Why we invested in Stable Sea

Stable Sea recently announced its $3.5M funding round, led by Kindred Ventures, and with participation from The Venture Dept., The FinTech Fund, DFS Labs, and other early-stage investors. The round reflects growing interest in solving one of the most pressing barriers to scaling stablecoins: turning them into usable money on the ground. For companies and end users alike, off-ramping into local currency remains fragmented, hard to navigate, and often expensive. Read more about the announcement in PYMNTS and Axios.

Stable Sea is building critical infrastructure for converting stablecoins into local fiat — quickly, reliably, and at scale. While stablecoins, typically denominated in U.S. dollars, have become one of the most widely adopted applications of blockchain technology and a powerful tool for cross-border payments, their real-world utility breaks down at the last mile. The recipient — whether a vendor, employee, or end user — still needs to spend that value in local currency. Today, that off-ramping process is fragmented, slow, and expensive. Stable Sea solves this by offering enterprises a unified platform to manage and route stablecoin flows to local fiat.

Here are three reasons we invested:

1. Local fiat remains a bottleneck.

In conversations with dozens of teams in this space, one theme has remained constant: no matter how seamless the stablecoin transaction, the real-world challenge is converting that value into usable local currency. Even if you use stablecoins to effectuate a cross-border payment, there’s still the friction of turning that into spendable cash in the local economy. Stable Sea is tackling this pain point directly.

2. Up-leveling stablecoins for corporates.

Stable Sea is building more than just an off-ramp. They’re offering a unified payments dashboard that gives corporates real control over how they manage stablecoin flows. Whether sending funds to international subsidiaries, making vendor payments, or optimizing treasury operations, companies can track and manage these flows from a single interface. It’s the kind of productization the space has been missing.

3. A team that can execute.

The founding team — Tanner, Tony, and Ben — brings a rare combination of scrappiness and credibility. At TBD (Block), they lived firsthand the complexity of bridging crypto and traditional finance. Since then, they’ve moved quickly, built strong partnerships with banks and wallets, and surrounded themselves with sharp operators and backers. We believe this is the right team to build the missing rails for global stablecoin usage.

We’re excited to support the Stable Sea team as they turn stablecoins into something genuinely stable, and usable.