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- Inversion Raises $26.5 Million for Blockchain-Powered Private Equity Strategy
Inversion Raises $26.5 Million for Blockchain-Powered Private Equity Strategy
In our conversation, Founder Santiago Roel Santos shares detailed insights on Inversion’s playbook, the sectors he sees as most poised for crypto-driven disruption, and the company’s strategic priorities for the year ahead.
Fiodar Yuzhyk & Maximilian Vargas
September 12, 2025
This past week has been nothing short of fascinating. It felt a bit like the 24/7 Super Bowl of stablecoins, with Hyperliquid at the center of attention.
Long story short: The leading decentralized derivatives exchange went to crypto town square and launched a public request-for-proposal process for its yet-to-be-built native stablecoin, USDH.
What happened next was remarkable. Nearly every major stablecoin issuer showed up in the governance forum, pitching their vision for powering Hyperliquid’s stablecoin and offering an insightful glimpse into their strategies.
Today, we’ll give you the high-level rundown of what happened.
We’ll also talk about:
Inversion raises $26.5 million for crypto-powered private equity strategy
Chat with Coinbase’s Head of Derivatives Exchange
HIGH SIGNAL NEWS
Ethena announces major updates. First, StablecoinX, the leading treasury vehicle for the protocol’s $ENA token, has raised approximately $530 million — representing roughly 14% of the token’s circulating market cap. Additionally, Ethena has partnered with Binance to embed USDe across its entire platform, including using it as collateral for futures and perpetual trading, and introducing new USDe spot pairs. Lastly, the protocol announced it will power USDm, the upcoming native stablecoin of the MegaETH layer-2.💸
Galaxy, Multicoin, and Jump Crypto lead $1.65 billion investment into Forward Industries. The funds will be used to kickstart the company’s Solana-focused treasury strategy, which includes acquiring SOL and building related infrastructure. In addition, Multicoin’s Kyle Samani will become Chairman of the Board of Directors.💰️
BlackRock explores ETF tokenization. According to Bloomberg, the world’s largest asset manager is weighing ways to make ETFs tradable as blockchain-based tokens. Specifically, the firm is working on tokenizing funds tied to real-world assets such as stocks.🪨
Figure goes public. After being priced at $25 ahead of the blockchain lender’s Nasdaq listing, shares are trading at $31 at the time of writing, valuing the company at $5.4 billion.📈
Coinbase acquires leadership team at Sensible. Going forward, the founders of the crypto-yield platform will lead key teams shaping Coinbase's onchain consumer strategy and advancing its vision of becoming the "everything exchange." Sensible was backed by Coinbase Ventures.🤝
VENTURE
Prominent Crypto Investor Raises $26.5 Million for Blockchain-Powered Private Equity Strategy
Fundraise: On Monday, New York-based crypto firm Inversion announced its $26.5 million seed round at a $100 million valuation, attracting high-profile investors such as Dragonfly, VanEck, and ParaFi Capital.
Why it matters: Despite the crypto industry’s growth over the last decade and the technology’s increasing maturity, widespread blockchain adoption remains relatively low. According to Santiago Roel Santos, Founder and CEO of Inversion, the reason isn't technological: “The industry still suffers from this negative perception that crypto is just speculation.”
A tough sale: This bad reputation not only hurts adoption among retail users but also across enterprises. Santos explains: “Take Coinbase Commerce and Helium. Both are great products offering superior services compared to their traditional counterparts. But when I asked them why they don’t have more customers, both told me that companies simply don’t want to engage with them.”
Inverting the playbook: Santos’ answer is to apply a private equity model to crypto adoption. Instead of selling crypto products to reluctant enterprises, Inversion acquires low-margin, high-customer-volume businesses — like telcos or remittance providers — and then upgrades their infrastructure with crypto rails. The logic: control the business, cut costs and expand margins through blockchain, and in the process onboard millions of everyday users onchain without them ever needing to opt in.
Interview: In our conversation, Santos shared detailed insights on Inversion’s playbook, the sectors he sees as most poised for crypto-driven disruption, and the company’s strategic priorities for the year ahead.
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On his motivation for founding Inversion:
“I’ve invested in many teams over the last decade that have built phenomenal products. The problem is that most users who come onchain today are onboarded through exchanges with speculation in mind.
Speculation is not bad per se, but it’s not enough.
We have a broken go-to-market funnel. We won’t onboard a billion users this way. We need to go to where users are — not expect them to jump through hoops to learn how to use this technology or be rapidly disillusioned in the casino.
This is the impetus for starting Inversion: bring real GDP onchain. Onboard users that are using crypto protocols and infra but don’t know it, but feel it.”
On which industries are most attractive for Inversion’s strategy:
“We see opportunities across several industries where crypto can have an immediate and measurable impact on business margins. The core value drivers are simple: reducing costs and creating new revenue streams.
Take remittances. Sending money from London to Turkey today costs around 9%, with roughly 4% going to payment fees, 3-4% to FX spreads, and additional commissions paid to local liquidity providers. By integrating stablecoins, we can cut most of these costs. On top of that, we can eliminate many of the costly middlemen who today account for up to 60% of the operating expenses of remittance providers like Western Union.
Another key focus is telecommunications, particularly mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs). Most MVNOs operate on razor-thin 5% EBITDA margins, with around 50% of their expenses going to incumbents such as Deutsche Telekom or Vodafone, which own the cell tower infrastructure that these operators rely on.
This is also where we see one of the biggest opportunities, especially because many of these providers have customer bases in the tens of millions. For that reason, we are initially prioritizing South American telecommunications companies as our first acquisition targets, and we have already submitted several bids in the region."
On how the unit economics break down:
“Let’s stay with telecommunications. Today, MVNOs typically pay about $1 per gigabyte of data used by their customers, making up their largest operating expense. Offloading a portion of their traffic to Helium, however, can materially reduce their largest cost center and increase margins from less than 10% to 15-20%.
But reducing costs is only one part. The second part is creating new revenue streams by tapping into the large customer bases of these telco providers. In LATAM, many of these customers are unbanked and have limited access to basic financial services. By offering crypto-based financial products such as remittances, yield, and credit directly through the telco’s distribution network, we can increase revenues while simultaneously also helping deliver on the promise of banking the unbanked.
This approach builds on a proven model pioneered by Safaricom’s M-Pesa in Africa, which successfully bundled telecom services with financial products. What sets Inversion apart is the ability to make this model cheaper, faster, and more global by using DeFi infrastructure and crypto rails."
On the biggest risks and challenges:
"The beauty of our private equity model is that we own the companies and can therefore directly control many variables. That said, there are a few risks I currently see.
First, stablecoin infrastructure is not fully mature yet. On- and off-ramp capacity remains limited, with only a handful of reliable providers available today.
The same goes for user experience. While it has improved significantly in the last years, it is still not seamless enough to make crypto truly invisible — and achieving that level of simplicity is one of our goals.
Lastly, there is a potential middleware gap. While our priority is to partner with best-in-class providers and protocols, we may still need to build parts of the infrastructure ourselves if we find critical components missing or if existing solutions do not meet our needs."
What’s the focus for the next 12 months?
“Our priority is simple: buy one business, transform it, and prove the model. Whether it’s a telco, a remittance operator, or another financial services company, the goal is to take a low-margin business, integrate blockchain rails, and demonstrate how we can double or triple profitability within the first year.
Once we’ve proven that transformation, we’ll scale the playbook and accelerate acquisitions."
STABLECOINS
Bidding War Erupts Over Hyperliquid’s Stablecoin Plans
Stablecoin Wars: This week, the crypto industry witnessed an unprecedented "bidding war" between its leading stablecoin issuers. At the center of the story: Hyperliquid, DeFi's leading derivatives exchange, which opened a public RFP to choose the infrastructure partner and issuer for USDH, its forthcoming native stablecoin.
Why it matters: Today, Circle’s USDC stablecoin lies at the heart of Hyperliquid’s operations, serving as margin collateral for traders on the platform. As a result, Hyperliquid holds $5.6 billion in USDC, or about 7% of the stablecoin’s total supply. For USDC issuer Circle, this translates into more than $200 million in annual revenue from the interest it earns on the stablecoin's underlying reserves.
Recapturing value: By launching its own native stablecoin, Hyperliquid aims to internalize these profits, significantly boosting its already high $540 million in YTD revenue — a figure that makes it one of crypto’s highest-earning entities, just behind Tether and Circle.
Request for Proposal: In an RFP announced last Friday, Hyperliquid’s core team invited stablecoin issuers and infrastructure providers to submit proposals for a “Hyperliquid-first, Hyperliquid-aligned, and compliant USD stablecoin,” with the winner to be selected by the network’s validators on Sunday, September 14.
A first of its kind: Unlike most stablecoin partnerships, which have traditionally been struck behind closed doors, Hyperliquid opted for a public process. By letting the community watch the competition unfold, the team brought an unusual level of transparency to what is typically a private negotiation.
“Just” a ticker? Importantly, winning the RFP will not automatically displace USDC as the dominant quote currency on the platform. Instead, the winner will gain the right to issue a stablecoin under the USDH ticker — a mark of alignment with the Hyperliquid team that could significantly improve its chances of becoming the platform’s leading stablecoin over time.
Let the games begin: Still, just the prospect of becoming Hyperliquid’s main stablecoin was enough to attract nine high-profile proposals from both leading and emerging stablecoin issuers, including Paxos, Ethena, Sky, and Agora.
Revenue share: While the proposals differed on issuance infrastructure, reserve backing, and regulatory compliance, they all shared a common thread: every issuer pledged to allocate the majority — often 95-100% — of reserve yield back to the Hyperliquid ecosystem, mainly through $HYPE token buybacks, liquidity incentives, or ecosystem grants.
Notable absences: But not everyone joined the race. Circle, which arguably has the most to lose if a new dominant stablecoin emerges on Hyperliquid, showed no interest in the RFP, with CEO Jeremy Allaire telling his audience on X to "Don’t believe the hype." Luca Prosperi, Co-founder and CEO of stablecoin infrastructure provider M0, also openly stated that his company also would not submit a proposal. When asked about his reasoning, Prosperi explained to Blockstories:
"We are long-term oriented in how we look at the market. Supporting a team in building a custom stablecoin for their ecosystem or application is an extremely strategic and involved process. Committing to a solution is an important decision which will not be reversed so easily. We believe Hyperliquid is one of the most exciting applications of crypto in recent years, and we stand ready to support any teams willing to build stablecoin infrastructure for the ecosystem."
Just a farce? Throughout the week, voices emerged suggesting that Hyperliquid’s validators had already made up their minds, with a majority leaning toward Native Markets — a team closely tied to the core developers — and that other proposals were never seriously considered. While it’s impossible to know whether there is any truth to these claims, Native Markets currently leads with 71% of the votes, which has already prompted Ethena to pull their proposal.
Lucas Tcheyan is a Research Associate at Galaxy and the author of an extensive research paper on the developments around Hyperliquid's USDH.
What’s really at stake in the USDH vote? Not control of Hyperliquid’s stablecoin rails and not an automatic monopoly. The winner gets one thing: the right to issue a stablecoin under the USDH ticker. That symbolism is powerful. Securing USDH means being recognized as the issuer most aligned with Hyperliquid’s governance and values, a stamp of legitimacy that could matters as competing teams vye for integrations, liquidity, and market-maker support.
Ultimately, however, success will depend on execution, from securing integrations to building deep liquidity across the ecosystem. Given these hurdles, it is premature to declare the USDH winner the de facto Hyperliquid stablecoin, even more so as other proposers are likely to still proceed with issuing a native offering even if they lose the vote.
Whatever the final outcome, with all the concessions made by leading stablecoin issuers, Hyperliquid is already the biggest winner. Beyond that, the process accelerates an ongoing shift in issuer economics: instead of capturing all revenues themselves, they may increasingly have to funnel them into the ecosystems where they want to grow, effectively subsidizing adoption to gain traction.
Wildcat | $3.5 million | Seed+ : Protocol enabling undercollateralized, peer-to-peer lending.
A conversation with Boris Ilyevsky, Head of Coinbase Derivatives Exchange, on the company’s recent announcement of the Mag7 + Crypto Equity Index Futures and Coinbase’s broader derivatives business.
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Disclaimer: The information provided in the Crypto Briefing by Blockstories does not constitute investment advice. Accordingly, we assume no liability for any investment decisions made based on the content presented herein.
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