Sorting out the stablecoin projects for YC 24-25: Cross-border payments remain the core scenario

"Stablecoin's first stock" Circle (CRCL.US) experienced some pullback from its recent high last week, but market attention towards stablecoin-related assets continues to heat up, with new applications being built around stablecoin use cases also receiving significant attention. In the "2025 USDC Economic Outlook" released by Circle at the beginning of the year, it pointed out: ... developers are already leveraging this new opportunity to build a value internet. Crucially, this process is occurring both bottom-up and top-down. Entrepreneurs are creating entirely new categories of financial applications using USDC and Circle's platform. Meanwhile, enterprises are integrating the efficiency of USDC and blockchain into their existing operations using the same infrastructure.

According to incomplete statistics from "Mingliang Company," there are a total of 6 stablecoin-related projects in the well-known Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator (hereinafter referred to as YC) for the 2024-2025 period (a total of 6 batches), among which there are three in the 25W category, and there are also 3 for the entire year of 2024.

Overall, the total number of projects in YC25W (164 projects) is less than that in YC24W (252 projects). Looking back at the past 5 years of YC's project pool, the number of projects related to cryptocurrency peaked in 2021 (about 28 projects); it was very popular in 2022, with about 42 projects; and began to decline in 2023 (about 22 projects), while the number of stablecoin projects started to increase in 2024.

Specifically, these 6 stablecoin-related projects can be categorized into three directions: application infrastructure/API, digital banking (Neo Bank), and payments, with the main payment scenario being cross-border payments. "Mingliang Company" will summarize the specific situations of these 6 projects next.

01 Stablecoin Payment Applications: BeerMe and Blaze

BeerMe (formerly known as Charm) and Blaze are both projects from YC24F.

BeerMe is a P2P payment platform that provides a global personal peer-to-peer payment system that does not rely on bank accounts. However, the payment method that BeerMe emphasizes is not a direct "transfer," but rather sending a series of Emoji expressions to represent the amount transferred— for example, sending a beer symbol (which is BeerMe's token) represents 8 USDC, or 8 dollars; sending a coffee symbol represents 5 USDC, and so on...

Users need to first deposit USDC when using the service, and after purchasing emoji tokens, they transfer funds to the recipient by sending a unique link. Technically, BeerMe's tokens are NFTs based on the ERC1155 standard on Base (Ethereum L2). So in reality, when users make a purchase, USDC is deposited into the token contract, and a new token is minted. Upon redemption, the tokens are destroyed, and USDC is returned to the holder.

The founding team of BeerMe has an interesting insight, turning the act of transferring funds into a part of "emotional consumption." They believe that transfers should be as fun and expressive as other online content. However, this seems more like a user growth model—similar to "red envelope covers," where the underlying capability is to lower the usage threshold of digital wallets through an account-free model (sending links), enhancing the experience during cryptocurrency transfers, and breaking geographical limitations.

Co-founder and CEO Gray Newfield's LinkedIn profile shows that he graduated from Yale University with a CS degree in 2019 and worked at Amazon and Unisaw before founding BeerMe.

Now let's look at the payment platform Blaze.

The official introduction describes Blaze as "a global cross-border payment version of Venmo, a peer-to-peer payment application that uses USDC to make payments between any two people in the world fast and low-cost." Venmo is a payment platform under PayPal, focusing on consumer-to-consumer payment scenarios.

Blaze's positioning is built around "cross-border, peer-to-peer," with its core solution emphasizing real-time, low-cost transfers covering multiple countries globally. One core demand identified by the team is the transactions and services of "digital nomads" worldwide—payers often collaborate with individuals from different countries and transfer funds and pay compensation through peer-to-peer methods. In contrast, traditional bank account systems and restrictions are relatively cumbersome.

The discovery of this demand may be related to the founding team's background, as their team is distributed between the United States and Mexico, making cross-border payments a daily occurrence, leading to the establishment of this company. Currently, the company has three co-founders, with the CEO and CTO graduating from Cornell University and New York University, respectively.

In addition to the two projects mentioned above, there is also a stablecoin wallet company called Peg (previously known as PayMobile) among the YC20W projects, with the core scenario being the storage, payment, and sending of stablecoin USDC to different accounts.

In summary, the three projects centered around stablecoins primarily focus on peer-to-peer transfers and cross-border needs. These projects are more about breaking through the bank account system, emphasizing a better payment experience, rather than "disrupting" the existing payment models and ecosystems. The cryptocurrency system relies on a higher threshold for the transfer model of encrypted wallets and addresses. With clearer regulations and improved compliance, stablecoins provide a new platform and medium for further innovation.

The insight from the above projects is that if peer-to-peer cross-border payments continue to grow within the stablecoin ecosystem + social media ecosystem, it means that individual online collaboration globally may bring higher efficiency and potentially give rise to new business models and opportunities, particularly benefiting individual creators and "digital nomads" engaged in "services going overseas."

02 Digital Banks: Karsa and Kontigo

Karsa is a project from YC25W, and its introduction on the YC website is quite simple: a stablecoin digital bank (Neo Bank) aimed at emerging market countries.

Specifically, Karsa's positioning is: "Designed for professionals and families in regions with unstable currencies (exchange rates) who wish to protect their savings while also having flexible local consumption." According to the company's current description, Karsa offers a USD digital wallet and US accounts. In addition to transfer services, users can also purchase and deposit stablecoins in their Karsa accounts, enabling flexible conversion between digital assets and USD. Karsa plans to launch a VISA physical card in the future to meet payment needs in various offline scenarios.

Compared to other NeoBanks, Karsa's biggest differentiation lies in targeting the needs of emerging market countries. The company states that the countries with the strongest demand currently include India, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Kenya, characterized by large populations and a certain level of economic vitality. However, traditional banks and financial service giants have not provided comprehensive services for the masses in these regions, and domestic currency exchange rates are unstable in many emerging market countries, leading residents to have a strong demand for USD-denominated stablecoins.

When Karsa entered the YC accelerator, the team consisted of only 2 people. CEO Shahryar Hasnani graduated from Northwestern University in the U.S. in 2021, majoring in economics and entrepreneurial writing; CTO Dale Wilson graduated from the University of Virginia in 2020, majoring in computer science.

Another digital bank project related to stablecoins, Kontigo, entered the accelerator in the YC 24W batch, primarily targeting Latin America with a USDC-based smart digital bank.

Almost identical to Karsa, Kontigo also aims to address the local users' lack of financial services, highlighting solutions to pain points such as "losses due to inflation" and "high global payment fees."

"Due to the Latin American region consisting of 33 countries and 39 different currencies, it is extremely painful to either remit to Latin America or hold funds there. On one hand, the costs of cross-border remittances to Latin America are extremely high (up to 20% per transaction); on the other hand, the local currencies have depreciated severely over the past decade (with some countries experiencing depreciation exceeding trillions of percentage points)..." Kontigo describes its technical solutions based on USDC, while its product is very similar to Venmo

Kontigo has already secured financing, with investors including DST Global, Soma Capital, Pioneer Fund, Transpose, and YC alumni. Co-founder and CEO Jesus Castillo hails from Venezuela and founded Kontigo in San Francisco in 2023.

From a fundamental perspective, the underlying logic of the two digital banking projects mentioned above is essentially the same: leveraging the characteristics of stablecoins to serve emerging market countries with weak sovereign currencies, helping users address issues such as local financial service deficiencies and asset losses due to inflation.

According to "Mingliang Company," Chinese enterprises have also deeply penetrated the micro-lending and other financial service businesses in Latin America. The underlying reason is that the local financial service level still has a significant gap compared to domestic standards (extremely high fees and interest rates, as well as outdated digital infrastructure), and the widespread application of stablecoins may bring new opportunities for Chinese enterprises in the Latin American market.

03 Application Infrastructure: BlindPay, Infinite

Another two YC projects involving stablecoins in 2024-2025 focus on B2B services for stablecoin application infrastructure.

BlindPay is also a project from YC25W, primarily providing stablecoin APIs to help businesses send and receive funds globally through fiat currencies, stablecoins, and multiple blockchains. The company handles all complex compliance and regulatory requirements, allowing businesses to focus on their core operations. Like Kontigo, BlindPay also targets the Latin American market, but its users are primarily businesses.

According to its official website, Latin American companies often face challenges such as high fees, slow transaction times, significant exchange rate fluctuations, complex compliance, and fragmented local payment systems when making global payments.

"Traditional cross-border payments rely on correspondent banks, with B2B fees reaching 1.5-6%, and transaction times taking 2-5 business days. Especially in regions like Latin America, frequent currency fluctuations and high inflation further increase the uncertainty and risk of international payments. Additionally, strict regulatory requirements in various countries and different local payment systems (such as SPEI, Pix, PSE) make integration and compliance more cumbersome for businesses."

To address these pain points, BlindPay offers an API solution based on stablecoins and blockchain technology. Businesses can seamlessly integrate existing workflows through BlindPay, flexibly use fiat and stablecoins for global payments, enjoy competitive exchange rates and low transaction fees, and directly access local instant payment systems in various Latin American regions for 24/7 instant settlement. The platform also ensures compliance through blockchain screening, tiered KYC/KYB, and continuous monitoring, helping businesses reduce costs and transaction times by up to 80% while expanding their global operations, completely eliminating delays, high fees, and compliance barriers associated with traditional payment systems BlindPay's co-founder and CEO Bernardo Simonassi Moura primarily worked in Brazil before founding the company.

Another stablecoin B2B service company, Infinite, also comes from YC 25W. It is a stablecoin payment processing institution that mainly provides plug-and-play APIs and SDKs for enterprises. In terms of application scenarios, Infinite emphasizes: "Whether it's for cross-border settlement, global payroll, or serving emerging industries such as creator economy and marketplace platforms, enterprises can quickly integrate stablecoin payment functions through Infinite, simplify compliance processes, and enhance capital flow efficiency, thereby better expanding their global business."

Infinite's co-founder and CEO Nikhil Srinivasan has previous entrepreneurial experience and has also worked for 7 years in angel investing at Mitra Ventures.

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