Welcome to another edition of the Money Code newsletter (fka The Weekly Stable), the essential source of stablecoin news coverage for global fintech professionals, brought to you by This Week in Fintech and Stablecon.
This week we cover:
KAST Raises $80M for Stablecoin Consumer Finance
Money Code Ep 23: Stablecoins Won't Build Themselves w/ Zach Abrams (Bridge)
Product launches, partnerships and funding news from Aon, BVNK, Brale, Circle, Frax, KAST, Mastercard, Nasdaq, Paxos, Perena, Privy, Ripple, Solana, SquareFi and more.
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🏆 Top Stories
KAST Raises $80M for Stablecoin Consumer Finance
KAST raised an $80M Series A at a reported $600M valuation, with QED Investors and Left Lane Capital co-leading and Peak XV, HSG, and DST Global returning. They report more than 1M users, nearly $5B in annualized volume, and that they’ll use the capital to expand product, licensing, compliance, and global reach.
Why it matters:
It’s the same fintech playbook, just on different rails.
Distribution is getting funded. KAST, ARQ (fka DolarApp), and Lemon all show investors are willing to back branded, consumer-facing financial apps built around digital dollars, cards, and cross-border utility. It looks like a stablecoin-native version of the global neobank model that firms like Revolut (who are seeking capital at a $100B valuation) helped validate.
Brand and product matter more than the rail. Stablecoins are becoming table stakes. The harder part, and the real moat, is building trust, habit, and a product users treat as their primary money app.
Dollar access is emerging as a core product category. This is a bet that millions of users, especially cross-border and emerging-market users, want a better way to hold, move, and spend dollars than local banking can offer.
📺 Money Code Podcast
Ep 23: Stablecoins Won't Build Themselves w/ Zach Abrams (Bridge)
Stablecoins feel inevitable, but the issuers captured the economics, and nobody had built the infrastructure to push the value back to consumers.
Zach Abrams built Bridge through crypto winter, sold it to Stripe, and spent two years following developers into markets nobody else was serving. He argues that's exactly how you turn a payment rail into real infrastructure, not by focusing (the typical founder advice), but by letting builders show you what's next.
We decode
How founding through Terra Luna, FTX, and SVB shaped Zach's biggest mistake as a CEO
The "fog of war" strategy: how Bridge built five businesses in two years by letting developers explore the map instead of following the "focus" advice
Why getting acquired by Stripe made some things harder, not easier
Give it a listen and share your feedback by sending me a DM or replying to this email.
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Read on for a round up of this week’s news:
📊 Market Trends
Latin America’s crypto user growth outpaced U.S. by 3x in 2025, report shows (read more)
Tokenized assets exceed $25 billion after nearly quadrupling in a year (read more)
Stablecoin Firms Bet Big on AI Agent Payments That Barely Exist: Bloomberg (read more)
The Stablecoins Market Cap just hit a new ATH of $313B (read more)
Bernstein sees 70% upside for Circle as stablecoin adoption expands across payments and AI (read more)
Tokenized U.S. Treasuries Surpass $10B, Up From Under $2B a Year Ago (read more)
Sanctions evasions using crypto increased by 700% in 2025: Chainalysis (read more)
💸 Fundraises and M&A
KAST raises $80 million at $600 million valuation to expand stablecoin payments platform (read more)
🚀 Product Announcements & Partnerships
SquareFi launches stablecoin infrastructure layer for cross-border B2B payments (read more)
Nest Integrates with Perena to Bring RWA Yield to Solana via LayerZero (read more)
Brale Integrates Radius Network to Enable 2.5 Million TPS Stablecoin Settlements (read more)
Privy has integrated the Sky Savings Rate and sUSDS into its wallet infrastructure. (read more)
Nasdaq Partners With Kraken in Tokenization Push (read more)
Coinbase and Paxos tap USDC, PYUSD stablecoins to pay Aon insurance premiums (read more)
Sonic Labs taps Frax infrastructure for native network stablecoin (read more)
Wells Fargo files 'WFUSD' trademark covering crypto trading, payments and tokenization services (read more)
Mastercard launched a Crypto Partner Program with 85+ companies to link blockchain to its global payments network. (read more)
Ontop just launched USD stablecoin accounts, powered by BVNK (read more)
⚖️ Regulatory Developments
U.S. banking agencies say capital should be same for standard or tokenized securities (read more)
South Korea to block firms from using USDT, USD Coin (read more)
U.S. Treasury signals shift on crypto mixers, acknowledges legitimate privacy uses (read more)
U.S. SEC chief Atkins said bond with sister agency CFTC to include joint meetings, exams (read more)
Senators try to unlock stalled crypto Clarity Act with compromise on stablecoin yield (read more)
Ripple to acquire Australian financial services license as APAC payments volume doubles (read more)
Hong Kong poised to grant first stablecoin licences to HSBC, Standard Chartered (read more)
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