Original author: flowie, ChainCatcher
Original editor: Marco, ChainCatcher
In the relatively quiet Web3 market in recent days, Web3 payment is one of the more active tracks.
Solana, Binance, and Coinbase all emphasize Web3 payments.
Solana Foundation Chairman Lily Liu has presented the concept of PayFi at major Web3 conferences such as EthCC this year, saying that its market size may far exceed DeFi. Binance Research recently released a research report on Web3 payments titled Blockchain Payments: A Fresh Start, detailing the impact that blockchain is having on global payments. Coinbase CEO also recently announced his participation in a new track related to AI encrypted payments.
Amid the overall downturn in the Web3 investment and financing market, Web3 payment has also been one of the hottest financing tracks in the past quarter.
According to statistics from the Web3 asset data platform RootData, Web3 payment has announced 15 financings in the past two months, with a total financing amount of over US$200 million, and large-scale financings have occurred frequently.
ChainCatcher statistics show that in the past two months, there have been 11 financings exceeding US$30 million, and nearly 40% of them came from Web3 payments. Among them, the stablecoin payment platform Bridge and the blockchain payment and settlement technology platform Partior both received more than US$50 million in financing.
From the perspective of investors, the Web3 payment projects that have received financing recently have gathered giants in various fields such as payment, stablecoins, and traditional finance. Visa, Tether, Circle, JPMorgan Chase, and Standard Chartered Bank are all vying to join the game, and top capitals such as Sequoia Capital and Temasek are also betting.
Stablecoin payment platforms have repeatedly received large amounts of financing
As of press time in July, Web3 Payment has announced at least 15 financing rounds, of which 5 have raised more than 10 million US dollars, most of which came from stablecoin payment platforms.
Stablecoin payment platforms have basically launched their own fiat stablecoins for cross-border payment networks, and some platforms are also committed to distributing certain profits to stablecoin holders.
Last week, the stablecoin payment platform Bridge announced that it had completed a $58 million financing round, with investors including Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, Index Ventures, Haun Ventures and 1coinfirmation.
Bridge provides solutions for enterprises to integrate stablecoin payments, issue stablecoins, or make cross-border payments. SpaceX and Coinbase both use Bridge’s services.
Fortune magazine has reported that SpaceX uses Bridge to collect payments in different currencies in different jurisdictions and transfer them to its global treasury via stablecoins.
Coinbase supports transfers between USDT on Tron and USDC on Base through Bridge’s service.
In addition, Bridge also provides stablecoin technology services to Web3 companies such as blockchain network Stellar and Bitcoin payment application Strike.
Bridge already processes more than $5 billion in annual payment volume.
According to Techcrunch, the two co-founders of Bridge co-founded the P2P payment platform Evenly in 2012, which was later acquired by Square, the leading US mobile payment company.
The two co-founders have also worked at Coinbase. CEO Zach Abrams served as the head of consumer at Coinbase, and its CTO Sean Yu worked as a senior engineer or engineering manager at Airbnb and Coinbase. Recommended reading : Raising $58 million, an article reveals how Bridge built the Web3 version of Stripe .
WSPN (Worldwide Stablecoin Payment Network), which received $30 million in seed funding, also focuses on stablecoin payments.
This round of financing for WSPN was led by Foresight Ventures and Folius Ventures, with participation from Hash Global, Generative Ventures, Yunqi Partners and RedPoint China.
WSPN has launched WUSD, which is pegged to the US dollar at a 1:1 ratio. Compared with traditional stablecoins such as USDT and USDC, WSPN hopes that its stablecoin will introduce returns, community governance, enhance user accessibility, and help ecosystem users to realize various asset allocations of stablecoins, including stocks, gold, crude oil, commodity trading, etc.
WSPN hopes to expand the user scale of stablecoins to the order of 1 billion and gradually replace the current mobile payment system.
Sling, a payment app that also focuses on stablecoin payments, announced that it has completed a US$15 million Series A financing round, led by Union Square Ventures, with participation from Ribbit Capital and Slow Ventures.
Sling aims to allow users to send money to almost anyone in the world in a low-cost way. Sling has launched a self-custodial wallet Wallet, where the funds in the users wallet are held in the form of USDP. USDP is a digital currency issued by Paxos Trust Company LLC and regulated by the New York Department of Financial Services.
Sling is also committed to providing profit distribution for users holding USDP in the future. Sling has launched Apple and Android apps, covering more than 50 countries and regions, with Europe and Africa being its core areas of development. Recommended reading : How does Sling, which has received tens of millions of dollars in financing and led by USV, make money from cross-border transfers of stablecoins?
IDA, which is committed to achieving seamless payments between Hong Kong and the global market, was established not long ago. It recently received US$6 million in financing led by Hashed and CMCC Global, with participation from Hack VC, GSR, Kenetic Capital, SNZ Holding and others.
IDA also launched HKDA, a fiat stablecoin built on a public chain. Lawrence Chu, co-founder and CEO of IDA, was the founder of venture capital firm BlackPine and partner of Lever VC. Another co-founder and CSO Sean Lee was the CEO of Algorand Foundation and co-founder of Layer 1 project Odsy Network.
In addition, Kredete, which is committed to helping African immigrants build credit and send money home at low fees, has significantly reduced transfer fees to less than one dollar by using stablecoins. Kredete recently announced that it has received $2.25 million in financing.
In July, cross-border payment platforms PEXX and Caliza, which received US$4.5 million and US$8.5 million in financing respectively, also support the use of USDT or USDC to achieve instant transfers.
Stablecoins are becoming an important tool to enhance the global payment system
According to the Blockchain Payments: A Fresh Start report released by Binance, the transaction volume processed by stablecoins in 2023 exceeded US$10.8 trillion. Excluding activities such as machine or automatic transactions, the figure was US$2.3 trillion.
Binance Research said that comparing stablecoin payments with traditional payments, stablecoin payments have been catching up with traditional payments in terms of quarterly transaction volume.
According to the analysis of crypto-native investment and incubation community DAOSquare in Stablecoins and the New Payment Landscape ,
Even excluding activities such as machines or automated transactions, stablecoins could account for about a fifth of Visa’s payment volume in 2023 and more than a quarter of Mastercard’s, representing a huge increase since the advent of stablecoins.
In the past, the main use case of stablecoins was to allow crypto investors to trade digital assets between centralized and decentralized exchanges. However, with the integration of stablecoins by payment giants and the rise of some stablecoin payment platforms, stablecoins are penetrating the global payment market.
This week, Ripple, a global cross-border payment network, announced that its stablecoin RLUSD will be launched in the coming weeks. In August, Tether made a strategic investment in Kem, a cross-border payment company. Kem will launch USDT on its platform to promote the widespread adoption of USDT in the Middle East.
In April this year, payment giant Stripe announced the integration of cryptocurrencies again after a lapse of 6 years, and gave priority to supporting USDC payments. At the end of June, Stripe reached a strategic cooperation with Coinbase to introduce USDC payments to the Base platform. Previously, payment giants such as PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard have also announced related stablecoin plans.
AI encrypted payment becomes a hot spot for innovation
In addition to stablecoin payments, AI-based encrypted payments have also become a major innovation trend.
On August 31, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced the first AI-to-AI crypto transaction on the Base network, and said that AI Agents can now use USDC on Base to trade with humans, merchants, or other AIs. These transactions are instant, global, and free.
Coinbases AI encrypted payment plan has also been in preparation for a long time. As early as May this year, Brian Armstrong said that self-hosted encrypted wallets will provide support for AI Agent.
Recently, Skyfire and Payman, which focus on AI encrypted payments, have also received financial support from leading institutions.
On August 23, Skyfire received $8.5 million in seed round financing from Circle, Ripple, Gemini, and the venture capital firm of Tim Draper, a well-known Silicon Valley billionaire and Bitcoin advocate.
Skyfire was founded by two former Ripple developers. It is an open source payment system that allows autonomous AI agents to purchase any goods needed to complete a specified task on the Internet - from data storage and creative assets to airline tickets and groceries. All of these transactions will be supported by the stablecoin USDC.
PaymanAI received $3 million in financing from Visa, Coinbase Ventures, Boost VC, Deepwater Management, The Spartan Group, Untapped VC, Theory Forge VC and others.
Payman is committed to enabling AI Agents to pay humans in a variety of ways, including fiat currency, cryptocurrency, and bank accounts. Payman supports fiat currency and USDC payments. Payman founder Tyllen worked as a product manager at Meta and later as a developer relations director at Dapper Labs and Uniswap Foundation.
Compared with the above AI encrypted payment projects that provide interfaces and services for payments between AI Agents and humans, some other projects try to make AI Agent products with payment functions for ordinary users.
Bitte, the AI Agent wallet of the Near ecosystem, and Wayfinder, the AI interaction protocol incubated by Parallel, are both making such attempts. They are all trying to access OpenAIs model API, allowing users to command Agents to complete various on-chain operations in a chat window interface similar to ChatGPT. Recommended reading: Coinbase enters a new AI payment track. What other projects are adding wallets for Agents?
Compared with stablecoin payments, AI crypto payments are still in their early stages and are expected to take longer to verify and for more innovative players to emerge.
