Inversion Raises $26.5 Million for Blockchain-Powered Private Equity Strategy

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.

On his motivation for founding Inversion:

On which industries are most attractive for Inversion’s strategy:

On how the unit economics break down:

On the biggest risks and challenges:

What’s the focus for the next 12 months?

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.

For a detailed overview of all proposals, see the dedicated paper by Galaxy Research

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.

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.