Stablecoin startups continue to rake in cash. The crypto company Bastion announced Wednesday that it had raised $14.6 million in a round led by Coinbase Ventures, the crypto exchange’s venture fund.
Bastion is a white label issuer of stablecoins, which are cryptocurrencies pegged to underlying assets like the U.S. dollar. Rather than hire lawyers to secure regulatory licenses and software developers to write code, companies hire Bastion to more easily spin up their own branded stablecoins.
Other participants in the startup’s fundraise included the venture arm of the Japanese tech giant Sony, the venture arm of the South Korean phone maker Samsung, the crypto arm of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and the crypto VC Hashed.
Nassim Eddequiouaq, cofounder and CEO of Bastion, declined to specify at what valuation his startup raised the new capital. He and his team raised $25 million in a 2023 seed round. Eddequiouaq and his cofounder Riyaz Faizullabhoy, who has since left the company, were previously executives at Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm, and, before that, the pair worked at Meta on the tech giant’s now-scuttled stablecoin project Libra.
“Almost every week, there are some announcements of whatever company launching its branded stablecoin,” Ludovic Copéré, senior investment director at Sony’s venture fund, told Fortune. “We think Bastion is very well positioned to be this kind of glue and enabler for many corporates, many entities to launch, manage, [and] operate their stablecoins.”
