blockchain specific.”