Monad Foundation Acquires Portal, Accelerating Payments on Monad

We’re excited to share that the Monad Foundation has acquired Portal, a leading stablecoin infrastructure provider. This combination brings a full-stack payments solution to Monad, a high-throughput Layer 1 blockchain. Portal CEO and co-founder Raj Parekh will join the team as Head of Payments and Stablecoins. Raj was previously a founding member and Director of Visa’s global crypto product, and he brings deep expertise and leadership in payment networks, stablecoins, and onchain finance.

Now more than ever, stablecoins are poised to radically transform the global economy. Stablecoin adoption makes money borderless, allows businesses to tap into global labor and capital pools, enables cost-effective remittance flows, and grants the underbanked access to cheaper, safer, and faster tools for personal finance. Stablecoins offer rapid settlement and powerful treasury management tools for businesses of all sizes.

But in order for stablecoins to reach their true potential, they urgently need better supporting technology. To scale to global adoption, stablecoins need transfers that are fractions of a penny and throughput in the hundreds of millions of daily transactions. To be truly borderless, they need a credibly-neutral decentralized base layer on which to live. And to achieve widespread adoption, they need powerful and easy-to-adopt SDKs that enable any business to quickly add crypto capabilities for themselves and for their users.

That’s where we saw an incredible opportunity to meaningfully accelerate the adoption of crypto and stablecoins by combining the capabilities of Monad and Portal:

• In five months of public testnet, the Monad blockchain has demonstrated breakthrough performance, facilitating 2B transactions from over 300M onchain addresses and peak throughput of over 10,000 transactions per second. Monad is purpose-built to support a future where hundreds of millions of users are utilizing stablecoins for day-to-day purchases and personal finance.

• Portal powers millions of dollars in daily stablecoin settlement. Its out-of-the-box toolkit makes it incredibly easy for web2 businesses to add crypto payments to any app.

This acquisition will enable both organizations to grow the overall market for onchain payments, supercharging stablecoin issuance.

We’re equally thrilled to welcome exceptional talent to the Monad Foundation team. As Head of Payments and Stablecoins, Raj Parekh will drive stablecoin adoption by issuers, PSPs, web2 enterprises, and web3 developers. Raj is a tenured leader in the space and serves as the Head of the Payments Committee at Stablecoin Standard - check out his writing here.

Portal will remain an independent entity, led by co-founders Parsa Attari (CEO), David Scrobonia (CTO), and Rami Shahatit (COO). Portal will continue pursuing its mission to make stablecoin-powered payments effortless across every major ecosystem by accelerating development of new liquidity integrations, compliance modules, and developer tooling to make stablecoin payments ubiquitous globally.

There is tremendous opportunity ahead to drive widespread stablecoin — and crypto — adoption. Both the Monad Foundation and Portal are well positioned to lay the groundwork required to do so. Thank you to everyone who’s been on this journey so far. We are excited about what is to come!

If you’re a developer or enterprise interested in building payments applications on Monad using Portal’s infrastructure, please reach out. We’d love to chat.