Trace Finance, a settlement infrastructure outfit working the seams between blockchain rails and Latin American banks, closed a $32 million Series A on Wednesday. CoinFund led it. Coinbase Ventures, Jump Capital and Paxos all wrote checks, according to a statement the company shared with Cointelegraph.
That is a sizable jump from where the firm started. In 2022, Trace pulled in $4.3 million in a seed round fronted by HOF Capital, with Circle Ventures and Mantis VC (the fund The Chainsmokers co-founded, which still amuses me to type) along for the ride. HOF came back for this round as well. So the early believers stuck around, which usually tells you something.
The company says it has handled north of $10 billion in transaction volume to date. The new capital goes toward expansion in three directions: deeper into LatAm, then into the US and Asia-Pacific. Ambitious geography for a Series A, though not unreasonable given who is funding it.
The money behind the move
Strip away the branding and Trace does three unglamorous things: banking, foreign exchange, and stablecoin settlement for cross-border payments. The unglamorous part is the point. Moving dollars from a São Paulo account to a counterparty abroad has historically meant correspondent banks, multi-day settlement, and fees that quietly eat the margin. Stablecoins compress all of that. Trace's pitch is plumbing, not speculation.
The investor list reads like a who's-who of firms with skin in the stablecoin game. Paxos issues them. Coinbase distributes USDC. CoinFund has been chasing payments infrastructure for a while. When the people who profit from stablecoin adoption start funding the connective tissue around it, that is a signal worth reading.
It is worth situating this inside the wider rush. Stripe bought stablecoin startup Bridge in 2025. That same May, Circle launched a payments network designed to wire banks, payment processors and wallets together for real-time settlement across borders. Last week, payout platform MassPay tied up with Coinbase to let customers shuttle between fiat, USDC and other tokens. Trace is not pioneering a category. It is racing in one that is getting crowded fast.
Why the regulatory window opened
Most of the momentum here traces back to lawmakers rather than technologists. The GENIUS Act, signed into US law in July 2025, gave stablecoins a federal framework and set off a chain reaction. Hong Kong put its Stablecoin Ordinance into force in August 2025 and has since handed out its first licenses. Other jurisdictions started drafting their own rules in response.
For a settlement firm, regulatory clarity is not a nuisance. It is the unlock for institutional clients who could not touch any of this while the legal status sat in limbo. Banks do not move until the lawyers sign off. The lawyers are starting to sign off.
Latin America has its own version of this. Brazil, as Decrypt reported, now treats cross-border crypto transfers under the same rulebook it applies to currency dealing, a reclassification that drags those flows into regulated territory and steers institutional money toward outfits already fluent in FX mechanics. Trace, which built its business around exactly that, stands to benefit. Convenient, that.
Not everyone is cheering. On the same Wednesday Trace announced its raise, a People's Bank of China official, Wang Xin, said authorities are watching how stablecoins might reshape the international monetary system and cross-border flows. Measured words, those. They land softer than PBOC Governor Pan Gongsheng's October 2025 remarks, when he called stablecoins high-risk and prone to abuse for moving money illicitly across borders. China's posture matters because its skepticism shapes how much room dollar-denominated stablecoins get in Asia, which is precisely one of the markets Trace wants to enter.
Stablecoin market cap sat near $315 billion at the time of the raise, per DeFiLlama. That is the pool everyone is building infrastructure around, and it is a big enough number that even modest fee capture on cross-border settlement turns into a real business.
What I would watch from here: whether Trace can actually plant flags in the US and Asia-Pacific, or whether $32 million stretches thinner than the press release implies once you are underwriting banking relationships in three regulatory regimes at once. Expansion announcements are cheap. Bank integrations, recall, are not. The next twelve months will show which kind of company this is.