OpenFX, a two-year-old cross-border payments startup, closed a $94 million Series A on March 31, 2026, at a valuation of approximately $500 million. The round was led by Accel, Atomico, Lightspeed Faction, M13, Northzone, and Pantera, with participation from Flybridge and Hash3. Annualized paymen...
"Stablecoins could do for money what the internet did for information." — Prabhakar Reddy, Founder & CEO, OpenFX
OpenFX, a two-year-old cross-border payments startup, closed a $94 million Series A on March 31, 2026, at a valuation of approximately $500 million. The round was led by Accel, Atomico, Lightspeed Faction, M13, Northzone, and Pantera, with participation from Flybridge and Hash3. Annualized payment volume on the platform has risen to $45 billion from $4 billion twelve months earlier, an 11.25x expansion. The company reports that more than 98% of transactions settle in under 60 minutes, compared with two-to-five business days for legacy correspondent banking rails.
The raise positions OpenFX inside a narrow group of stablecoin-native payment infrastructure firms competing to displace correspondent banking in institutional FX corridors. Bridge, acquired by Stripe for $1.1 billion in February 2025, quadrupled volume in 2025 and received conditional OCC approval for a national trust bank charter in February 2026. Conduit, which raised $36 million in May 2025, surpassed $10 billion in total volume with 16x year-over-year growth. McKinsey estimates stablecoin payment volume excluding trading reached $390 billion in 2025, with B2B stablecoin flows at roughly $226 billion — still 0.01% of the $1.6 quadrillion global B2B payment market.
The OpenFX raise is less a milestone for a single company than a data point in a broader repricing of cross-border liquidity. Institutional FX spreads in corridors such as the UAE have compressed from 0.30% to mid-single-digit basis points where stablecoin rails are available. The economic question is no longer whether stablecoins can move value across borders, but how much margin the incumbent correspondent banking system can retain once they do.
OpenFX was founded in 2024 by Prabhakar Reddy, a co-founder of crypto prime broker FalconX. The company's March 31, 2026 Series A totaled $94 million, making it the largest single crypto-adjacent round in the week of March 30 to April 5, 2026, during which 18 deals raised a combined $264.3 million, according to Cryip data.
The investor syndicate is notable for its concentration of generalist venture capital rather than crypto-dedicated funds. Accel, Atomico, Lightspeed Faction, M13, and Northzone are primarily known for enterprise software and fintech investments. Pantera Capital is the only crypto-native lead. The valuation of approximately $500 million implies a roughly 5.3x multiple on current run-rate revenue if the company captures industry-standard 10-20 basis points on its $45 billion annualized volume, though OpenFX has not disclosed take-rate figures publicly.
The company employs 105 staff across four continents and serves more than 100 institutional customers including fintechs, neobanks, remittance platforms, and payroll processors. It supports 15 currencies out of approximately 150 globally traded pairs, with active corridors in the UAE, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Europe. Stated use of proceeds includes product, engineering, operations, and go-to-market hiring, plus corridor expansion into Southeast Asia and Latin America.
The core growth metric is the annualized payment volume expansion from $4 billion to $45 billion over twelve months — an 11.25x increase. The company disclosed that its first month of operation processed $500,000 in volume, meaning OpenFX has scaled payment throughput by a factor of approximately 90,000 since launch.
This curve is consistent with other stablecoin-native payment infrastructure firms during the 2024-2026 window. Bridge reported volume quadrupling in 2025 before its Stripe acquisition closed. Conduit grew transaction volume 16x year-over-year in 2024, passing $10 billion in cumulative processed value. The pattern across these firms is similar: a narrow institutional customer base, highly concentrated corridor exposure, and stepwise volume expansion as individual clients migrate treasury operations from correspondent banking.
The fact that OpenFX's trajectory exceeds Bridge's and Conduit's by absolute magnitude is partially a function of timing. OpenFX launched into a market where the operational reliability of stablecoin rails had already been validated by earlier entrants, shortening the institutional due diligence cycle for new customers. It also launched after the passage of the U.S. GENIUS Act established baseline stablecoin regulatory parameters, reducing counterparty uncertainty for large-ticket users.
OpenFX reports that 98% of transactions settle in under 60 minutes. The comparison benchmark is two-to-five business days for SWIFT-based correspondent banking, the standard for cross-border institutional FX.
The operational architecture is straightforward. A client initiates a transfer in a source fiat currency. OpenFX collects funds via local banking rails, converts the balance into a stablecoin (typically USDC or USDT), transmits the stablecoin across a public blockchain, and converts back into the destination fiat via a local partner bank. The blockchain hop typically adds 10-90 seconds to the flow. The rate-limiting step is not the blockchain itself but the last-mile fiat pay-out leg, which depends on local banking hours and automated clearing house schedules in the destination jurisdiction.
Reddy has publicly addressed the throughput ceiling that conventional stablecoin rails hit at institutional clip sizes. "You can easily do transfers for anywhere between $1,000 and $100,000 — but the minute you tried to do anything between $1 million and $10 million clip sizes, you eat through the order book," Reddy told industry press. The implication is that OpenFX has built custom liquidity aggregation infrastructure — rather than relying solely on public DEX orderbooks — to support transaction sizes relevant to institutional treasury use cases. The specifics of that liquidity layer have not been disclosed.
The stablecoin cross-border payments sector now has three clearly capitalized institutional-grade competitors: Bridge (Stripe), Conduit, and OpenFX. Each occupies a slightly different niche.
Bridge (Stripe). Stripe closed its $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge in February 2025. Bridge processed roughly 4x its 2024 volume during 2025, per Stripe disclosures. In February 2026, Bridge received conditional OCC approval to form a national bank trust charter. In March 2026, Visa announced it would expand its card partnership with Bridge to more than 100 countries, enabling stablecoin-backed card issuance at point of sale. Bridge's moat is distribution: Stripe's merchant network and Visa's card rails provide the last-mile acceptance layer that pure infrastructure firms lack.
Conduit. Founded in 2021, Conduit raised $36 million in May 2025 from Dragonfly and Altos Ventures with participation from DCG, Circle Ventures, Commerce Ventures, and Sound Ventures. The company reported 16x year-over-year transaction volume growth in 2024 and passed $10 billion in cumulative processed volume. Conduit has focused on African corridors, with the number of African customers on its platform rising 80% between Q3 and Q4 2025. In February 2026, it partnered with Onafriq, which operates one of Africa's largest cross-border payment networks.
OpenFX. Unlike Bridge, OpenFX does not own a merchant acceptance layer. Unlike Conduit, its geographic focus is broader and less concentrated in a single emerging-market region. The company's $45 billion annualized run-rate, if accurate, is larger than Conduit's cumulative volume by a factor of 4.5x and is competitive with Bridge's disclosed volume levels. OpenFX's differentiation appears to be institutional clip size: support for $1-10 million transactions that exceed the liquidity depth of retail-oriented platforms.
The three firms are not yet in direct competition for customer accounts. Bridge serves Stripe merchants. Conduit serves African SMEs and remittance corridors. OpenFX serves fintechs, neobanks, and payroll processors. Whether the segments remain separable as each firm scales is an open question.
OpenFX disclosed one corridor-level economic metric in its Series A materials: in the UAE, the firm has compressed FX spreads from 0.30% (30 basis points) to "mid-single digits" — meaning roughly 3-6 basis points. On a $45 billion annualized volume base, each basis point of spread compression represents $4.5 million in annual revenue transferred from the correspondent banking intermediary layer to the end customer.
This fee compression is the core economic thesis of the stablecoin cross-border payment sector. Legacy correspondent banking typically extracts 50-300 basis points in total cost across FX spread, wire fees, lifting fees, and intermediary bank charges in institutional flows. Stablecoin rails reduce this to single-digit basis points plus nominal blockchain transaction fees, capturing perhaps 5-20% of the legacy cost structure as platform revenue and returning the remainder to customers.
The question for incumbents is what portion of the $1.6 quadrillion annual B2B payment market is addressable by stablecoin infrastructure before regulatory or operational constraints cap expansion. If 5-10% migrates by 2030 — the high end of consensus forecasts — that represents $2.1-4.2 trillion in annual value flowing through rails that did not exist in 2022.
OpenFX's $94 million raise occurred against a backdrop of regulatory consolidation. The U.S. GENIUS Act, signed in 2025, established federal preemption for payment stablecoin issuers and defined reserve, audit, and disclosure requirements. Four federal agencies — the Fed, FDIC, OCC, and Treasury — are currently writing implementing rules. The FDIC released its prudential framework for bank stablecoin issuance in early April 2026.
In the EU, MiCA's July 2026 deadline is expected to split euro stablecoin liquidity between compliant and non-compliant issuers. In South Korea, a Digital Asset Basic Law is under debate that will determine whether domestic issuers such as Toss can issue KRW-denominated stablecoins onshore.
For OpenFX, the regulatory environment is a mixed input. Clarity reduces counterparty risk for institutional customers and expands the addressable market. But licensing requirements — particularly state-by-state money transmitter licenses in the U.S. and equivalent national licenses abroad — impose compliance costs that favor well-capitalized entrants. The $94 million round provides runway to build out the compliance stack across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously.
The ceiling on stablecoin cross-border payment volume is not demand-driven. Institutional FX demand exceeds $1.6 quadrillion annually. The ceiling is a combination of regulatory bandwidth, on/off-ramp liquidity at local banking endpoints, and the willingness of correspondent banks to cede volume without defending spread.
McKinsey estimates stablecoin B2B payment volume at $226 billion in 2026, or 0.01% of global B2B payment flows. To reach 1%, stablecoin rails would need to handle $16 trillion annually — a 70x expansion from current levels. To reach the high-end consensus 5-10% penetration by 2030, they would need to handle $80-160 trillion, a 350-700x expansion in four years.
These growth rates are not impossible. Bridge, Conduit, and OpenFX are each growing volume at rates consistent with the lower end of this trajectory. The binding constraint is likely to be local currency liquidity at pay-out endpoints, not blockchain throughput or customer demand. Each corridor requires deep banking partnerships to absorb fiat pay-outs at scale without local currency spreads widening. This is the hidden infrastructure cost that distinguishes operational stablecoin payment firms from marketing-stage ones.
OpenFX's Series A is not the story. The story is that three stablecoin-native cross-border payment firms are now each processing volume at scale sufficient to materially compress correspondent banking spreads in institutional FX corridors. Bridge has Stripe's distribution. Conduit has Africa concentration. OpenFX has institutional clip sizes and a 15-currency footprint. None of them existed in their current form in 2022.
The economic value framework is straightforward. Each basis point of FX spread compression on an institutional payment flow is permanently transferred from correspondent banks to either the end customer or the stablecoin infrastructure provider. Whether the $45 billion OpenFX annualized run-rate translates into durable revenue depends on whether the company can hold margin as Bridge and Conduit scale into adjacent segments. What is already clear is that the pricing structure of cross-border institutional payments is being rewritten in real time, and the firms writing it are capitalized, licensed, and growing volume at 11-16x annual rates. The correspondent banking system's share of global FX economics is contracting. The only open questions are the slope of the contraction and which infrastructure firms capture the transferred margin.