The Weekly Stable (Vol 9)

Hi stable subscribers,

If last week was the regulatory edition, this week is the fundraising edition, with what seemed like fundraising, M&A, or partnership announcements nearly every day. 

This activity began with MoonPay’s acquisition of Iron.xyz last week which raised the temperature on M&A expectations, and has continued with a barrage of fundraising announcements from well known players such as Crossmint, Utila and Privy as well as new stablecoin payment entrants Stable Sea. 

The stablecoin landscape is rapidly evolving and companies are either raising capital to go after the opportunity themselves, or are making company acquisitions to quickly bring talent, expertise and infrastructure capabilities in house. For this week’s top story, we'll dive into M&A strategy to provide a framework for builders and fintechs exploring the market.

📢 This Week in Fintech has also joined in on the deal making fray and, as of this week, is proud to welcome Stableminded as our official stablecoin podcast!

As stablecoins become increasingly important to the fintech ecosystem, we wanted to provide our community with dedicated content on this rapidly evolving space.

Stableminded delivers compelling conversations with the builders and visionaries leading the digital payments innovation and I have personally found the episodes to be a great way to understand the use cases that are driving stablecoin adoption (and stablecoin company valuations!).

The Weekly Stable will now feature new episodes and insights from Stableminded to help our 76,000+ subscribers stay informed about the future of financial infrastructure. Check out this recent episode with Nilos CEO and Co-founder Eytan Messika.

Lastly, thanks so much for the survey responses so far. We'd like to do one final push for feedback so if you haven't already please complete the 1 minute survey through the link below so we can continue to tailor your Weekly Stable experience.

(Find us online at @chuk_xyz, linkedin/chuk-okpalugo, @thestablecon and linkedin/stablecon)

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First Stripe, Then MoonPay: What’s your M&A Strategy?

Major fintechs have concluded that M&A is necessary to quickly gain niche expertise and accelerate market entry.

Both companies acquired key capabilities that were complementary to their existing strengths and that could be leveraged within their existing business.

There are several factors to consider when developing a stablecoin M&A strategy and I have broken them down into the following steps:

The analysis is very much dependent on your specific company and specific positioning. However, when you apply this framework at a high level you end up with an initial idea of possible M&A tie ups where incumbents might look to plug strategic gaps:

While just a thought experiment, it’s an interesting exercise to envision how TradFi and stablecoin rails converge. If you’d like to explore these ideas in more detail, check out the full breakdown of an M&A framework here.

Circle announced plans to launch recently acquired US Yield Coin (USYC) to global market participants via Circle Bermuda's digital assets license and operations. This follows from their acquisition of Hashnote Tokenized Money Market Fund in January.

Fuse, the on-chain consumer wallet from Squads Labs has integrated Lulo, the DeFi yield aggregator, in their Fuse Earn product, enabling users to earn optimized DeFi yields.

Hydration, a DeFi protocol built on Polkadot, announced plans to launch HOLLAR, a decentralised, overcollateralized stablecoin that is native to Hydration and Polkadot.

Securitize and Ethena launched Converge, an Ethereum-compatible blockchain, blending DeFi with Securitize’s RWA and Ethena’s ecosystem of assets. They are targeting institutional investors and have partnered with protocols like Aave, Pendle and Morpho to build institutional-grade Defi products.

Crossmint raised $23.6M, led by Ribbit Capital, to expand blockchain tools for AI agents and Web3, targeting 40,000+ companies

Level raised $2.6M, led by Dragonfly, to grow lvlUSD, a decentralized stablecoin powered by DeFi yield

Privy, a provider of crypto wallet infrastructure with 50M+ accounts, raised $15M, led by Ribbit Capital

Stable Sea, led by founders previously at Block, raised $3.5M to launch a platform to simplify stablecoin transactions for corporate treasurers. It focuses on treasury movements, supplier payments in emerging markets, and cross-border payroll, slashing fees and complexity. Axios, PYMNTS

Utila secures $18M in Series A funding from Nyca Partners to boost its institutional crypto wallet, handling $8B monthly. With 100+ global clients, it projects over $1B in daily volume by year-end

BlackRock and Securitize's $BUIDL surpasses $1 billion in assets under management 

Dune and Artemis released a comprehensive stablecoin report: The State of Stablecoins 2025

MoonPay acquired Iron, a stablecoin infrastructure firm, for at least $100M, to enhance its offerings for enterprises

Mountain Protocol partners with Borderless.xyz to integrate USDM, a yield-bearing stablecoin, into payments, enhancing cross-border transactions with daily yield for users

M^0 Protocol, the decentralized stablecoin issuance platform, crosses $150M in supply

Russia is using Bitcoin, Ethereum, and stablecoins for oil trade with China and India to bypass sanctions.

Spark, a stablecoin borrow/lend DeFi platform, have announced BlackRock/Securitize (BUIDL), Superstate (USTB), and Centrifuge (JTRSY) as the winners of their Tokenization Grand Prix. This ends a competition launched in June 2024 designed to allocate $1B of stablecoins to yield bearing RWAs through the Spark Liquidity Layer which currently holds USDC, USDS, sUSDS, USDe, and sUSDe. Given Spark’s current balance sheet of $8.4B, Spark CEO, Sam MacPherson announced they would actually be deploying $3.6B into RWAs, this would almost double the RWA market from $4.6B to $8.2B

USDG expands trading availability to over 10 exchanges globally

USDS the decentralized stablecoin of the Sky protocol (previously MakerDAO) has reached $250M of cross-chain supply (total supply is above $8B)

U.S. Senate Banking Committee advances the GENIUS (stablecoins) and FIRM (debanking) Acts, establishing a federal stablecoin framework to protect consumers and promote U.S. dollar dominance, now moving to the Senate floor.

Letter: Banks and fintechs will be outcompeted by stablecoins

Plasma hosted a twitter discussion about the Stablecoin Bills

Offgrid Africa: Solar Kiosks and Stablecoins