TLDR; The Capa team thanks you all for your continued support in 2025. This year was about proving that stablecoin FX and payments is no longer a theory, sharing some grounded thoughts on where payments and stablecoins are actually heading, and paving out what comes next for Capa.

This first annual letter is intentionally light on flexing and heavy on thinking. Not because 2025 lacked numbers, but because it marked a shift in how stablecoins are actually used. Stablecoins didn’t “break out” this year, they quietly became normal. Fewer hot takes, more production systems doing exactly what they’re supposed to do. That’s not a loss of momentum, it’s what progress looks like once things start to matter.

Before going further, it’s important to kill one idea early. None of this was a one-man show. Capa grew meaningfully this year, in headcount, in seniority, and in operational maturity. That showed up in how we price risk, choose markets, and how comfortable we are operating where things break first. The strategy got sharper because the team got better.

Rather than turning this into a scoreboard, we wanted to show how our thinking evolved as the market got less entertaining and more serious. Crypto stopped being a place to feel smart quickly and started behaving like infrastructure. That also means it got boring, repetitive, and much harder to fake. Good.

For Capa, 2025 was the year we stopped acting like an orchestrator and started behaving like an FX and liquidity provider. That meant owning risk, pricing, and the ugly parts of moving money at scale. Our north star didn’t change, connecting emerging markets to global finance, but the framing did. We’re not just facilitating payments, we’re solving foreign exchange by making stablecoins the main trading pair for all currencies.

This distinction matters more than most people admit. Early stablecoin flows looked innovative on the surface, but under the hood they were still running the same legacy playbook. Local currency gets converted, routed through correspondent banks, sent to the US, minted by an issuer like Circle, and then pushed back downstream as a “stablecoin payment.” It works, but it’s inefficient. It’s the same FX trade and the same correspondent payment, just with an extra step in the middle. Many companies hide this complexity because the narrative sells better than the plumbing.

The real opportunity lives underneath that flow.

Foreign exchange clears over $3T USD every day. FX is not a side quest to payments, it is the market that makes payments possible. Payments fees cap quickly, FX compounds with volume, and whoever controls conversion, inventory, and settlement timing controls the real surface area of value creation.

This is where most teams hesitate. Converting emerging market currencies into liquid assets is hard, solving the first and last legs of a trade requires regulatory coverage, local rails, balance sheet, and real risk management. It’s much easier to stay abstracted and call it orchestration.

We don’t think that abstraction wins.

This is also why we don’t frame the problem as “killing SWIFT”. We don’t need to deprecate it, we need to wrap it. Compliant correspondent banking relationships still matter. What REALLY changes is the bearing asset, by using stablecoins as the primary settlement layer, leveraging local instruments to hopscotch around slow paths, and embedding proper FX dealing desk infrastructure, settlement efficiency improves without breaking compliance.

When you combine correspondent access, local and dollar-based stablecoin issuance, and real FX inventory, fragmented liquidity starts to collapse into a single pricing surface. Spreads tighten, settlement speeds up, margin stops leaking, and eventually the pie gets bigger.

That’s the field of opportunity most companies are still scared to build on.

±$600M USD annualized payments volume as of EOY
This was the year flows stopped being “early” and started being consistent. Volumes became sticky, and counterparties began treating stablecoin FX as critical infrastructure in their day-to-day operations.

Largest market maker for non-USD stablecoin issuers
We leaned hard into the hardest side of the market, local and non-USD stablecoins. Liquidity where spreads are ugly, depth is thin, and settlement actually matters. This is where most people don’t want to play, and where Capa built a real competitive edge.

Working with teams that ship
We’re grateful to keep building alongside partners who understand payments at scale, including Bridge, Polygon, Base, Arbitrum, Bitso, Monato, Chipper, Brale, and others across the ecosystem. These weren’t logo relationships, more like production grade flows paired with tight feedback loops that showed us exactly where to double down.

Geographic coverage across LatAm, G3, and Africa
Capa expanded where the market demanded expertise, emerging market corridors, cross-border settlement, and local liquidity challenges that only surface in production. Across multiple volatile currencies, we consistently held pegs within 3 bps of mid-market, even in low liquidity environments.

(On the current state of crypto and blockchains)

On 11/3 we wrote about market sentiment. The conclusion still holds, not because the market hasn’t moved, but because the technology hasn’t changed. What changed is the tone. Crypto went from being framed as fun or speculative to being dismissed as boring, repetitive, or the same thing with different names. That shift isn’t a failure. It’s a transition.

Sentiment no longer flips week to week, attention thinned out, timelines got quieter, or louder in the worst way. Meanwhile, the systems keep running.

• Blockchains still produce blocks.

• Protocols still run autonomously.

• Transactions and objects are still preserved immutably.

Strip away the noise and blockchains are simple. Permissionless databases that run continuously. You can write code, publish standards, and define ownership in a system that doesn’t shut off and doesn’t ask for approval. That persistence is the point.

The Monet steam engine on the cover captures this moment well. Steam engines were loud, inefficient, and unimpressive compared to what already existed. For years, they lived alongside older systems, similar to how many of us still rely on SWIFT for last-mile settlement while using stablecoins in the middle leg. Nothing broke overnight.

Then, quietly, they reshaped trade and logistics. Not because they were exciting, but because they worked.

Stablecoin payments are in that same phase. They’re not elegant yet. They still sit next to traditional rails and can look speculative from the outside. But they’re moving from something people argue about online to something businesses actually rely on.

The shift is from consumer-attention-driven to infrastructure. It feels less exciting than what second or third cyclers like us are used to (trust me, markets were way way easier just a couple years ago), but the tradeoff is permanence. And historically, this is usually when systems start to matter in ways we only understand later.

Looking ahead, our focus stays narrow and deliberate. We’re not expanding for the sake of expansion. We’re doubling down on the parts of the stack where we’ve earned the right to play.

• Our FX + payments desk
  In January, we’re formally rolling out our FX and payments desk as a first-class product. This isn’t a dashboard feature or a wrapper, it’s a full dealing and execution layer designed to price, warehouse, and convert risk across emerging market currencies and stablecoins, with settlement as close to real time as possible. The goal is simple, make the FX leg invisible to our partners by owning it ourselves.

• A strong focus on PSPs with real, sticky volume
  We’re putting more energy into servicing PSPs that move serious, repeat volume. These are not experimental flows. These are payrolls, supplier payments, treasury movements, and cross-border disbursements that don’t churn every cycle. PSPs live and die by reliability, pricing, and settlement speed, and that maps directly to where Capa is strongest. This is where stablecoin FX stops being optional and starts being embedded.

• Strategic partnerships we’re almost ready to announce
  Next year we’re launching several partnerships with national banks across LatAm and publicly traded S&P 500 companies. We can’t name them yet, but the direction is clear. Stablecoins are no longer being explored at the edges. They’re being soldered directly into institutions that already move real money at scale. These partnerships reinforce the same thesis we’ve been executing on, FX first, settlement second, everything else follows.

Across all of this, our focus remains the same. Connecting emerging markets to global finance by doing the conversion work others avoid. We continue to triple down on turning fragmented, illiquid, and operationally painful FX into the one asset everyone else is already working with. The TAM on paper might look smaller, but the pie you can actually eat is much, much bigger.

We didn’t get here by chasing narratives (the core team has experienced stablecoin's pros and cons for the last 5-6 years), and we didn’t get here by staying abstract. The team behind Capa today is sharper, more experienced, and more comfortable operating where most companies stop short. That shows up in the markets we chose, the risk we own, and the infrastructure we’ve built underneath the surface.

Foreign exchange is the largest market in the world, and it’s still the hardest part of payments to get right. Stablecoins don’t replace FX, they expose it. And if you’re serious about scaling payments in emerging markets, there’s no way around that reality. You either solve FX at the core of your stack, or you keep leaking time, margin, and reliability through someone else’s system.

That’s the gap Capa fills.

If you’re a PSP, fintech, or enterprise looking to expand into emerging markets, move real volume, and do it without rebuilding the same fragile plumbing everyone else relies on, book a call with us. We’ll tell you quickly whether we can help, and if we can, we’ll show you how to make stablecoin payments actually work at scale.

That's all for 2025 mis CaPanas.

We ball!!!!

TLDR; The Capa team thanks you all for your continued support in 2025. This year was about proving that stablecoin FX and payments is no longer a theory, sharing some grounded thoughts on where payments and stablecoins are actually heading, and paving out what comes next for Capa.

This first annual letter is intentionally light on flexing and heavy on thinking. Not because 2025 lacked numbers, but because it marked a shift in how stablecoins are actually used. Stablecoins didn’t “break out” this year, they quietly became normal. Fewer hot takes, more production systems doing exactly what they’re supposed to do. That’s not a loss of momentum, it’s what progress looks like once things start to matter.

Before going further, it’s important to kill one idea early. None of this was a one-man show. Capa grew meaningfully this year, in headcount, in seniority, and in operational maturity. That showed up in how we price risk, choose markets, and how comfortable we are operating where things break first. The strategy got sharper because the team got better.

Rather than turning this into a scoreboard, we wanted to show how our thinking evolved as the market got less entertaining and more serious. Crypto stopped being a place to feel smart quickly and started behaving like infrastructure. That also means it got boring, repetitive, and much harder to fake. Good.

For Capa, 2025 was the year we stopped acting like an orchestrator and started behaving like an FX and liquidity provider. That meant owning risk, pricing, and the ugly parts of moving money at scale. Our north star didn’t change, connecting emerging markets to global finance, but the framing did. We’re not just facilitating payments, we’re solving foreign exchange by making stablecoins the main trading pair for all currencies.

This distinction matters more than most people admit. Early stablecoin flows looked innovative on the surface, but under the hood they were still running the same legacy playbook. Local currency gets converted, routed through correspondent banks, sent to the US, minted by an issuer like Circle, and then pushed back downstream as a “stablecoin payment.” It works, but it’s inefficient. It’s the same FX trade and the same correspondent payment, just with an extra step in the middle. Many companies hide this complexity because the narrative sells better than the plumbing.

The real opportunity lives underneath that flow.

Foreign exchange clears over $3T USD every day. FX is not a side quest to payments, it is the market that makes payments possible. Payments fees cap quickly, FX compounds with volume, and whoever controls conversion, inventory, and settlement timing controls the real surface area of value creation.

This is where most teams hesitate. Converting emerging market currencies into liquid assets is hard, solving the first and last legs of a trade requires regulatory coverage, local rails, balance sheet, and real risk management. It’s much easier to stay abstracted and call it orchestration.

We don’t think that abstraction wins.

This is also why we don’t frame the problem as “killing SWIFT”. We don’t need to deprecate it, we need to wrap it. Compliant correspondent banking relationships still matter. What REALLY changes is the bearing asset, by using stablecoins as the primary settlement layer, leveraging local instruments to hopscotch around slow paths, and embedding proper FX dealing desk infrastructure, settlement efficiency improves without breaking compliance.

When you combine correspondent access, local and dollar-based stablecoin issuance, and real FX inventory, fragmented liquidity starts to collapse into a single pricing surface. Spreads tighten, settlement speeds up, margin stops leaking, and eventually the pie gets bigger.

That’s the field of opportunity most companies are still scared to build on.

±$600M USD annualized payments volume as of EOY
This was the year flows stopped being “early” and started being consistent. Volumes became sticky, and counterparties began treating stablecoin FX as critical infrastructure in their day-to-day operations.

Largest market maker for non-USD stablecoin issuers
We leaned hard into the hardest side of the market, local and non-USD stablecoins. Liquidity where spreads are ugly, depth is thin, and settlement actually matters. This is where most people don’t want to play, and where Capa built a real competitive edge.

Working with teams that ship
We’re grateful to keep building alongside partners who understand payments at scale, including Bridge, Polygon, Base, Arbitrum, Bitso, Monato, Chipper, Brale, and others across the ecosystem. These weren’t logo relationships, more like production grade flows paired with tight feedback loops that showed us exactly where to double down.

Geographic coverage across LatAm, G3, and Africa
Capa expanded where the market demanded expertise, emerging market corridors, cross-border settlement, and local liquidity challenges that only surface in production. Across multiple volatile currencies, we consistently held pegs within 3 bps of mid-market, even in low liquidity environments.

(On the current state of crypto and blockchains)

On 11/3 we wrote about market sentiment. The conclusion still holds, not because the market hasn’t moved, but because the technology hasn’t changed. What changed is the tone. Crypto went from being framed as fun or speculative to being dismissed as boring, repetitive, or the same thing with different names. That shift isn’t a failure. It’s a transition.

Sentiment no longer flips week to week, attention thinned out, timelines got quieter, or louder in the worst way. Meanwhile, the systems keep running.

• Blockchains still produce blocks.

• Protocols still run autonomously.

• Transactions and objects are still preserved immutably.

Strip away the noise and blockchains are simple. Permissionless databases that run continuously. You can write code, publish standards, and define ownership in a system that doesn’t shut off and doesn’t ask for approval. That persistence is the point.

The Monet steam engine on the cover captures this moment well. Steam engines were loud, inefficient, and unimpressive compared to what already existed. For years, they lived alongside older systems, similar to how many of us still rely on SWIFT for last-mile settlement while using stablecoins in the middle leg. Nothing broke overnight.

Then, quietly, they reshaped trade and logistics. Not because they were exciting, but because they worked.

Stablecoin payments are in that same phase. They’re not elegant yet. They still sit next to traditional rails and can look speculative from the outside. But they’re moving from something people argue about online to something businesses actually rely on.

The shift is from consumer-attention-driven to infrastructure. It feels less exciting than what second or third cyclers like us are used to (trust me, markets were way way easier just a couple years ago), but the tradeoff is permanence. And historically, this is usually when systems start to matter in ways we only understand later.

Looking ahead, our focus stays narrow and deliberate. We’re not expanding for the sake of expansion. We’re doubling down on the parts of the stack where we’ve earned the right to play.

• Our FX + payments desk
  In January, we’re formally rolling out our FX and payments desk as a first-class product. This isn’t a dashboard feature or a wrapper, it’s a full dealing and execution layer designed to price, warehouse, and convert risk across emerging market currencies and stablecoins, with settlement as close to real time as possible. The goal is simple, make the FX leg invisible to our partners by owning it ourselves.

• A strong focus on PSPs with real, sticky volume
  We’re putting more energy into servicing PSPs that move serious, repeat volume. These are not experimental flows. These are payrolls, supplier payments, treasury movements, and cross-border disbursements that don’t churn every cycle. PSPs live and die by reliability, pricing, and settlement speed, and that maps directly to where Capa is strongest. This is where stablecoin FX stops being optional and starts being embedded.

• Strategic partnerships we’re almost ready to announce
  Next year we’re launching several partnerships with national banks across LatAm and publicly traded S&P 500 companies. We can’t name them yet, but the direction is clear. Stablecoins are no longer being explored at the edges. They’re being soldered directly into institutions that already move real money at scale. These partnerships reinforce the same thesis we’ve been executing on, FX first, settlement second, everything else follows.

Across all of this, our focus remains the same. Connecting emerging markets to global finance by doing the conversion work others avoid. We continue to triple down on turning fragmented, illiquid, and operationally painful FX into the one asset everyone else is already working with. The TAM on paper might look smaller, but the pie you can actually eat is much, much bigger.

We didn’t get here by chasing narratives (the core team has experienced stablecoin's pros and cons for the last 5-6 years), and we didn’t get here by staying abstract. The team behind Capa today is sharper, more experienced, and more comfortable operating where most companies stop short. That shows up in the markets we chose, the risk we own, and the infrastructure we’ve built underneath the surface.

Foreign exchange is the largest market in the world, and it’s still the hardest part of payments to get right. Stablecoins don’t replace FX, they expose it. And if you’re serious about scaling payments in emerging markets, there’s no way around that reality. You either solve FX at the core of your stack, or you keep leaking time, margin, and reliability through someone else’s system.

That’s the gap Capa fills.

If you’re a PSP, fintech, or enterprise looking to expand into emerging markets, move real volume, and do it without rebuilding the same fragile plumbing everyone else relies on, book a call with us. We’ll tell you quickly whether we can help, and if we can, we’ll show you how to make stablecoin payments actually work at scale.

That's all for 2025 mis CaPanas.

We ball!!!!