The financing will support Velocity’s work to provide stablecoin infrastructure to issuers, acquirers, payment providers, financial institutions and merchants, the company said in a news release Tuesday (Sept. 15).
The extension of the company’s Series A round follows the $38 million Velocity raised in July. Investors include Circle Ventures, Ripple and Visa Ventures, a new backer.
“Stablecoins are playing an increasingly important role in reshaping how value moves across the Visa ecosystem, and companies like Velocity are helping accelerate adoption and unlock new opportunities for our customers and partners,” said Rubail Birwadker, global head of growth products and strategic partnerships at Visa.
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Velocity says its infrastructure lets institutions and businesses use stablecoins for settlement, liquidity and treasury operations without supplanting their existing systems, with a platform aimed at making money movement more continuous while reducing dependence on prefunding and extending settlement beyond traditional banking hours.
The company said the involvement of Circle Ventures and Ripple brings Velocity together with two major companies promoting regulated stablecoins and their use in payments, liquidity and institutional finance. Another investor, Translink Capital, provides a “strategic bridge” to Velocity’s corporate and institutional partners in Asia.
“Their investment reflects a shared view that the next phase of stablecoin adoption will depend not only on the assets and blockchains themselves, but also on the infrastructure connecting them with the banking, treasury and settlement systems institutions already use,” Velocity said.
The new funding comes at a moment where stablecoins “have gotten boring, fast,” as PYMNTS wrote last week.
And that development is good news for the industry, the report added, as it works to get end users to start treating stablecoins as “an always-on layer for moving liquidity, extending credit, and settling financial obligations.”
This followed a week in which several companies made stablecoin-related announcements that involved token acting less as the product being built and more as an underlying component with products that already resemble recognizable financial services, including credit facilities, card programs, cross-border treasury, custody, settlement and developer infrastructure.
“The first phase of institutional stablecoin adoption asked whether blockchain could move money faster or more cheaply,” that report said. “The emerging phase is now asking what financial products become possible when money, settlement and transaction data can operate continuously on programmable infrastructure.”
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