Stablecoin startups are pushing into payments, with Rain, MassPay and Verda-backed companies building around old rails

Stablecoins are no longer just a crypto-side quest. Startups like Rain and MassPay are using them to get into payments infrastructure, while venture-backed funds are pouring capital into the category. For PSPs, the important part is not the token itself but the plumbing: who controls the bridge between digital assets and traditional payment rails, and which legacy stacks can actually adapt.

1. Alex Witt, general partner at Verda Ventures, said the fund he and Amit Chu created two years ago has raised $40 million and bought minority stakes in about two dozen companies globally. He said the original pitch was that sending payments should be “as easy, fast, and cheap as sending a text message,” and that this seemed “completely crazy” to people when he started fundraising in 2024.
2. The Verda portfolio includes Yellow Card, which focuses on payments in Africa, and Capa, a blockchain infrastructure services company operating in Latin America. Two other portfolio companies, Kulipa and Beam, have already been sold. Witt also said Stripe is circling another possible purchase, though he declined to name it.
3. Rain’s holding company, Signify, started as a different business and later became the company branded as Rain. A company spokesperson said it has collected about $338 million in equity investments, including a recent round disclosed in January that raised a quarter of a billion dollars. Investors include Iconiq Capital, Sapphire Ventures and Balaji Srinivasan, Coinbase’s former chief technology officer.
4. Rain provides stablecoin infrastructure that lets corporate customers bridge stablecoin payments into traditional payment rails. In practice, that means companies can embed Rain’s technology in consumer-facing services so users can tap stablecoins without seeing much of the underlying complexity. Early clients were crypto firms, fintechs and neobanks, including in countries such as Argentina, where digital assets were used as a hedge against inflation.
5. Rain later began attracting larger customers and landed Western Union as its first major customer. At the same time, established payments players such as Visa and Fiserv have also moved toward stablecoins, but the article notes that legacy infrastructure may make it harder for them to adapt to digital schemes.

For high-risk payment operators, the signal is pretty clear: stablecoins are moving from “crypto feature” to payments infrastructure layer, and the competition is now about onboarding, settlement paths and who can make the old rails and the new ones talk to each other without breaking either side.