Stablecoins have crossed the threshold from interesting to inevitable.

They are no longer a crypto-native experiment. They are, increasingly, a global settlement layer for dollars.

The data makes that clear. The market is already on the order of $300B with a ~100% annualized growth rate over the last 5 years. Transfer volume has, at times, exceeded Visa and Mastercard combined. More importantly, usage is no longer confined to trading or crypto-native workflows. Stablecoins are now used for cross-border payments, treasury movement, dollar access in inflationary economies, and increasingly, as the default way to move money in internet-native businesses.

What happens next is not about whether they work…it’s about how much they can reshape the financial system by taking advantage of fundamentally better technology. At first, the advantages are obvious: Transactions settle instantly, costs are low, the system is always on, and money can move at the speed of software.

That success creates a breaking point however, in that most stablecoin transactions are public.

Balances are visible. Transaction histories are traceable. Counterparties can often be inferred. In effect, using stablecoins can mean turning your financial activity into a publicly available dataset. 

This is not a marginal issue. Financial systems are not defined by speed and cost alone — they are defined by expectations. One of those expectations is that financial activity is not broadly visible by default. Sid, co-founder and CEO of Payy, internalized this firsthand at Apple, where privacy isn’t a feature: it’s a founding principle. And while for individuals this is a matter of basic rights, for businesses it’s operationally critical. No company can run payroll, manage vendors, or move treasury if every transaction is exposed to competitors, customers, and counterparties. And yet, that is effectively the default state of most blockchain-based payment systems today.

Until this is solved, stablecoins remain a technology, not infrastructure. 

The first phase of stablecoins solved for the movement of money.The second phase needs to solve for the use of money.

Payy starts from a simple premise: if stablecoins are going to be used broadly, privacy and compliance need to be default properties of the system.

Just as Apple Pay took the existing credit and debit card rails and wrapped them in a seamless, secure, consumer-friendly layer — delivering the magic of “just tap and pay” with your phone while keeping your real card number hidden — Payy does the same for stablecoins. 

This is not theoretical.The system is already live and is being used across more than 100 countries, and it is processing meaningful transaction volume. Payy has already built a full-stack, global “onchain banking” experience as proof of concept. At the surface, it looks familiar: a self-custodial wallet, a card that works anywhere Visa is accepted. From the user’s perspective, it behaves like a modern financial product.

The difference is in how it works underneath.

Transactions are verified using zero-knowledge proofs, allowing the network to confirm validity without exposing the underlying details. Onchain balances and activity are not directly linked to real-world spending. Sensitive financial data remains with the user rather than being broadcast to the network. The result is that Payy becomes the most private way to transact in the world. 

That architecture is the real innovation—making Payy not just another neobanking product, but rather a new kind of payments rail.

At its core is an EVM-compatible L2, purpose-built for private stablecoin transactions. Privacy is enforced at the protocol level, not approximated at the application layer. Developers can build on familiar infrastructure, but with a fundamentally different set of guarantees around how financial data is handled. 

Apple Pay made digital payments private and frictionless on top of legacy rails; Payy makes stablecoin payments private and frictionless on top of public blockchain rails. Same philosophy, same architectural leap — only this time for the next era of money.

We’ve been investing in crypto for over a decade, starting with early bets like DCG and more recently with Rain. The throughline has been consistent: back the infrastructure that moves crypto from possibility to utility. First, that meant custody and security. Then, payments rails and stablecoin infrastructure. Now, increasingly, it means the layers that make those systems usable in real-world contexts and we believe Privacy is one of those layers and we think Payy’s technology is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the opportunity.

We’re excited to partner with Sid, Calum, and the entire Payy team on this journey.