KAST Raises $80 Million to Expand Stablecoin Payment Platform

The company’s Series A round, announced Monday (March 9), will allow KAST to expand its product, designed to ease cross-border money movement for people and businesses.

KAST said this new round of funding is happening as stablecoins are increasingly being employed as payment and settlement mechanisms.

“That shift matters because moving money across borders still takes too much time, costs too much, and includes too many steps for too many people. The demand for better infrastructure is growing, and it is growing fast,” per the announcement.

“We are building directly into that change. KAST connects digital dollars with local payout systems in supported markets, giving users a simpler way to move money between digital assets and traditional financial rails.”

A report by Bloomberg News cites sources familiar with the matter who said the funding round values KAST at $600 million.

The company says the financing will help it expand across North America, Latin America and the Middle East, while also supporting the launch of products such as its KAST Business offering. KAST says it also aims to expand its team after hiring several high-profile cryptocurrency and FinTech companies.

PYMNTS wrote recently about the role the world’s payment giants are playing in fueling the rise of stablecoins as a new payment rail.

That report cites the example of Visa’s expansion of stablecoin-enabled cross-border payments via its partnership with Bridge, showing that card networks view “blockchain-based settlement not as competition, but as infrastructure.”

“In this model, the end user may never know stablecoins are involved,” PYMNTS added. “A transaction might start with a card payment and end with a merchant receiving stablecoins or local currency, with blockchain rails quietly handling the settlement in between. This hybrid model — traditional front-end interfaces with blockchain-based settlement — could become the dominant architecture for stablecoin adoption.”

Other elements of this shift can be seen in the partnership between BitGo and SoFi, and PayPal’s continuing expansion of its stablecoin strategy, the report continued.

“Regulators and central banks are watching closely,” PYMNTS wrote. “This week saw institutions including the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank generally converging on a similar conclusion: stablecoins can offer meaningful efficiency improvements for payments but also raise questions around financial stability, monetary policy transmission and consumer protection.”