Stablecoin settlement raises $32M — and the regulated banking layer is the whole product

Trace Finance closes a Series A backed by CoinFund, Coinbase Ventures, and Haun Ventures to scale the compliance and bank connectivity infrastructure that stablecoin payments still require to work inside institutional corridors.

Trace Finance, a regulated cross-border payments and stablecoin settlement provider, has closed a $32 million Series A led by CoinFund, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Haun Ventures, Jump Crypto, Valor Capital, Paxos, and HOF Capital. The raise, which values Trace at approximately 10 times its 2022 seed-round figure, funds an expansion from the company's original U.S.-Brazil corridor into Latin America at large, APAC, and additional priority markets.

The timing is precise. Banco Central do Brasil issued Resolution BCB No. 561 in April 2026, requiring regulated eFX providers to settle international transfers exclusively through traditional foreign exchange transactions or non-resident real accounts, removing stablecoins from the supervised settlement rail entirely. For unregulated fintechs built on bare stablecoin plumbing, that regulation represents a hard wall. For Trace, it represents a lead. The company is already operating on bank-grade infrastructure inside Brazil's most demanding compliance environment, processing more than $10 billion in cross-border volume as the primary infrastructure provider for the top four global payment companies in Latin America, including dLocal.

Why is regulated banking infrastructure the missing layer in stablecoin payments?

The market context for this raise is stark. BCG and Allium Labs estimate that real-economy stablecoin payments reached $350 to $550 billion in 2025, growing around 60% year-over-year. B2B stablecoin payment volume surged from under $100 million per month in early 2023 to more than $6 billion per month by mid-2025. Yet volume growth is running well ahead of institutional-grade infrastructure deployment, and the gap between what stablecoins promise and what regulated enterprises can actually access is precisely where Trace positions itself.

Bernardo Brites, co-founder and CEO of Trace Finance, has been consistent on this point: "Stablecoins alone do not solve cross-border payments. Stablecoins plus regulated local bank infrastructure does." The claim carries operational weight. Enterprises operating across the U.S.-Brazil corridor face Pix connectivity requirements, local FX conversion, compliance operations keyed to Brazilian regulatory frameworks, and settlement rails that bridge fiat and digital dollars. Trace built all of it. The Series A capital will extend those capabilities across FX, bank connectivity, compliance, and stablecoin settlement into new jurisdictions.

What does Brazil's regulatory tightening mean for the competitive landscape?

Brazil is among the five most active stablecoin markets globally by infrastructure concentration. Chainalysis estimated the country received approximately $318.8 billion in crypto value in 2024, representing close to one-third of Latin America's total. The Banco Central's own data shows stablecoins account for roughly 90% of Brazil's crypto flows, which reached 227 billion reais (approximately $42.8 billion) in the first half of 2025 alone. The scale of that market means regulatory clarity has direct commercial consequences.

The BCB's November 2025 framework, Resolutions 519, 520, and 521, brought virtual asset service providers under BCB authorization and prudential oversight and classified stablecoin transactions as foreign-exchange operations. The April 2026 Resolution 561 tightened that further, closing the back-end settlement rail for eFX providers using stablecoins. Notably, under Resolution 521, banks authorized as virtual asset service providers retain access to stablecoin settlement under a separate, supervised channel. The regulatory structure is not hostile to stablecoin infrastructure; it is hostile to unregulated stablecoin infrastructure. Trace's positioning as a bank-grade operator, rather than a crypto-native intermediary, is the direct product of this distinction.

Who is backing Trace, and what does the investor composition signal?

Beyond the institutional investors, the Series A attracted strategic angels who define the stablecoin and payments credibility of the cap table. Sean Neville, co-founder of Circle, the issuer of USDC; Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs; Bam Azizi, co-founder and CEO of Mesh; and Ricardo Villela Marino, partner and vice chairman of Itaú Unibanco, Latin America's largest bank, all joined the round. Strategic participants also include Chainlink Labs and SNZ Capital.

CoinFund partner Einar Braathen took a board seat as part of the deal and offered a clear read on the investment thesis: "Brazil is one of the largest and most operationally complex payment environments in the world, and Trace has built the regulated infrastructure that global blue-chip businesses are using to scale, while saving time and costs compared to legacy alternatives." The presence of Haun Ventures is also notable: the firm closed $1 billion across two new funds in May 2026, with a stated thesis centred on financial infrastructure, stablecoin architecture, and the intersection of regulated payment rails with AI agent systems. That Haun participated in a $32 million Series A alongside that fundraise signals active deployment behind the thesis, not passive observation.

Trace previously raised $4.3 million in a 2022 seed round led by HOF Capital, with participation from Circle Ventures, Mantis VC, and BlockFi, among others. The 10x valuation step-up to Series A reflects both volume growth and the shift in institutional appetite for regulated stablecoin infrastructure since the U.S. GENIUS Act established a federal stablecoin framework in July 2025.

What are the limits of this model at scale?

Several risks merit attention. The $10 billion in processed cross-border volume is a company-reported metric, not independently audited data; institutional buyers should treat it as directional rather than definitive. Trace's current competitive strength rests substantially on first-mover positioning in Brazil's regulatory environment. As the BCB framework matures and competitors invest in their own licensing and bank connectivity, that structural lead becomes harder to sustain. The company's stated expansion into APAC covers a set of markets with fragmented and sometimes divergent regulatory regimes: compliance infrastructure built for Brazil does not transfer directly to, say, Singapore or Indonesia without material localisation investment.

There is also a concentration risk embedded in Trace's client base. Serving as the primary infrastructure provider for the top four global payment companies in a single region means that the loss of any one significant enterprise relationship has an outsized effect on volume and revenue. The new products in development, described in the press materials as built on Trace's regulated banking infrastructure but not yet detailed, represent another variable: product expansion introduces execution risk at precisely the moment the company is also scaling geographically.

The broader stablecoin infrastructure segment is also crowding. Stripe acquired Bridge for $1.1 billion in 2024. Mastercard acquired BVNK for $1.8 billion. Visa reached a $4.5 billion annualised stablecoin settlement run rate by January 2026. Institutional capital is building aggressively in this space, and Trace will eventually compete with counterparties that have significantly larger balance sheets and existing bank relationships across multiple jurisdictions.

Where does Trace go from here?

The Series A capital will be deployed across four priorities: scaling into large global enterprises, deepening product capabilities across FX, bank connectivity, compliance, and stablecoin settlement; expanding the regulated footprint across Brazil, the U.S., APAC, and additional priority jurisdictions; and building out new settlement products against the company's existing infrastructure base. The geographic expansion from a Brazil-U.S. corridor specialist to a multi-region operator is the largest execution challenge in the plan, and the pace of that expansion against the regulatory timelines in each target market will be the clearest signal of whether the company's infrastructure thesis translates beyond Latin America.

Why this matters to FinanceX readers

For finance professionals evaluating stablecoin payment infrastructure, Trace's raise clarifies what the institutional market is actually paying for: not stablecoin rails in isolation, but the compliance, FX, and bank connectivity layer that makes those rails usable inside regulated corridors. Brazil's regulatory tightening is the leading indicator, not an outlier. As the GENIUS Act in the U.S. and MiCA in the EU establish enforceable frameworks, the same pressure will apply globally: operators without bank-grade infrastructure will be pushed out of institutional settlement flows. The investors backing Trace are betting that the compliance layer is not a cost of doing business but a defensible product in itself.