From $300B to $3T: Why We Co-Led The Velocity Series A

Stablecoins have been the most transformative unlock in fintech over the past decade. Circulation has grown from zero to $300 billion, dollar access has changed the lives of millions of consumers around the globe, and the ecosystem is still very nascent.

We've spent the past 18 months deep in this market at FirstMark. Regional on/off ramps, correspondent banks, consumer and B2B neobanks, liquidity providers, and everything in between. That work led us to Rain, the leading stablecoin-native card issuer and a principal member of the Visa network, settling directly with Visa in stablecoins 365 days a year across 150+ countries. It also led us to Payy, a layer 2 using zero-knowledge proofs to build the features of traditional payments, like privacy and reversibility, into core stablecoin rails.

And in conversation after conversation, when we asked leaders what inning of the adoption cycle we're in, the answer was consistent: we're still in spring training. While nearly every large financial institution has an innovation team experimenting with stablecoins, the amount of real transaction volume flowing through remains tiny in the scope of the global financial system.

CFOs and financial services companies already recognize what instant, global money movement is worth, but what they lack is a way to get it without taking on the full complexity of operating on-chain. We believe that there is a huge opportunity in closing that gap, and it requires an enterprise enablement platform with the best of crypto and tradfi DNA.

The Problem

Cross-border payments is a roughly $200 trillion market that still runs on 50-year-old rails. Fifty years of technology cycles, and SWIFT is still SWIFT.

The cost of that stagnation is concrete, and the people running these networks say so themselves. Western Union's CEO has described carrying a cost of capital on the billions of dollars the company must keep parked in the system just to make instant money movement work. The same dynamic runs through the money transmitters, the merchant acquirers, and the card networks: enormous sums of trapped cash posted as collateral, waiting on clearance and settlement. Layer on 3-to-5-day settlement windows and opaque FX pricing spread across a correspondent banking system whose priorities compete with those of its customers, and you have trillions of dollars doing nothing.

Stablecoins solve this. Once money is on-chain, it moves on a structurally superior rail: instant settlement, 24/7/365, fully transparent. The use cases are already clear. Nights and weekends, when banks are closed but businesses aren't. Cross-border flows and long-tail currencies, where correspondent chains are longest and spreads are widest. And the core treasury motions of funding, sweeping, and settling that every global company runs daily.

But a treasury team at a Global 2000 company can't just "adopt stablecoins." Going on-chain means sourcing liquidity, managing custody, and navigating compliance in every market you operate, then integrating all of it into the ERP and treasury systems you already run.

Nobody was building for that buyer.

What Velocity Does

Velocity is a stablecoin-native treasury platform built for the enterprise. It abstracts away the complexity of operating on-chain, from on/off ramps and FX to custody and a global regulatory footprint, delivered through a single integration that plugs into the systems enterprises already use. One partner, one bundle, and a company brings its financial operations on-chain without changing how it runs them.

The go-to-market is as deliberate as the product. Most of the category has pursued a bottoms-up, developer-centric motion serving startups and consumer remittance. Velocity is running an enterprise playbook: consultative, integration-first, and global from day one, starting with payments companies and financial institutions and expanding into the full treasury stack. Come for payments, stay for treasury.

The shorthand we use internally: Velocity is to the enterprise what Bridge is to startups.

Why Eric, Why Now

Enterprise financial services is not a market you hack your way into. It requires someone who has sat across the table from CFOs, treasurers, and network executives for years, and who speaks their language natively.

That's Eric Queathem. Eric spent nearly a decade at Worldpay, most recently as EVP and Head of Growth, helping run one of the largest payments organizations in the world. Our references were remarkable in their consistency: a top-1% mind, a tireless operator, one of the rare people who understands both how the global payments system actually works and how to sell into it. He's paired that with a world-class team, including CTO Lukasz Anwajler, previously CTO at Ramp Network.

This is the pattern we look for: the right founder, at the right time, in a market at its inflection point. Enterprises are ready to come on-chain. They need a partner who meets them where they are.

We're thrilled to co-lead Velocity's $38M Series A alongside our friend (and Rain co-investor) Rob Hadick at Dragonfly, with participation from Activant Capital, QED Investors, Capital One Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Ripple, and Wintermute Ventures. We believe Velocity will be the on-chain treasury layer for the world's largest businesses, and the catalyst that helps take this ecosystem from $300bn to $3tn.

Excited for the first inning and beyond with Eric and team!