Today Ubyx announced a $10 million seed funding round led by Galaxy Ventures. Other backers in the round include Founders Fund, stablecoin issuer Paxos, Payoneer and others. Ubyx aims to provide a clearing system enabling anyone to easily on and off-ramp between bank accounts and stablecoins. This is a particular issue for corporates that want to use stablecoins for cross border payments, but might find the accounting for holding them on their balance sheet tricky.
This challenge has created opportunities for infrastructure providers to fill the gap. While the likes of stablecoin issuer Circle has the scale to build its own Circle Payments Network, not all stablecoin issuers have that luxury. Plus, numerous other stablecoin infrastructure startups are also duplicating effort in building their own distribution. Ubyx aims to provide this distribution and redemption service for numerous stablecoins.
Partners signed up so far include Paxos, Ripple, Agora, Transfero, Monerium, GMO Trust, BiLira, Juno (a Bitso company), Brale, Minteo, Tokenised GBP, Avenia, Agant, AllUnity, and Eurodollar. Notable absentees are Circle and Tether, although it’s still early days.
Ubyx was founded by a Citi veteran
The progress so far has been rapid given that Ubyx only publicly unveiled its plans in March, after founder Tony McLaughlin finished his gardening leave at Citi. He was the architect of the Regulated Liability Network, one of the first so-called unified ledgers for institutions incorporating CBDC, tokenized deposits and regulated stablecoins. Following Trump’s election victory, he anticipated that regulatory obstacles hindering stablecoin adoption would diminish.
The funding reflects investor confidence in this infrastructure approach.
“Stablecoins become ubiquitous when there is a shared acceptance network, just like cards. Traditional banks and fintechs should provide wallets to accept a wide range of regulated stablecoins on many public-permissionless blockchains,” said Mike Giampapa, General Partner of Galaxy Ventures.
In the meantime, McLaughlin has been building alliances with various launch partners with plans to launch in Q4 2025. They include BitGo, Copper, dfns, Fireblocks, GK8 by Galaxy and Taurus for custody and wallets; Axelar and LayerZero for interoperability; Chainalysis and TRM Labs for blockchain analytics; Digital Asset, IntellectEU and Kaleido for blockchain technology; and consultants Chavanette Advisors and Zuehlke.
For additional context on the company’s strategy and market positioning, we previously explored Ubyx’s potential in more depth here and here.
