Fasset Raises $68 Million at a $1 Billion Valuation to Build Stablecoin Banking Rails

DUBAI — Fasset, a stablecoin-based banking platform founded in 2019, said it had raised $68 million in a Series C round led by SBI Group, the Japanese financial conglomerate, at a valuation of $1 billion.

The company operates what it describes as a neobanking platform that lets customers hold and move multiple currencies and digital assets from a single account. Its pitch is aimed principally at emerging markets, where the gap between what a domestic bank account can do and what a cross-border business actually needs is widest.

Most of the new capital is earmarked for Own Network, Fasset’s settlement infrastructure. The network is an Ethereum Layer 2 built on Arbitrum, which the company says connects banks, telecommunications operators and payment providers across more than 100 banking corridors. The design intent is that a payment between two of those corridors settles on the shared layer rather than passing through a chain of correspondent banks.

That architectural choice is the substance of the bet. Correspondent banking remains the default plumbing for cross-border payments, and it is slow and expensive largely because each intermediary in the chain holds its own liquidity, takes its own cut and applies its own compliance review. A shared settlement layer collapses the chain, at the cost of requiring every participant to trust the same infrastructure.

Whether that trade appeals to regulated institutions is the open question for every company building in this category. Banks have been willing to experiment with tokenized settlement in controlled pilots. Moving production volume onto a public Layer 2 operated by a startup is a materially different proposition, and the pace at which incumbents make that move has consistently lagged the projections of the firms building the rails.

The identity of the lead investor is worth noting on its own. SBI Group has been among the more persistent institutional backers of digital-asset infrastructure in Asia, and its participation gives Fasset a distribution channel into Japanese financial institutions that is difficult to buy any other way.

The round also arrives during a broad repricing of stablecoin infrastructure. Augustus, a clearing-bank startup building settlement infrastructure for stablecoins, raised $180 million at a $1 billion valuation in July. Investors are, in effect, funding several competing answers to the same question about which layer of the payments stack captures the value as settlement moves on-chain.

Fasset did not disclose transaction volumes, revenue or the share of its corridor count that is live in production rather than contracted. Those figures are the ones that would distinguish a functioning network from a map of intentions, and their absence is the standard limitation on reading any announcement of this kind.