Squads has closed an $18 million strategic round led by Solana Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Haun Ventures, L1D, Collab+Currency, Electric Capital, Placeholder, Jump Crypto, and Robot Ventures. Total funding now stands at $42.9 million. The capital is directed at Altitude, a financial operating system built on stablecoin infrastructure.

The underlying thesis is structural, not speculative. For most of the last decade, building financial products for businesses meant building on top of banks — partnerships required to hold customer funds, access payment rails, and clear compliance in every new market. Blockchains changed the underlying layer. Stablecoins turned money into software, separating treasury and payments from the fractional reserve system for the first time. That separation created a new category of licensed Payment Service Providers capable of moving funds across both stablecoin and traditional banking rails simultaneously.

Liquid, a trading platform targeting the convergence of crypto and traditional finance, has closed an $18 million Series Seed round co-led by Neo and Left Lane Capital. The round also drew participation from Haun Ventures, K5 Global, SV Angel, AntiFund, and Sunflower Capital, alongside existing backers Paradigm and General Catalyst — a heavyweight roster that signals serious institutional confidence in the platform’s thesis.

The core premise is straightforward: modern traders don’t stop when Wall Street closes, and their tools shouldn’t either. Liquid consolidates access to over 500 markets — spanning crypto, equities, commodities, FX, and pre-IPO assets — into a single interface available on iOS, Android, and desktop. Users can trade with up to 200x leverage without surrendering custody of their assets. The platform launched in August 2025 and has already processed over $3 billion in trading volume across 40,000 users.

Paystand, the blockchain-powered B2B payments network, has announced the launch of USDb, a stablecoin designed specifically for commercial-scale enterprise finance. The announcement was made on stage at Bitcoin Las Vegas.

Unlike Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC) — which together control over 90% of the stablecoin market and were built for crypto-native use cases — USDb targets the accounts receivable, accounts payable, payroll, and treasury workflows that underpin the global economy. It is backed 1:1 by USD reserves and natively deployed on Rootstock, Bitcoin’s leading smart contract sidechain.

MoonPay, KOSDAQ-listed Sungho Electronics, and its controlling shareholder Seoryong Electronics have signed an agreement to jointly acquire a stake in Finger, one of Korea’s original fintech companies, in a deal structured to build a Korean won stablecoin ecosystem from the issuance layer down to point-of-payment usage. Pantos Holdings, a vehicle wholly owned by Koo Bon-ho — a member of the LG founding family and former major shareholder of LX Pantos — joins as a strategic investor. The total transaction is valued at approximately KRW 110 billion, or around $76 million.

Canada’s digital asset market took a notable step forward with the launch of QCAD trading on Kraken, giving wider access to one of the country’s most prominent regulated Canadian dollar stablecoins. The listing places QCAD on a major global exchange and strengthens the case that locally denominated stablecoins may become an important bridge between traditional banking systems and blockchain-based markets.

QCAD, developed by Stablecorp, has positioned itself as Canada’s first compliant CAD stablecoin. That status matters because stablecoins tied to national currencies can reduce friction for traders, institutions, and businesses seeking blockchain settlement without repeated foreign exchange conversion into U.S. dollars. Easier access to a CAD stablecoin can support trading pairs, treasury management, payments flows, and faster movement of capital between fiat and digital ecosystems.