Bridge: An entirely new payments platform, built with stablecoins, to simplify global money movement

Although our world has fundamentally shifted from a collection of isolated, local economies to an interconnected global economy, our money is stuck in local currencies.

Local currencies create global problems.

If you live in a country with an unstable economy and unchecked hyperinflation—you’re stuck—unable to protect your savings or participate in the economy. Where you’re born shouldn’t dictate your access to opportunity. And yet too often it does.

Consumers in Nigeria, for instance, often cannot pay for global products like Netflix, Udemy, ChatGPT and others. They lack access to credit/debit cards and global merchants are unable to accept local currency payments. Meanwhile consumers in Argentina often see the price of core staples, like milk and bread, increase 20-30% overnight.

Moreover, current solutions for exchange are cumbersome, expensive, slow, and out of reach for many. We can’t keep trying to patch the old system and expect to get ahead, because each little fix is another cost, another service, another problem, and another fee. Every friction-reducing service that tries to help ends up tacking on additional cost. Pretty soon it feels like more money is going to all the middle men than to consumers.

For instance, only ~40 cents of every dollar donated to a global aid organization makes it to the end recipient. If you own a business in Mexico and need to pay a global vendor, these cross-border payments take days to settle and cost business owners 3-4%. The cost incurred to collect, convert and transmit funds is immense.

We’ve long believed that stablecoins present the solution. Much of our team worked at Coinbase and led the development, launch and rollout of USDC, which was the first scaled, regulated, dollar-backed stablecoin in the US. We’ve since seen stablecoins scale to billions in payment volume across hundreds of countries. We saw the potential in 2018, and today have even greater conviction that stablecoins represent a new payment platform that can uniquely solve these global economic problems.

Today we’re very excited to announce Bridge: an entirely new money movement platform that utilizes stablecoins - dollar-backed digital currencies - to solve these global financial challenges. To actually do what people thought was possible with crypto. To pull a more connected world forward. To give everyone more economic choice.

Bridge provides the world’s most scalable, secure and efficient system for re-building financial services with stablecoins. We eliminate the friction and fees of blockchains, wallets and traditional exchanges. We’re creating a new way to move and access money.

We're building stablecoin Orchestration and Issuance as a service. Orchestration provides simple APIs to easily convert between any two dollar formats (USD/EUR, USDC, PYUSD, USDT, etc.). Issuance gives developers the ability to convert any of these dollars into a stablecoin they can customize and benefit from. Our Orchestration and Issuance APIs make it possible for any company and team to offer digital dollar-based services to their end consumers or businesses.

Over the last year, we’ve worked with some of the most forward-thinking organizations to pioneer new use cases and scale our platform, including:

We’re just getting started. We’re excited about the impact we’ve had to date but even more excited about the very large problems we can solve in the years ahead.

Since embarking on this journey, we have raised $58m from Sequoia, Ribbit, Index, Haun Ventures and others to support our mission. We have a lot to build and many, many more problems to solve.