Accelerating Stablecoin Payments: The Role of Velocity

With the increasing global utilization of stablecoins, traditional finance is striving to keep up. Many businesses are still figuring out how to incorporate dollar-pegged tokens into their customer payment systems. One company that’s spearheading this effort is London-based startup Velocity, which recently secured a $38 million Series A funding round.

The Challenge for Traditional Companies

“Many companies don’t yet understand the potential of using stablecoins to address their problems. Those are the ones we’re targeting,” says Rob Hadick, a partner at venture capital firm Dragonfly. Dragonfly specializes in supporting companies that enable fiat-to-crypto transactions.

Dragonfly and Firstmark spearheaded Velocity’s Series A round. Additional investors included Coinbase, Capital One Ventures, QED Investors, Activant Capital, Ripple, and Wintermute. Velocity’s founder and CEO, Eric Queathem, declined to disclose the precise valuation at which the startup raised its latest capital.

The Corporate Push for Stablecoins

Established in 2025, Velocity’s mission is to leverage the rapid expansion of the stablecoin industry to accelerate payments. The company’s client base includes a diverse mix of global merchants, payment providers, fintechs, and financial institutions.

Before founding Velocity, Queathem spent almost a decade at payment technology firm WorldPay. There, he witnessed the inefficiencies of traditional banking systems firsthand, especially when dealing with cross-border transactions.

Velocity: A New Solution for Cross-Border Transactions

Velocity views traditional banks and foreign exchange houses as its primary competition, not other payment startups. Hadick sees Velocity as a model that transcends simple use cases to cater to the complex treasury and cross-border settlement needs of large corporations.

“We believe that what Velocity has built is the most convenient and comprehensive set of solutions for these businesses to join the blockchain in a way that feels familiar to them,” Queathem told Fortune.

The company already operates in the United States, parts of Europe, and Australia. It plans to use the new funding to secure licenses to expand into Africa and Latin America, invest in secure asset custody infrastructure, and develop features like yield-generating stablecoin products.

Stablecoins: The Future of Cross-Border Payments

Over the past two years, stablecoins have expanded beyond fintech and penetrated Wall Street. Supporters argue that they facilitate quicker cross-border transactions and reduce transaction costs. Venture investors have committed hundreds of millions of dollars to the sector in the past year alone. In June, a consortium of financial firms, including Stripe, Visa, BlackRock, and over 140 others, announced that they would launch their own stablecoin to compete with the current market leaders.

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