A while ago, I was chatting with an American investor, and he said something that left a deep impression on me: buying Circle’s stock doesn’t actually mean you’re getting a “stablecoin exposure.”

Thinking about it carefully, that really is the case. CRCL is essentially an interest-earning reserves business during a rate-cutting cycle, and it’s not closely related to things like stablecoin trading volume, cross-border flows, merchant networks—items that are genuinely being re-priced.

What the market is really re-pricing is the layer between stablecoin issuers and the real economy—the trading layer. And in the past 60 days, capital has been hitting this layer quite aggressively.

Major moves within the last sixty days

OpenFX secured a Series A of $94 million, with an estimated valuation of about $500 million

Tether strategically invested in Axiym; its cross-border payments and bridging financing target is to embed USDT into global payment channels

Mastercard acquired stablecoin infrastructure unicorn BVNK for up to $1.8 billion

At the same time, XTransfer—an SME cross-border payments company—filed its IPO prospectus with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, with a pre-IPO valuation of about $3 billion. I’m including XTransfer not because it belongs to this wave of stablecoin stories, but as a comparison anchor: see how much the secondary market is willing to pay for a genuinely profitable, audited, licensed cross-border FX company.

The story is real, and so is the volume. And the regulatory tailwinds are real—especially the GENIUS Act in the U.S., which really did give institutions a reason to “place bets.”

But to be honest, among the so-called “stablecoin-native” players in this wave, a substantial portion isn’t doing anything truly new. Fundamentally, it’s still the same cross-border PSP business from 2018—only the settlement step has been replaced with stablecoins. The innovation is real; but the valuation that’s buying it is a different matter—we can call it “a $500 million wrapper.”

What kind of company is OpenFX, exactly?

OpenFX’s story is told very well: use stablecoins as the intermediary settlement layer between fiat and fiat, eliminate the need for nostro account pre-funding, and compress T+2 settlement into within 60 minutes. Within 12 months, annualized trading volume grew from $4 billion to $45 billion. CEO Prabhakar Reddy is a co-founder of FalconX, and the lineup of backers behind it is top-tier.

But one thing must be made clear: OpenFX is not a multi-licensed financial institution.

Apart from a U.S. MSB license, in other markets it mostly operates through partner banks—SEPA in Europe, FPS in the U.K., and NPP in Australia—everything is implemented through local partners. Compliance outsourcing in each market is handled by “licensed and regulated entities.” Naming virtual accounts is still on the roadmap for now.

Reddy is also pretty frank about it:

“The time it takes to get licensed globally is three times what you expect. Even banks that publicly call themselves ‘stablecoin-friendly’—to actually run the partnership relationship through, it’s far more complicated than what press releases make it sound. Last-mile liquidity is built corridor by corridor.”

This passage, almost word for word, describes the path Airwallex walked between 2015 and 2020: first partner with local banks, capture the FX spread from multinational banks, and then fill in licenses market by market. Airwallex spent 10 years and burned $1.57 billion just to build the licensing moat behind today’s $8 billion valuation.

OpenFX has only been founded for two years. From this perspective, the $94 million Series A is less like a medal for the licensing marathon and more like an entry ticket. This isn’t criticism—it’s simply to clarify what investors are actually paying for.

But there’s another, more generous interpretation

OpenFX may just be running a “scale first, license later” script—and in the crypto industry, several of the most successful infrastructure companies have indeed run that script.

Ondo Finance, before the SEC investigation had been fully concluded, drove tokenized stock market share to 58% and tokenized U.S. Treasuries TVL to about $2 billion; after the investigation only closed in November 2025, Ondo moved to acquire Oasis Pro, bringing in three licenses—broker-dealer, ATS, and transfer-agent—at once. GSR—this crypto market maker—just received its first round of external strategic investment from Standard Chartered’s SC Ventures last month. Only after a full 12 years, reaching $287 million in revenue and $71 million in after-tax net profit, did it bring a regulated bank into its shareholder lineup.

The pattern is actually quite consistent: in markets where the regulatory framework itself isn’t fully written yet, players who first build scale often end up defining “what compliance is” afterward, rather than rushing to force themselves into a template that doesn’t exist.

Can OpenFX replicate this script in the cross-border payments space? That’s an open question. Cross-border payments are far more fragmented than equity tokenization or crypto market-making: regulation is broken down by country, licenses by channel, and banking relationships by locality. Capital gets priced based on the assumption that it can “get through” the process.

Western investors vs. Asian players

Stablecoins as the settlement layer for cross-border FX is indeed a real innovation. It compresses the most hidden and largest cost component in cross-border payments—the pre-funding deposit portion. A capital-efficiency improvement of a few hundred basis points, multiplied by the tens of trillions in global annual cross-border flow, is enough to constitute a legitimate re-pricing event.

But aside from that, nothing else is particularly new. Local bank partnerships, multi-currency virtual accounts, mid-market FX quotes, and API-first integration methods—these have been standard moves that Asian and European cross-border PSPs have been playing for years. Many of them are already profitable, and the vast majority are actively integrating stablecoins.

There are three things in this table that are especially worth paying attention to.

First, Asian players have noticeably higher capital efficiency. Tazapay achieved a growth curve similar to OpenFX using about half the money, and it’s already at break-even. The amount KUN raised was about half of OpenFX’s, but its month-over-month growth reached 200%. In this playbook in Asia, the approach is to get the licenses first and then slowly burn capital; while in the Western stablecoin playbook, the approach is to get large Series A funding first, and deal with licenses later.

Second, the same stablecoin issuers and large financial institutions appear on both sides, but the prices are completely different. Tether invested in Axiym. Circle Ventures and Ripple invested in Tazapay. Visa and Citi Ventures invested in BVNK. Stripe bought Bridge for $1.1 billion; Mastercard acquired BVNK for $1.8 billion.

The strategic logic is essentially the same, and it’s worth making it explicit: stablecoin issuers themselves don’t have PSP or MSB licenses, don’t perform KYC for end merchants, and therefore can’t single-handedly roll USDT or USDC out across 140 jurisdictions. They have to find partners with last-mile compliance capabilities. So these “investments,” in essence, are distribution agreements disguised in equity clothing—they’re buying channels. The core logic of the Axiym deal and the Tazapay deal is identical; the only difference is the amount paid by the final buyer.

Third, the comparison prices provided by the public markets are fairly level-headed. XTransfer—once again, this is not a stablecoin company—filed an IPO prospectus on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange at a pre-IPO valuation of about $3 billion. Behind it are $248 million in revenue, $47.7 million in adjusted net profit, a gross margin of 90%+, 800,000+ SME customers, and annualized transaction volume of 60 billion+ dollars. In other words, a profitable, audited, fully licensed cross-border FX company is currently priced at roughly 12x revenue, backed by real operating data.

OpenFX’s valuation is $500 million—its transaction volume is roughly in the same neighborhood—but it has no revenue, no profit, and no licensing system to support it. The market is paying real money for “stablecoin premiums,” but the underlying operational gap is also real. Western capital is pricing regulatory options under the GENIUS Act; Asian PSPs are pricing based on realized P&L. Put simply, these two sides are bidding with capital that’s almost not in the same pool.

A footnote from Brazil

On April 30, 2026, the Central Bank of Brazil issued Resolution BCB No. 561. Effective October 1, 2026, it prohibits all eFX (electronic foreign exchange) service providers from using stablecoins or any virtual assets for cross-border payment settlement.

For a sense of scale: stablecoins previously carried about 90% of Brazil’s monthly $6–8 billion crypto-related cross-border flow. This rule does not ban individuals from holding stablecoins, but it draws a hard line around regulated FX channels, telling fintech companies: either remove the stablecoin portion, or move it into a truly compliant channel.

This is the future, not an exception. Other major jurisdictions are also tightening regulation around stablecoins and cross-border payments. Relying on just a U.S. MSB plus partner banks to sustain the window for a global stablecoin payment infrastructure is being closed corridor by corridor.

Players in this sector can be roughly divided into three regulatory colors:

Where the boundaries between these zones tighten, and to what degree, will affect the landscape of this sector over the next 24 months—and the way it will do so is not fully clear at this time.

Stablecoin issuers’ current strategic investments—Tether investing in Axiym, Circle and Ripple investing in Tazapay, and other similar deals—share a common point: in each investee’s product narrative, “compliance” and “multi-jurisdiction readiness” are positioned relatively prominently.

But whether a compliance posture is truly a moat, or whether growth speed and product depth are more critical factors, is still not settled by the market. Different answers are being bet on at very different prices.

Final Thoughts

The infrastructure for cross-border payments is indeed being re-priced by stablecoins, and this is a sector worth taking seriously.

However, the valuations from this Western wave of deals are not pricing in the current operating business itself; rather, they are pricing an option—an option that includes clarity on regulatory direction, execution speed, and which channels will remain open versus which will be shut down.

This option could produce very attractive returns. Or it could be re-priced once the market gathers more data on “who is truly building sustainable businesses.”

For investors who want to look for stablecoin exposure beyond Circle, the question that may be worth putting more thought into than “who is running fastest today” is: after 24 months, following the next wave of regulatory implementation, what exactly is left in each player’s hands?