Payy

Last week during Digital Asset Summit in NYC, we hosted Off the Record Café with Payy and Zerion. We had over 200+ teams came through. Coinbase, Paradigm, Pantera Capital, Mastercard, IBM, Circle, Alchemy, Fireblocks, Solana, and many more. One thing was clear: the gap between DeFi and traditional finance is closing faster than most people realize. Grateful to everyone who was in the room. More to come.

Everything you do onchain is being watched. Your salary. Your net worth. Who you pay. What you buy. All visible to anyone, forever. So how do you publicly verify a transaction on a blockchain WITHOUT revealing all the data that comes along with it? That's exactly the challenge that Payy has solved and one of the reasons we were so excited to lead their seed round at FirstMark. Payy is a new kind of payments rail, with an EVM-compatible L2, purpose-built for private stablecoin transactions at its core. Privacy is enforced at the protocol level, not approximated at the application layer. Developers can build on familiar infrastructure, but with a fundamentally different set of guarantees around how financial data is handled. Already, over 100K users are doing $130M in annualized volume on the Payy Wallet. Thousands of private transactions across 100+ countries. We couldn't be more excited to welcome the Payy team to the FirstMark family!

Looking for weekend stablecoin reading? I've got you covered ⬇️ In the latest edition of the Money Code newsletter we cover: • NYSE partners with Securitize to develop 24/7 tokenized securities platform • Whop launches Aave Labs-powered treasury with yield for 21M+ users • Money Code Ep 25: How Should Banks Respond to Stablecoins w/ Chris Dean (Treasury Prime) • Product launches, partnerships and funding news from Invesco, Monument, MoonPay, ParaFi Capital, Payy, Startale Group, Tether.io, XFX and more. 𝐅𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐤: 📊 Visa and Dune Analytics published Beyond Dollarization, a data-heavy look at non-USD stablecoins. The headline numbers: • non-USD stablecoin holder addresses grew from 40,000 to 1.2 million since January 2023, with monthly transfer volume hitting $10 billion. • Euro stablecoins (EURC in particular) dominate at 85% of transferred value, but BRL, SGD, and JPY are accelerating. The key insight: • 80% of non-USD stablecoin activity is payments and treasury flows, not DeFi. These are being used as operational money.  Check out the full report inside 📝 Noah Levine (a16z crypto) wrote another great piece: Entering the Era of the Headless Merchant. A new category of business is emerging: services with no storefront, no user accounts, no checkout page. Just an API endpoint and a price per call, built for AI agents. The Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) marketplace launched with 60+ agent-consumable services, and 913 agents executed 34,000+ transactions in the first week at prices ranging from $0.003 to $35 per request. The key argument: the payment rails for agent commerce now exist across cards, stablecoins, and Lightning. The bottleneck is no longer infrastructure. The opportunity is building a new type of merchant for the agentic age. Worth a read if you're thinking about how agentic coding is transforming how we work (and procure). --- The Money Code newsletter is the essential source of stablecoin news coverage for global fintech professionals, brought to you by This Week in Fintech and Stablecon