Alex Witt, Founding General Partner at Verda Ventures – Interview Series

Alex Witt, Founding General Partner at Verda Ventures, is an investor and fintech executive with experience spanning venture capital, digital assets, blockchain infrastructure, and traditional finance. Before Verda Ventures, Witt served as Chief Financial Officer at Celo, where he helped support the network’s mainnet launch, fundraising, tokenomics, and financial operations. He previously co-founded SWFT Blockchain, a cross-blockchain payments platform, serving as its Chief Financial Officer and helping raise more than $5 million while developing its liquidity and financial infrastructure. Earlier in his career, Witt worked in asset management at J.P. Morgan and as an equity analyst in Global Investment Research at Goldman Sachs (GS ), giving him a background that bridges institutional finance with emerging blockchain and fintech markets.

Verda Ventures is a venture capital firm focused on fintech, stablecoin infrastructure, and blockchain-enabled financial applications, with a particular emphasis on expanding financial access in emerging markets. Through its MiniPay Fund, the firm invests in companies developing solutions across payments, remittances, identity, stablecoin-based banking, and consumer financial services. Verda combines investment capital with technical and distribution support, including connections to Opera’s MiniPay ecosystem and Celo’s blockchain infrastructure, giving portfolio companies a potential pathway to reach large consumer markets. The firm invests across stages, from early concepts and seed-stage companies to more mature businesses, and currently prioritizes companies with demonstrated market fit in Africa while looking toward opportunities across Latin America and Southeast Asia as the MiniPay ecosystem expands.

Your career has taken you from investment research at Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan to co-founding SWFT Blockchain, serving as CFO of the Celo Foundation, and now investing through Verda Ventures. Across those different vantage points, what ultimately convinced you that stablecoins could evolve from a crypto product into a foundational layer of the global financial system?

I’ve been working on the same problem for 10+ years, which is how do we make money as easy, cheap, and fast as sending a text message? Since starting in traditional finance, it always seemed perplexing to me that we can send a message to anyone in the world instantly for free, but sending money globally can require three intermediaries, a two-day lag, and transaction fees that are prohibitively high for much of the world.

The lesson at SWFT Blockchain was that interoperability was solvable but volatility was not. Nobody pays an invoice in an asset that can move 10% before it settles. The missing piece was a stable unit of account living natively on the rails.

Celo was where the thesis stopped being theoretical. As CFO through mainnet launch I saw a mobile-first, stablecoin-native chain get real usage in Kenya, the Philippines and Latin America from people who had never heard of DeFi. They held digital dollars because their banks or currencies had failed them.

After 3 years at Celo, the blockchain infrastructure went from clunky, slow, and expensive to send a transaction to near instant settlement for a fraction of a penny. Thus, I decided to move away from focusing on the infrastructure blockchain layer, a largely solved problem, to the application layer. In 2025, stablecoin volume crossed $28 trillion, more than Visa and Mastercard combined. Right now, it’s a question of who builds and wins the application layer.

Verda’s Stablescape platform tracks more than 6,000 companies operating across the stablecoin ecosystem. What does that data reveal about where genuine adoption is occurring, and are there regions or categories receiving significantly more or less investor attention than their actual usage would justify?

Stablescape now indexes 6,142 companies across 149 countries and 12 categories, and the headline finding is a bifurcation. Where stablecoins touch the real economy, the map skews to emerging markets: on/off ramps is 67% emerging-market by disclosed region. Where growth-stage capital and AI live, it skews to the United States: agentic payments is just 11% of the emerging market, 35% of all companies founded in 2025–26 are in North America, and 40% of the entire map sits in five countries.

The category most over-served relative to usage is agentic payments. It is our largest category at 950 companies, 377 of them founded in 2026 alone, yet 97% of venture-staged companies are pre-seed or seed and only about 3% have graduated past seed. Formation has dramatically outpaced any evidence of agent-initiated volume.

The under-served side is the mirror image. Consumer remittances is our smallest category at 167 companies, despite the Philippines alone receiving nearly $40 billion in remittances last year. Compliance and regtech has seven companies in Latin America and five in Africa. Nigeria is 60% of Africa’s stablecoin universe, sub-Saharan Africa received more than $205 billion in on-chain value last year and grew 52%, and the corridor businesses serving that demand are still funded largely by regional networks rather than global venture capital. The volume map and the funding map do not match.

Stablecoins appear to be gaining particularly strong traction across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. What economic or infrastructure conditions are driving adoption in these markets faster than in the United States or Europe?

In the United States and Europe, stablecoins improve a system that already works. Domestic payments are cheap, instant rails exist, and the money in your bank account holds its value. That makes stablecoins an institutional upgrade, adopted at the pace of compliance departments.

In Lagos, Buenos Aires or Manila, stablecoins are the product. The drivers are straightforward. Monetary instability: in Argentina, stablecoins are more than half of all exchange purchases because inflation and capital controls make legal dollar access a bureaucratic obstacle course. Dollar scarcity: Nigeria has more than 26 million crypto users, over one in eight adults, and roughly 59% of them hold USDT as their first reliable store of dollar value. The infrastructure leapfrog: these markets went from cash to mobile money without a long card-network era, so a stablecoin wallet on a $50 Android phone, like MiniPay, which Verda backs through Opera, is not a step backward from anything.

And the corridors. Remittance costs of 5 to 7% versus fractions of a percent on-chain; B2B cross-border flows in Latin America growing from under $100 million a month in early 2023 to more than $6 billion a month by mid-2025; IMF data putting stablecoin flows at 7.7% of GDP across the region. That is people and businesses solving problems the incumbent system never solved for them.

One of the strongest arguments for stablecoins is their ability to reduce the cost of remittances and cross-border payments. In deployments you have observed through Verda’s portfolio, where are the largest savings actually coming from, and which costs are proving harder to eliminate?

The largest savings come from collapsing the middle. A traditional cross-border payment stacks an FX spread, correspondent bank fees, and the cost of capital tied up in pre-funded accounts while settlement takes days. A stablecoin transfer replaces that with one on-chain hop and a single conversion at each end. Across the corridors our portfolio operates, the two line items that disappear are the correspondent chain and the float; working capital that used to sit idle in several jurisdictions now recycles multiple times a day. The savings are most visible in B2B, where larger tickets amortize fixed compliance costs and treasury teams feel the settlement difference immediately. Yellow Card excited consumers to focus on B2B, Bitso built the Mexico–U.S. corridor on business flows, and much of our portfolio has followed the same pattern.

The stubborn costs all sit at the edges. The last mile of cash-in and cash-out still runs through agent networks, P2P desks and local banking partners, who price for their own risk and for scarce local liquidity. On-chain settlement is instant; getting naira or pesos into a hand may not be. Compliance is the other one: every new country and banking partner triggers a fresh review that adds months to timelines that should take weeks, and that cost does not scale down with volume the way an FX spread does. Consumer transfers also carry KYC costs that scale with user count and unit economics that rarely survive $50 transfers. The technology solved the middle. The remaining work is local, regulatory and relationship-driven, which is why founders who know their corridor from the inside keep winning.

Verda recently invested in Plenti, which is building stablecoin infrastructure in Latin America. What specifically attracted you to the company, and when evaluating stablecoin infrastructure startups, what separates a defensible business from one built on technology that may eventually become commoditized?

Plenti is the profile we look for. Three founders in Medellín built a multi-currency account that lets Colombians hold, convert and move dollars, euros and pesos. By the time we and Tether invested, the company had more than 150,000 active users and was moving over $3.1 billion a year. They did not need capital to grow in Colombia; they raised the model to Peru and Bolivia. That kind of capital efficiency tells you the product is pulling demand rather than pushing it.

Two things stood out beyond the numbers. Distribution: Plenti found a wedge with freelancers and remote workers who earn in dollars and need somewhere reliable to hold them, a customer that grows with every remote-work contract signed in the region. And plumbing: they connected to Bre-B, Colombia’s real-time payments rail, for instant dollar top-ups, then layered on a multi-currency Visa card and fractional access to U.S. stocks, ETFs and Tether Gold. That is a full financial relationship, not a swap widget.

On defensibility, the test I apply is whether a company owns something that cannot be cloned with an API key: licenses, banking and payment-rail integrations that took quarters to negotiate, a distribution channel a well-funded competitor cannot simply buy, corridor liquidity and regulatory relationships. What commoditizes is anything that sits purely in software between two other people’s rails, such as white-label wallet SDKs, chain-agnostic middleware and generic orchestration. Those get absorbed by Stripe, MoonPay or the issuers themselves, which is exactly what the acquisition data on Stablescape shows. The technology is table stakes. The moat is ground truth in the market.

As stablecoins increasingly become invisible financial infrastructure, where do you expect the greatest economic value to accrue: stablecoin issuers, payment applications, wallets, liquidity providers, compliance platforms, orchestration layers, or some other part of the stack?

Today value accrues overwhelmingly to issuers, because the business model is float. Tether had roughly $184.6 billion of USDT in circulation at the end of the second quarter, more than 60% of the market, earning Treasury yield on all of it. But the issuer layer is now splitting into two very different positions.

Circle is the one under threat. Open USD offers fee-free minting and shared reserve income to more than 140 partners, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and Coinbase, and 21 banks are preparing their own dollar token. Both go directly after USDC’s core market: regulated internet commerce and institutional settlement, where the customers already belong to the banks and card networks. When Circle’s stock dropped on those announcements, the market was saying something simple. Banks and card networks own the customers; Circle just owns a token.

Tether is in a far better position, because its moat is not U.S. regulatory approval. It is local liquidity in markets where dollars are scarce. In Nigeria, Argentina, Turkey or Venezuela, USDT is the dollar that P2P desks, agent networks and merchants actually quote and hold. That took a decade to build, corridor by corridor, and a consortium coin launching in the U.S. does not replicate it. Open USD may win internet commerce. It will not displace USDT at a currency-exchange counter in Lagos.

Beyond issuers, value migrates toward whoever owns the customer relationship and the local liquidity. In the West that is banks, card networks and large processors, which is why Stripe and MoonPay are buying their way into the stack. In emerging markets it is the wallets people open every day: MiniPay, El Dorado and Plenti are the front door to the dollar for their users, and the front door is where pricing power lives.

Two layers remain underpriced: orchestration and FX between the growing number of digital dollars, euros and local-currency tokens, and on-chain liquidity provision, which for correlated pairs is structurally cheaper than traditional market making. Compliance will be a large but picks-and-shovels business. Western issuers will lower their margins down. Durable value sits in distribution, local liquidity, and the layers that connect one form of money to another.

Stablescape identifies agentic payments as an emerging category. What changes when AI agents rather than humans begin initiating financial transactions, and what infrastructure needs to exist before autonomous agents can safely hold, exchange, and spend stablecoins at scale?

Velocity changes first. Agents transact at machine speed, around the clock, in amounts often far below the floor where card networks make economic sense. A card-not-present transaction with a 30-cent fixed fee and a chargeback regime built for humans cannot serve an agent paying a fraction of a cent for an API call. Stablecoins are the only settlement asset that is programmable, global, final and available at 3 a.m. on a Sunday, and agents will default to whatever has the deepest liquidity. Right now that is USD stablecoins by a wide margin. The second change is that the counterparty is no longer a person with a legal identity and a bank account, which breaks most of the assumptions under KYC, authorization and dispute resolution.

So the missing infrastructure is mostly about identity and control, not about moving money. Agents need verifiable identity and authorization: who deployed this agent, on whose behalf, with what spending limits and which counterparties allowed. They need delegated wallets with programmable guardrails so a principal can cap exposure by amount, time and merchant without holding the keys. They need machine-readable payment protocols that let a service quote and settle in a single request. And they need a reputation and dispute layer, because there will be no chargebacks in the traditional sense.

The Stablescape data is honest about where this stands. Agentic payments is our largest and fastest-forming category at 950 companies, but 88% of venture-staged companies are pre-seed or seed. More than half are building payment rails, which will commoditize quickly; 176 are working on agent identity and authorization, which is where I expect the first durable winners once agent volume becomes measurable rather than projected.

Stablecoin regulation is becoming more defined across major markets. From an investor’s perspective, does greater regulatory clarity primarily benefit established issuers and financial institutions, or could it create an entirely new generation of startups building regulated stablecoin infrastructure?

Both, in different layers. A year in, the GENIUS Act has clearly succeeded as a legitimization signal: market cap crossed $300 billion, volumes roughly quadrupled, Fidelity and Ripple received conditional charters, and Tether launched USA₮ through Anchorage. Institutions that spent years debating whether stablecoins were a threat are now issuing them.

At the issuer layer, clarity favors incumbents. The rules are still unfinished, and the firms that can absorb repeated compliance reviews, secure charters and negotiate reserve custody are the ones that already have capital, legal teams and federal relationships. Early access hardens into distribution before smaller firms can comply at the same speed. The fight over stablecoin yield in the CLARITY Act shows what is at stake: that debate is not about consumer protection, it is about who captures the spread of money. Stablecoins exposed how fragile the zero-yield deposit model is.

But regulation creates enormous surface area one layer down. Every institution entering the perimeter needs custody, on-chain compliance, identity that travels with the asset, orchestration between a bank coin and USDC and a euro token, and settlement that runs outside banking hours. Stablescape shows compliance and regtech formation up 150% from 2024 to 2025 and on pace for its highest year ever in 2026. And outside the United States, the volume in Nigeria and Argentina required no regulatory clarity at all. Clarity did not create that demand; it just made it safe for compliance departments to participate in it.

Stablecoins are increasingly being explored by banks, fintech companies, payment processors, and multinational corporations. Do you expect the long-term market to be dominated by privately issued stablecoins, tokenized bank deposits, central bank digital currencies, or a combination of these models?

A combination, and the shape is already visible. My base case is a three-way split in the dollar. Tether keeps emerging markets and offshore retail, where its liquidity and distribution are years ahead of anyone. Open USD, with Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase and more than 140 partners, takes internet commerce. The bank consortium coin becomes the institutional settlement asset sitting next to tokenized securities and 24-hour trading venues. The caveat on the bank coin is speed: it began as ten banks exploring last October and still has no product, so it will arrive third to market in dollars. The euro token may be the more interesting part of that announcement, because there is no Tether-scale incumbent in euros.

Tokenized deposits will matter inside and between banks, where the counterparty is already known, but a deposit token from one bank is not automatically fungible with another’s, so they are unlikely to circulate broadly. CBDCs will remain mostly a wholesale story in the West and a retail story in a few jurisdictions; it is worth noting that China is adding yield to the digital yuan while the U.S. debates banning it on stablecoins.

The practical consequence of a multi-issuer world is that interoperability becomes the whole game. If I hold one digital dollar and you hold another, the questions are how cheaply we can transact and whether the identity verification behind my token travels with it to your institution. There will not be one stablecoin, one chain or one form of digital money. The value is in connecting them.

Looking five to ten years ahead, what would need to happen for stablecoins to become a routine part of global financial infrastructure, and which opportunities within the ecosystem do you believe investors are still significantly underestimating today?

Three things. First, the last mile has to be solved market by market. On-chain settlement is done; cash-in, cash-out and local banking access are not, and they cannot be solved from San Francisco. Second, regulatory interoperability has to catch up with technical interoperability, so that a digital dollar and a digital euro are institutionally usable across borders, not just technically compatible. Singapore’s consultation on cross-border recognition is a good early template. Third, local currencies have to come on-chain. Dollar stablecoins solve dollar access, but most of the world’s commerce is in pesos, naira, rupees and shillings, and the FX layer between those and the dollar is where the friction and the margin now sit.

On what investors underestimate, I would start with geography. In 2024, 30 firms captured 75% of the capital raised by U.S. venture funds. Those funds have the stablecoin macro thesis right and the geography wrong. Many of the next generation of winners will come from founders in Lagos, São Paulo and Manila building for a customer the incumbent system ignored, the way Brazil produced Nubank.

Within that, the mispriced layers are the on/off-ramp and corridor businesses, where most companies are locally founded and most funding is still regional; non-USD stablecoin issuance, the fastest-growing sub-sector in APAC on Stablescape; emerging-market compliance, where the company count is in single digits per region; and on-chain liquidity provision, which is structurally cheaper than traditional market making for correlated pairs.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more about this VC firm should visit Verda Ventures.