Exclusive: Loop Crypto raises round led by VanEck, Fabric Ventures

Stablecoin payments processor Loop Crypto raised a strategic round co-led by VanEck and Fabric Ventures, the firm exclusively told Blockworks.

This brings the total funding raised by the firm to $6 million, but the team declined to give specifics on the most recent round.

Co-founders Eleni Steinman and Shane van Coller noted that they — like many in crypto — couldn’t have foreseen the rapid rise in stablecoins.

For Steinman specifically, Stripe’s acquisition of Bridge earlier this year showed that bigger players “see the value in rebuilding the payment rails and that it’s working…people really are choosing stablecoin payments because of their value proposition of being faster, cheaper, and just inherently global.”

VanEck’s Wyatt Lonergan said: “Once you start moving to stablecoins, like everything is instant, and in fact, that win, win, lose is inverted. The losers are kind of the banks that sit between you and the merchant, and the merchant can get access to their funds, and you can do all these really expressive, interesting things with stablecoins.”

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“And that’s a lot of the tools that Loop has built to enable what feels like the same payment process for a merchant or a business to accept money,” Lonergan added.

Loop has, as an example, built out the ability to charge a subscription using stablecoins.

“We basically get an approval from the user who’s paying in that stablecoin for our smart contract to spend that stablecoin on their behalf. So when they sign up for the subscription, the first thing that they do is sign this approval transaction, which gives us the ability to go and pull money from their wallets when that subscription becomes due in the future. So it really is a pull payment from the wallet, versus a payment that a lot of other payment solutions do,” van Coller explained.

Loop currently serves merchants such as Helius, OpenPay, Kaito, and Privy, just to name a few. A press release noted that paid transaction volume in the second quarter of this year jumped by 344% in comparison to the same time period last year.

Loop, the team noted, has had both crypto native and non-crypto native merchants looking for stablecoin payment solutions.

“Our game plan is to keep trying to grow…basically, how many merchants are using us, right? Are we solving their problems? And the quality of that merchant really matters to us too, so we don’t want to serve just like 1,000 merchants who are maybe doing a few transactions, but can we solve problems for 10 really good merchants and build tools that really meet their needs,” Steinman told Blockworks.

Lonergan added that he sees a “huge role” for projects in the space that are “neutral,” meaning that they aren’t pushing their own stablecoin and instead allow merchants to have a slew of choices based on their needs.

“It feels like even though it’s been massive growth, like it’s still really tiny compared to the payments. B2B payments is a $190 trillion category…And so I’m not quite sure that we know what businesses and consumers want yet. I think the winners are going to be ones that still could play that neutral role and just, again, facilitate whatever the customer needs,” Lonergan said.

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