HIFI
HIFI is a stablecoin payments and financial-infrastructure company that provides a composable application programming interface (API) for moving, converting, and routing money across stablecoins and traditional bank rails. Legally incorporated as HIFI Bridge Inc. and operating under the tagline "Infrastructure for money," the company was founded in 2022 and is headquartered in New York, New York, with staff distributed across the United States, Brazil, Canada, and Switzerland.[1] Its central product connects conventional payment networks to blockchain settlement so that developers can build cross-border flows, wallet products, and programmable money movement through a single integration.[2]
Overview
HIFI describes itself as "financial infrastructure for the internet economy" and as a composable API platform for teams that move money at scale.[1] The company frames its work around the idea of making money programmable, with "rules, behaviors, and logic embedded at the asset level." It argues that for roughly a century payments were built on the assumption that money was passive—that "dollars could sit, travel, or settle, but they couldn't think"—and that the world consequently built processors, ledgers, and operational teams whose job was to push value between places.[4]
HIFI's stated thesis is that stablecoins—blockchain-based tokens pegged to a fiat currency such as the U.S. dollar—end that era by turning money into software, "objects that can hold logic, enforce rules, and operate without human intervention." The company contends that no existing infrastructure was designed for money that behaves like code, and it predicts that future companies "won't integrate payments around their product; they'll build products with money itself."[4] On its product surface, HIFI markets this capability as the ability to build conditional transfers, escrow flows, multi-party routing, and multi-chain settlement across both wallets and bank accounts.[5]
Funding
On September 24, 2026, HIFI announced a $37 million Series A round led by Left Lane Capital.[7] The company said the proceeds would be used to expand card products, stablecoin payments, and infrastructure for tokenized securities and capital-market transactions.[3] The round was reported without a disclosed valuation. In the announcement, HIFI stated that existing customers had grown their usage more than 400% over the prior six months.[1]
The Series A followed a sequence of earlier private rounds totaling about $8.2 million. Those included a $200,000 pre-seed in May 2022, a $2.0 million pre-seed in May 2023, a nominal seed entry in January 2024, and a $6.0 million seed round in December 2024.[1]
Platform and Products
HIFI's platform is organized around a REST API that lets developers "move, convert, route, and compile value across stablecoins and bank rails." The documented capabilities include moving funds globally using fiat rails, stablecoins, and supported digital assets; issuing local deposit accounts for users in supported markets; provisioning custodial wallets and managing stablecoin balances; converting between local fiat rails and stablecoin balances through one API; and building programmable money movement with settlement rules and workflow controls.[2]
User Onboarding and Compliance
HIFI models each participant as a user record representing either an individual or a business, and associates all account activity with this record.[6] When a user is created, HIFI conceptually links that user to custodial wallets on supported blockchain networks such as Polygon and Ethereum, so that the user can hold and transact in supported stablecoins without requiring separate wallet setup.[6]
To move value between stablecoins and fiat, users undergo Know Your Customer (KYC) or Know Your Business (KYB) checks to unlock a "Rail," which HIFI defines as a payment corridor enabling specific currency conversions, such as a USD rail that enables conversion between dollars and the USDC stablecoin.[6] The platform supports both hosted KYC/KYB flows managed by HIFI and programmatic onboarding through its API, and states that production reviews typically take one to three business days, while its sandbox environment approves applications automatically within minutes for testing.[6]
HIFI positions compliance as embedded in the platform rather than bolted on, stating that KYC, Know Your Business (KYB) checks, sanctions screening, and ongoing monitoring run inside the platform, with dedicated review agents handling edge cases and escalating risk events.[5] The company lists security controls including SOC 2 Type II compliance, hardened key custody, isolated wallets, role-based access, and encrypted transaction telemetry, and describes itself as a registered Money Services Business (MSB) operating under principal-agent bank partnerships that handle settlement and custody inside a regulated environment.[5] The company has also said that customer funds are segregated from HIFI's corporate balance sheet.[1]
Onramps, Offramps, and Transfers
Three core money-movement operations define the platform. A virtual account is a bank account number associated with a user that receives fiat deposits; when funds arrive, HIFI identifies the deposit, converts it into a specified stablecoin, and credits the resulting stablecoins to the user’s wallet, a process the company describes as an onramp.[6] Transfers move stablecoins directly between user wallets without fiat conversion, allowing value to circulate within the system in token form.[6]
An offramp converts stablecoins such as USDC back into fiat and pays out to a bank account that has been registered for the user.[6] Offramps operate on a quote basis, in which the platform returns an exchange rate and expiry and initiates conversion once the quote is accepted.[6] HIFI provides a sandbox environment that mirrors production behavior for testing onramp, transfer, and offramp flows.[6]
Global Payouts and Local Rails
HIFI has expanded its payout coverage so that developers can disburse funds over local payment rails in 55 markets, with recipients receiving local currency in their ordinary bank accounts within seconds for the full amount. Named corridors include PIX in Brazil, SPEI in Mexico, SEPA Instant across Europe, Faster Payments in the United Kingdom, and NAPAS in Vietnam.[7] The company has also said it can send U.S. dollars over the SWIFT network to banks in 66 jurisdictions and makes U.S. virtual accounts available to businesses and individuals in 137 countries; it has extended onboarding using liveness checks to markets including Fiji, Jamaica, Peru, Ecuador, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, and the Bahamas, and supports address verification through the identity provider Sumsub in eligible countries.[1]
In August 2026 the company launched payouts to Indian bank accounts, allowing developers to offramp USDC or USDT so recipients receive rupees; HIFI stated that payouts under ₹500,000 settle instantly, while larger payouts settle within two hours.[1] In September 2026 the company announced a push-to-card capability built on Visa Direct, enabling developers to send payments straight from a stablecoin to a card.[7]
Partnerships and Tokenized-Asset Work
HIFI has built a set of relationships with banks, card networks, and capital-markets infrastructure providers that extend its reach into both regulated banking and tokenized securities. In September 2026 it began building on Anchorage Digital, which it described as the first federally chartered digital asset bank in the United States, connecting HIFI's payments interface to stablecoins issued through Anchorage's regulated banking infrastructure in line with the GENIUS stablecoin framework.[7] Its partnership with Visa pairs HIFI's stablecoin settlement with Visa Direct, which NewsBTC reported could reach billions of Visa cards.[3]
Among HIFI's customers is Dapper Labs, the company behind digital-collectibles applications built with the NBA and Disney. HIFI has said Dapper moved tens of millions of dollars in stablecoin assets onto the platform and that HIFI processes more than 100,000 transactions a day for Dapper's marketplaces, where high-demand "pack drops" concentrate thousands of purchases into a few minutes.[7][1]
HIFI has also moved into tokenized capital markets. In July 2026 its platform was part of a production pilot run by the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) for tokenized repurchase agreements, with the company reporting that it participated in DTCC's production trades involving DTC-tokenized assets alongside firms including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, Nasdaq, DRW, and Marex.[3][1] In June 2026 HIFI completed an onchain repo trade on the Canton Network with DRW and Marex, and its transaction model has supported settlement to chains including Canton, as reflected in its own interface.[1][5] The company states that its API supports tokenized real-world assets that increasingly settle onchain.[8]
Settlement on Polygon
Polygon is a core settlement network for HIFI. According to a Polygon case study published on July 14, 2026, HIFI had routed more than $227 million across over 6 million transactions through Polygon's Open Money Stack since January 2025, spanning payroll conversions, supplier payments, treasury flows, and neobank money movement for more than 1,000 developers and businesses.[8] The case study frames cross-border payments as landing on a fragmented patchwork of bank rails such as SWIFT and local providers, causing capital lock-up and multi-day settlement, and positions stablecoins as improving value movement while still requiring anti-money-laundering (AML) and Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) compliance, licensing, and bank and regulator relationships that fintechs otherwise rebuild repeatedly.[8]
Chief executive and co-founder Zach Walsh has described Polygon as a "payments-first vehicle from day one" chosen for its reliability, and has compared the pairing to foundational internet infrastructure: "Building on top of Polygon is like building on top of HTTP, the underlying code of the internet. It's what everything runs on. HIFI is really the AWS that helps developers build out their financial products."[8] Walsh has also stated his expectation that stablecoins will grow from roughly $300 billion in market capitalization to between $3 trillion and $5 trillion within five years, and that the next generation of fintech products will be built with stablecoins as their underlying architecture.[8]
People and Organization
HIFI is led by Zach Walsh, its chief executive officer and co-founder.[1] Its leadership team includes Wei Yu Yang as Head of Engineering, Jake Walsh as Head of Partnerships, Leandro Matiello as Head of People, and Arya Demehri as Compliance Lead.[1] The company is privately held and classified in financial services. As of its 2026 reporting it employed 68 people, a figure it described as having doubled year over year, with teams concentrated in the United States and smaller presences in Brazil, Canada, and Switzerland.[1]
The company describes the broader purpose uniting these operations as building "a new set of technologies that will unlock new financial products that couldn't exist before," enabling customers to orchestrate stablecoins and bank rails, manage tokenized treasury, and build what it calls agentic commerce—money that software can hold, decide, and move on its own.[4][1]
