Stable Sea exits stealth, raising $3.5M

CEO Tanner Taddeo told Blockworks that institutions are looking to utilize stablecoins to make transfers cheaper, faster

article-image

Zwiebackesser/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks

share

This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.


There’s a new project in town. Stable Sea, founded by a group of ex-Block employees, have built a way to provide global stablecoin offramping. So, basically, a firm comes to them and asks them to convert stablecoins to the local fiat. 

Right now, they’re focused on payment processors, banks and neobanks. 

Stable Sea has raised $3.5 million in a round led by Kindred Ventures, with participation from DFS Lab and Ludlow Ventures. The firm’s fairly new, and by that I mean that they launched in January 2025. 

Tanner Taddeo, CEO of Stable Sea, told me that they set out to solve a clear issue — something we love to hear in crypto. 

“When you actually go deep into the operations with companies as to why they’re using stablecoin, it’s really that if you use the correspondent banking system today to move money between [for example] J.P. Morgan in the US and Lloyds Bank in London,” two things happen: A message is sent between the two via Swift, and then the two have to reconcile their privately-held ledgers. 

The use of stablecoins not only speeds up the time during which the transfer can take place, but simplifies and cheapens it, too.

If this isn’t catching your eye, that’s okay; Taddeo told me some of the use cases they’ve seen are “brilliantly boring.”

Stable Sea plans to utilize the recently raised funds to grow, and Taddeo told me that they’d consider another raise either later this year or early next year, but they’re “set for a few years.” So any possible raises in the future will just be the firm striking “when the iron is hot.”


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Upcoming Events

Brooklyn, NY

SUN - MON, JUN. 22 - 23, 2025

Blockworks and Cracked Labs are teaming up for the third installment of the Permissionless Hackathon, happening June 22–23, 2025 in Brooklyn, NY. This is a 36-hour IRL builder sprint where developers, designers, and creatives ship real projects solving real problems across […]

Industry City | Brooklyn, NY

TUES - THURS, JUNE 24 - 26, 2025

Permissionless IV serves as the definitive gathering for crypto’s technical founders, developers, and builders to come together and create the future.If you’re ready to shape the future of crypto, Permissionless IV is where it happens.

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

morpho 2 graphic.png

Research

Utilizing a ‘DeFi Mullet’ approach, Coinbase’s Bitcoin-backed loans integration with Morpho demonstrates a powerful blueprint for CEXs to monetize dormant assets by expanding adoption of wrapped products (cbBTC, USDC) while also supporting native and/or preferred DeFi ecosystems (Base) which can further lead to downstream growth in onchain liquidity and increased utilization of the related assets.

article-image

Not all heroes wear capes — some drive across the US in the name of Bitcoin

article-image

Kevin Rose said embedded wallets are a Digg feature “worth having there from day one”

article-image

The firm behind Helium announced that it reached a settlement with the SEC

article-image

SKALE’s Jack O’Holleran said that certain metrics are becoming more important to gauging the success of a project

article-image

Mary Gooneratne, co-founder of Solana DeFi startup Loopscale, wants to give blockchain borrow-lend a facelift

article-image

BlackRock, Fidelity and others had their spot ETH EFTs approved, and we may see more crypto products come to market