Stablecoin Infrastructure Provider Stably Raises Pre-Series a Round Led by Morgan Creek Capital
[PRESS RELEASE – Seattle, United States, 18th January 2022]
Stably, a US venture-backed stablecoin and asset tokenization infrastructure provider, announced it has secured an undisclosed amount of funding in a recent Pre-Series A equity financing round led by Morgan Creek Capital, Jackson Fu from CREAM & Partners and Sunny Lu from VeChain. Other new investors included Hard Yaka, Bloccelerate, B21 Capital, Lou Kerner from Blockchain Coinvestors and David Choi from Taureon Capital as well as two existing investors, BEENEXT and Pay It Forward.
The fresh round of funding will enable Stably’s 20+ member team to pursue several key strategic initiatives in 2022, one of which is rapidly tripling its engineering team’s size to further improve Stably’s Stablecoin-as-a-Service (SCaaS) offerings and expanding the company’s fiat-to-stablecoin gateway to meet growing demand across various emerging blockchain ecosystems, including non-custodial wallets and Web3 applications for DeFi, GameFi, NFT marketplaces and even metaverses.
Currently, the more than $160-billion global stablecoin market is highly fragmented across nearly 100 different blockchain protocols and many lack adequate fiat currency access points, or “on-ramps,” for their end users. On top of this, the fiat-to-stablecoin on-ramping market itself still remains very inefficient. For example, it may cost between 20% to 40% to purchase Circle’s USDC, a popular US Dollar stablecoin, with credit/debit cards via MoonPay or Simplex, two leading fiat-to-crypto gateway providers in the world.
To differentiate itself from other fiat-to-crypto gateways, Stably mainly focuses on providing stablecoins for “small-to-mid cap” blockchain platforms (i.e. “emerging” blockchains with native tokens between $100-million to $10-billion in total market capitalization). These nascent blockchains with enormous growth potential are still vastly underserved by most stablecoin issuers and fiat ramp providers today.
“Sunny Lu decided to participate in our round because he was also seeking for a practical and fast Stablecoin-as-a-Service solution for the VeChain ecosystem,” says Kory Hoang, Co-Founder and CEO of Stably. “Practically speaking, Stably was the only company in this space that could quickly integrate with the VeChainThor blockchain to launch a compliant stablecoin within a few months of our initial discussions.”
Over the past twelve months, Stably has integrated its stablecoin infrastructure and products/services with seven emerging blockchain networks, including VeChainThor, DigitalBits and Chia Network. The company, via its regulated financial institution partners, processed over $100-million in transaction volume from users in 2021 and grew its total revenue by more than 10x compared to the previous year.
“Stably also helped launch a gold-backed branded stablecoin recently for Kitco Digital Metals Group , a member of the Kitco group of companies focused on developing and promoting digital metals products, aiming to be a world leader of precious metal tokens. These achievements, in turn, helped attract significant institutional investor interest in Stably’s Pre-Series A round.
“As a leading incubator of FinTech and blockchain technology solutions, I saw the unique potential of Stably’s Stablecoin-as-a-Service platform right away,” says Jackson Fu, Founder of CREAM. “Our strategy and community building capabilities will see that this potential is maximized. As such, we are excited to invest in this round of financing as the lead investor, and to become a Stably board member going forward. We will see much happening with Stably, stay tuned!”
Going forward, Kory predicts a lot more DeFi, GameFi, NFT marketplace and metaverse activities will take place on emerging blockchain networks. He is planning for Stably to integrate with another 12 emerging blockchains by the end of this year. Kory estimates that there will be a total of 100+ emerging blockchains in need of stablecoin infrastructure by the end of 2022 and even 300+ by 2025.
About Stably
Stably is a venture capital-backed FinTech startup from Seattle (USA), with a focus on providing asset tokenization and stablecoin payment infrastructure for emerging blockchain networks, Web3 wallets and applications, including DeFi protocols, NFT marketplaces and metaverse platforms. The company’s mission is bridging money from traditional finance (TradFi) to the digital economy by providing Web3 users with fiat-to-stablecoin on-ramps that are faster, cheaper, secure and globally accessible.
