Trace Finance Banks $32M to Prove Stablecoins Play Well With Regulators 🏦

Trace Finance, the New York-based stablecoin settlement infrastructure provider, has closed a $32 million Series A led by CoinFund, with Coinbase Ventures, Haun Ventures, Jump Capital, Chainlink Labs and Paxos among the participating investors, the company said Wednesday. The round also drew individual backers including Circle co-founder Sean Neville, Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and Ricardo Villela Marino, vice chairman of Itaú Unibanco. HOF Capital, which led Trace's 2022 $4.3 million seed round that included Circle Ventures and Mantis VC — the firm co-founded by The Chainsmokers — also returned for the Series A.

The company links banks in Brazil and the United States to stablecoin settlement networks and has processed more than $10 billion in cross-border transaction volume. It counts Uruguay-based payments firm dLocal among its settlement partners. "Stablecoins alone do not solve cross-border payments. Stablecoins plus regulated local bank infrastructure does," said co-founder and CEO Bernardo Brites. "This round lets us deepen the banking, payments, and compliance infrastructure that global fintechs, exchanges, international banks, and enterprises rely on to bridge digital settlement with trusted local financial systems." CoinFund Partner Einar Braathen added: "The next phase of global money movement will be won by companies that can bridge on-chain settlement with trusted local banking systems. Brazil is one of the largest and most operationally complex payment environments in the world, and Trace has built the regulated infrastructure that global blue-chip businesses are using to scale, while saving time and costs compared to legacy alternatives."

Trace said it will use the new capital to expand beyond its initial U.S.-Brazil corridor into additional Latin American markets, the United States and Asia-Pacific. The raise comes as Brazilian regulators reclassify cross-border crypto transfers as foreign-exchange operations, a shift pushing institutional flows toward licensed, bank-grade intermediaries, the niche Trace has built around.

The funding lands against a rapidly evolving policy backdrop. US President Donald Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law in July 2025, Hong Kong implemented its Stablecoin Ordinance in August 2025 and has recently granted its first batch of licenses, and on Wednesday People's Bank of China official Wang Xin said authorities are closely monitoring how stablecoins could affect the international monetary system and cross-border payments — comments less critical than those PBOC Governor Pan Gongsheng made in October 2025, when he described stablecoins as high-risk and vulnerable to misuse for illicit cross-border transfers.

Private-sector activity has kept pace. Last Thursday cross-border payout platform MassPay partnered with Coinbase to offer stablecoin-powered international payouts allowing customers to move between fiat, USDC and other digital assets. Stripe acquired stablecoin infrastructure startup Bridge in 2025, and Circle launched its Circle Payments Network in May 2025 to connect banks, payment companies and digital wallets for real-time cross-border settlement using stablecoins. Stablecoin market capitalization stood at about $315 billion, according to DeFiLlama. On Wednesday the Federal Reserve held its benchmark interest rate steady at a target range of 3.5% to 3.75%, the fourth such pause this year.