Backing Rain & RedotPay: Expanding the Frontiers of Stablecoin Payments
Galaxy has long championed the disruption of traditional financial infrastructure through crypto innovation. The global financial services industry is on the brink of multi-faceted transformation, and we believe that stablecoins are poised to lead this evolution as the innovation fundamentally improves both the asset and infrastructure layers of finance. What began as a tool for crypto trading has evolved to become valuable for cross-border settlements, and very recently, a powerful payment method for everyday transactions.
We are excited about two of our recently announced investments in this space, Rain and RedotPay. Both companies are leading the charge in bringing stablecoin-enabled payments to the masses.
The Evolution of Stablecoin Payments
Stablecoins have emerged as one of the most important new primitives in all of financial services. With $6.1 trillion in transaction volume across 233 million unique wallet addresses over the last twelve months, the demand for stablecoin-based financial services is clear. Stablecoins have historically found product-market-fit with both consumers and corporates as a better tool for crypto trading, saving and dollarization, and more recently, cross-border payments.
We’ve since seen the stablecoin use case expand to include the emerging frontier of retail payments – where people can use stablecoin-enabled payment cards to buy everyday items, just as they would with a fiat-backed debit or credit card. To understand how we got here, it’s helpful to review the history of stablecoin adoption globally.
Trading Pairs & Crypto-Native Collateral: Stablecoins found initial product-market-fit by enabling investors to trade dollars in and out of crypto while remaining on blockchain rails. Prior to stablecoins, it was common to trade crypto against crypto (e.g., BTC|ETH on Binance); stablecoins reduced exposure to crypto volatility by offering a dollar-based asset onchain.
Saving & Dollarization: Stablecoins provide access to digital USD without a USD bank account, providing a novel solution to the decades-long global demand for dollars. As stablecoins gained global adoption for enabling crypto trading pairs, the market experienced organic adoption by consumers in emerging markets seeking to reduce exposure to currency volatility. There are over 35 million monthly active stablecoin wallets today, a relatively large figure which we expect to expand as stablecoins gain more utility for consumers.
Sending & Remittance: As we have discussed in previous perspectives (see “The Future of Payments” and Galaxy Ventures’ investment announcement for Rail), stablecoins provide a “10x better solution” for cross-border payments vs. traditional fiat rails due to their ability to settle near-instantly on a unified global ledger. Consumers and businesses are using stablecoins for remittances and cross-border payments without routing transactions through multiple intermediaries / correspondent banks, leading to significant time and cost savings.
Spending & Everyday Payments: As consumers around the world continue to adopt stablecoins as a store of value, it’s natural they will want the ability to spend these assets. Merchant acceptance of stablecoins is becoming critical with payments incumbents like PayPal, Stripe, and Shift4 all starting to enable merchants to accept crypto assets online and at the point-of-sale. We are also beginning to see a wave of card issuance businesses further enable users to “spend their crypto like fiat,” regardless of whether the merchant accepts crypto.
This brings us to where we are today. For all their advantages, spending stablecoins in everyday commerce remains a challenge. Consumers want financial products that integrate seamlessly with their existing lives, and cards provide a familiar, widely accepted format for payments. Rain and RedotPay are addressing this gap by making stablecoin payments as simple as swiping a card, bridging the gap between digital assets and real-world utility.
Stablecoin Payments: Disrupting The Future of Financial Services
The traditional financial system is riddled with inefficiencies—costly intermediaries, slow settlement times, and regional fragmentation. Crypto enables the next generation of payments applications, leveraging stablecoins and underlying blockchain infrastructure to present a powerful alternative by offering:
A faster, more cost-effective way to transact with instant, low-fee payments.
A global financial footprint, allowing fintechs to scale without reliance on local banking relationships.
A seamless offramp for stablecoins, making it easier for users to spend digital dollars across millions of merchants.
RedotPay is building a global payments super-app that allows users to spend or send stablecoins with digital wallets, crypto-settled credit cards, among other crypto payment avenues. The platform’s intuitive design integrates the efficiencies of blockchain technology with familiar and widely adopted payment methods. RedotPay has reached 4 million registered users globally and in January 2025 alone, serviced $380 million Total Payment Volume (TPV). This rapid adoption of RedotPay’s cutting-edge crypto payment platform highlights the increasing demand for stablecoin utilization in everyday transactions.
Rain operates at the infrastructure level, partnering with card networks (e.g., Visa) to provide a stablecoin-backed card issuance platform that enables fintechs (like RedotPay) to launch their own branded crypto-powered card programs. With a strong set of clients across the fintech and crypto space, and a deep pipeline of partners set to go live later this year, Rain has positioned itself as a leader in stablecoin payments infrastructure to enable faster, more capital-efficient transactions.
The Future of Crypto-Enabled Neobanking
As stablecoins continue gaining mainstream traction, we see them reshaping the fintech landscape. A new class of fintech innovators is emerging, building crypto-enabled neobanking solutions that leverage stablecoins and other tokenized assets to provide better, faster, cheaper financial experiences for both consumers and businesses globally.
Traditional neobanks are limited by their reliance on legacy financial rails and partners. The past 15+ years of fintech innovation primarily focused on improving the front-end experience, enabling digital account opening, online/mobile banking, and more modern card issuing. These UX improvements have led to over $200 billion of enterprise value (see chart below) creation across B2B and B2C neobanks globally. While these innovations have improved client experience, the lack of innovation at the core infrastructure level has led to the same limitations that traditional financial institutions face around the creation of truly global financial networks.
As stablecoin adoption accelerates, dollar-based digital payments can be made without relying on legacy banks for custody. The next generation of neobanks can provide a better customer experience, enabling clients to save, spend, and send money globally over crypto rails, without a traditional bank account. This innovation reduces the frictions and limitations that hinder neobanks’ global expansion and enables them to serve a broader audience of businesses and consumers.
RedotPay and Rain are currently focused on enabling crypto-settled card payments for consumers and businesses globally. While card payments represent a very large market that is ripe for disruption, we are also excited to see this infrastructure lead to further efficiencies across the entire neobanking stack.
B2B neobanks are leveraging stablecoin rails for global corporate finance, including payouts, pay-ins, treasury management, global contractor payments, and more.
Payments infrastructure providers such as BIN sponsors are making it easier for fintechs to issue stablecoin-powered cards.
Consumer-facing neobanks are challenging traditional banks by offering stablecoin-based accounts and direct spending capabilities.
DeFi applications and tokenized security issuers are poised to benefit longer-term as these new neobanks roll out access to additional onchain financial services and asset classes.
With over $36 trillion in annual global card payments volume in 2022, even a small shift toward stablecoin-powered card transactions represents a massive market opportunity. Companies like Rain and RedotPay are leading the charge.
Why We Invested
At Galaxy Ventures, we invest in companies that are working to build the financial infrastructure of the future.
Rain and RedotPay are making stablecoins usable in everyday commerce, bridging the gap between digital assets and real-world utility. Their work is not just about enabling crypto-native users—it’s about reshaping financial access on a global scale. The growth of stablecoin-based financial services around the world speaks volumes and we think they will lead to some of the largest outcomes for venture-backed companies.
If you’re as excited about the future of stablecoin payments as we are, we’d love to hear from you. Whether you’re a builder, an entrepreneur, or a potential partner, let’s connect.
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