Block<\/a>, the round closed in December 2025 and was structured as a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE) with attached token warrants, bringing Payy\u2019s total capital raised to $8 million including a $2 million pre-seed raised under its former identity as Polybase.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\u201cWe were preempted by FirstMark,\u201d Payy co-founder and CEO Sid Gandhi told The Block. The company\u2019s core argument is one that a growing chorus of stablecoin builders are raising \u2014 that on-chain payments are too transparent to attract serious enterprise volume. \u201cToday, sending a stablecoin payment is like posting your bank statement on a public website,\u201d Gandhi said. \u201cEvery amount, every recipient, every balance, visible to anyone. Enterprises will never move meaningful payment flows onchain if every transaction is visible to the world.\u201d A previous crypto.news\u00a0opinion\u00a0made a similar case, arguing that if stablecoins aren\u2019t private, nothing is.<\/p>\n
Payy was originally founded as Polybase, a web3 database project, before pivoting toward stablecoin payments in 2023. Gandhi said the pivot came from realizing that zero-knowledge technology built for the database could plug what he sees as a structural gap in the stablecoin stack. The company now offers a self-custodial wallet \u2014 launched in January 2024 \u2014 and a Visa card that went live in August 2025, allowing users to spend\u00a0USDC\u00a0anywhere Visa is accepted while keeping on-chain transactions private.<\/p>\n
The Payy Network<\/h1>\n
Payy\u2019s longer-term infrastructure play is the Payy Network, an Ethereum Layer 2 rollup using zero-knowledge proofs to shield transaction details including sender, receiver, and amounts. The company announced the network last month. A testnet is expected to launch next month, with a mainnet rollout planned for this summer. A native token is also in the pipeline, though Gandhi declined to set a timeline. A previous crypto.news\u00a0story\u00a0on USDCx highlighted how Aleo\u2019s zero-knowledge infrastructure is pursuing a near-identical thesis \u2014 private stablecoin transfers with selective regulatory disclosure \u2014 suggesting the market for this architecture is becoming genuinely competitive.<\/p>\n
Targeting enterprise stablecoin flows<\/h1>\n
Payy is based in New York and has a team of 12, with plans to hire across business development and engineering. The platform currently serves more than 100,000 users across 120 countries, processing roughly $130 million in annualized transaction volume. The company generates revenue through onramping fees, gas fees, and enterprise contracts.<\/p>\n
Gandhi said a dozen design partners are already building on the testnet to add privacy to \u201cbillions of dollars of stablecoin flows,\u201d and framed the FirstMark relationship as a direct channel into enterprise distribution. \u201cWith the FirstMark investment, we have access to some of the best technology-forward companies on the planet, who we plan to onboard to stablecoins in the coming months,\u201d he said. Payy now joins a broader wave of stablecoin infrastructure startups attracting institutional capital, including Gnosis, which entered U.S. markets through a partnership with stablecoin\u00a0startup\u00a0Noah after the latter raised $22 million in seed funding.<\/p>\n
<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Payy raised $6m led by FirstMark to build a zero-knowledge L2 and wallet that make USDC payments private by default, targeting enterprise stablecoin flows that avoid fully transparent chains. Summary…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11987,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cryptocurrency"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24438"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24439,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24438\/revisions\/24439"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}