For context, read this profile alongside the financial-licensing map and the crypto-wealth infrastructure guide. It is a case study in regulated stablecoin and payment infrastructure, not a product recommendation. Primary source: Conduit.
Trade with Latin America and Africa in 2026 runs into a mundane obstacle: a dollar transfer over SWIFT takes days, gets stuck at correspondent banks and can be put on a compliance hold at any moment. Importers and exporters need rails that simply deliver the money — preferably within hours and at a predictable price.
Boston-based Conduit answers that demand with stablecoin corridors: the payment is accepted in dollars or local currency, travels through a stablecoin in transit, and reaches the recipient as an ordinary bank transfer. Since the launch of its flagship service in late 2023 the platform has grown to over $10bn in annualised volume, and transaction volume for 2024 rose 16-fold, according to the company.
Background
The company was founded in 2021 by Kirill Gertman, a self-taught product executive with over 15 years in fintech: before Conduit he was CPO of the digital bank Arival, ran product at the crypto fintech Eco, which raised over $86m with participation from a16z Crypto, and built his own analytics startup, For the Win. The base is Boston; the team is distributed and compact — ≈58 people, with operations in 14 countries according to the company.
The first version of Conduit was a crypto-yield API for fintechs and neobanks. The collapse of Terra and FTX in 2022 knocked out demand, and in August 2023 the team relaunched in B2B cross-border payments, starting in Latin America; Gertman has said that after more than a year of searching for product-market fit, the team found it precisely there. The pivot caught a wave: the deglobalisation of correspondent banking coincided with the legitimisation of stablecoins in the payments industry.
Growth capital came in stages: seed money from Portage, Diagram and Gradient Ventures, a $6m top-up from Helios Digital Ventures in August 2024, and a $36m Series A on 28 May 2025 co-led by Dragonfly and Altos Ventures — Sound Ventures, Commerce Ventures, DCG, Circle Ventures and Portage also joined the round. Total funding stands at $53m; Rob Hadick of Dragonfly took a board seat, and the proceeds went into expansion in Mexico and Asia.
Hiring choices reveal the geographic priorities. The Africa business is run by Eric Wainaina, former director of the publication The Kenyan Wall Street; compliance was built by Mark Graves, a former SEC staffer and ex-CCO of the processor Marqeta. By August 2024 Kenya and Nigeria already accounted for ≈20% of platform volume, revenue was growing ≈25% month over month, and Ghana and South Africa were on the roadmap. The product matured quickly after that: integration with Circle Payments Network on mainnet, onchain FX with Brazil's Braza Group, and multicurrency virtual accounts on 11 December 2025, which unified fiat and stablecoins in a single interface.
Products and pricing
The core of the platform is virtual accounts with balances in USD, EUR and GBP: dedicated account details and IBANs opened through regulated partner banks. There are two account types — a Corporate Treasury Account for the company's own treasury, and Customer Virtual Accounts, which a platform client issues to its own users with segregation of funds. Alongside them sit stablecoin wallets supporting USDC, USDT and USDH across several blockchains.
The payout side, as of August 2026, covers over 100 countries and 15 fiat currencies. The rails are SWIFT, Fedwire, FedNow, RTP, SEPA Instant, Brazil's PIX and TED, Mexico's SPEI and local RTGS systems; in Africa the platform is connected to M-Pesa, NIBSS and PAPSS, closing the last mile in Kenya and Nigeria. Control runs through an API or a no-code dashboard, and the status of every payment is visible in real time through the Payment Tracker.
The pricing picture from the public FAQ, as of August 2026, is as follows. The minimum ticket is $10,000; below that a flat $35 fee applies. FX quotes are tied to trading hours: standard terms run from 9:00 to 15:00 US Eastern time, and outside that window a less favourable after-hours rate applies. The per-transaction limit is $1.5m, 15m Brazilian reais, 10m Mexican pesos or €1.5m; there is no ceiling on stablecoins, and larger amounts are split or processed through the operations team.
Speed: a domestic USD payment takes up to 2 hours, an international wire 2–8 hours depending on the recipient's time zone, and T+1 outside the beneficiary's banking hours; confirmation of a payment inside the working window takes up to 10 minutes. The spread itself is not disclosed publicly — pricing is tiered and linked to volume; the industry benchmark for enterprise clients on liquid pairs is a spread of 0.1–0.5%, noticeably wider in thin corridors. In aggregate, by the company's own count, clients have saved over $55m in fees and 60,000 hours of settlement waiting time.
Competitive landscape
The stablecoin orchestration market consolidated rapidly in 2025–2026. Bridge was bought by Stripe for over $1bn (the deal closed in February 2025) and is strong on the US–Europe leg on top of Stripe's distribution; London-based BVNK, covering 130+ countries, is being acquired by Mastercard for ≈$1.8bn. Among the independents, the African specialists stand out: Y Combinator alumnus Waza with its multicurrency platform Lync (January 2025), and Nigeria's Kora, which sells stablecoins as an operational tool against local currency volatility.
Against that backdrop Conduit's niche is the thin trade corridors of LatAm–Africa–China, where the giants have little local liquidity and local players lack the global plumbing. The piquant detail is that Circle, through its Payments Network, is simultaneously a partner and a potential competitor: the more banks connect to CPN directly, the more important it becomes for Conduit to hold its edge in the last mile and in corridor depth.
What it means for the client
For trading companies inside client structures this is a working instrument: paying suppliers and collecting revenue in markets where correspondent lines work only half the time. The invoice stays in dollars, the transit runs on a stablecoin, and the counterparty receives local currency to ordinary account details — timelines compress from days to hours. A representative example from the platform's own materials: a Kenyan coffee exporter shipping to China cuts transaction costs to under 1%, against ≈6% on the classic route.
On top of that, virtual accounts provide a collection point for revenue in hard currencies without opening a foreign bank account of your own. The platform is used by over 5,000 merchants and around a hundred fintech platforms that have embedded it via API; the profile of direct clients is importers and exporters, commodity traders, payroll services and e-commerce businesses from emerging markets. When choosing, look at the depth of the corridor you actually need: a country on a marketing list and stable liquidity with a tight spread in that country are different things, so it pays to run test payments on your own two or three routes before moving the main flow.
Under the hood
Corporate onboarding is an eight-step KYB: incorporation documents, a shareholder register, a bank statement, a balance sheet, a tax certificate and proof of address; financial companies additionally submit their own AML policy. Identity documents are required for all UBOs, directors and signatories; clean SMB-level files clear review in a matter of days. The sanctions perimeter is formalised in a public list of prohibited countries — the Country Risk Rankings policy in its edition of 20 April 2026.
Compliance, meanwhile, lives at the level of each individual transaction: every payment must be backed by an invoice, contract or purchase order. For goods transactions the documents must carry HS codes, Incoterms, weight and country of origin; in Mexico and Colombia invoices are accepted only with a digital signature and a QR code, and internal transfers between a client's own entities are supported by three months of bank statements. This documentary regime is the price of working with regulated banking partners in sensitive corridors.
Technically the core is assembled from a combination of blockchain infrastructure and banking partnerships: stablecoin custody runs on Fireblocks MPC wallets, and the Brazilian FX leg on a partnership with Braza Group, whose real-backed stablecoin BBRL swaps into dollar assets on-chain in minutes; Braza itself handled over $67bn of FX operations in 2024. The licensing stack is light: Conduit Technology, Inc. is registered as an MSB with FinCEN, the Canadian entity holds an MSB registration with FINTRAC, and there is no banking charter — client money physically sits in a network of nearly 30 partner banks worldwide, including six active banks in the United States. Routing itself picks between fiat rails and the stablecoin leg, and revenue comes from the FX spread plus a corridor fee; for a captive builder this is the anatomy of the genre — margin lives in thin corridors with durable demand, which is why a structure built around one specific corridor with guaranteed in-house volume pays back fastest.
Regulation and status
Status as of August 2026: a private company, with a perimeter of MSB registrations in the United States and Canada and no banking charter, operating through regulated banking partners and the licences of local payout providers. Milestones: the pivot from crypto API into payments and the launch of the flagship service (August 2023), 16-fold volume growth (2024), a $36m Series A and $53m raised in total (28.05.2025), onchain FX with Braza Group (12.06.2025), integration with Circle Payments Network (2025), multicurrency accounts (11.12.2025), over $10bn in annualised volume and over 100 countries covered.
FAQ
Is Conduit suitable for personal transfers?
The platform is built for B2B: legal entities, foreign trade contracts, corporate KYB onboarding and a minimum ticket of $10,000. Personal payments are better handled with other instruments. For a trading company inside a client group, this is the on-profile option.
How much do transfers through Conduit cost?
There is no public percentage price list: the cost is made up of the FX spread and a corridor fee, with tiered rates linked to volume. What is fixed in the FAQ as of August 2026 is a flat $35 on amounts under $10,000 and less favourable quotes outside the 9:00–15:00 ET trading window. The practical move is to request quotes for your own corridors and compare them with the bank-plus-SWIFT combination on real amounts.
What documents will be required?
At onboarding, the standard KYB package: incorporation documents, a shareholder register, a bank statement, a balance sheet, a tax certificate, proof of address and identity documents for all UBOs and directors. After that, every payment is backed by an invoice, contract or purchase order; goods transactions require HS codes, Incoterms and country of origin. For Mexico and Colombia the invoice must carry a digital signature and a QR code.
Does the counterparty see that the settlement ran on a stablecoin?
The recipient sees an incoming payment in local currency to ordinary account details — PIX in Brazil, SPEI in Mexico, the NIBSS rails in Nigeria. The stablecoin works as internal transport between the legs of the corridor, while the invoice stays in dollars. For the accounting departments on both sides it is a standard payment under a contract.
How resilient is a provider without a banking licence?
The MSB-plus-partner-banks construction is the standard for US payment companies; Conduit has nearly 30 partner banks worldwide and $53m of capital raised. The weak point of any such model is dependence on partner banks and coin issuers, and market consolidation (Bridge under Stripe, BVNK under Mastercard) adds a question about the long-term independence of standalone players. Sensible hygiene: keep the transit short and spread flows across several providers.