OpenTrade Raises $17M to Expand Stablecoin Yield…

OpenTrade announced on 6 May 2026 that it has raised US$17 million in a strategic funding round led by Mercury Fund and Notion Capital, lifting its total funding past US$30 million. The London-based stablecoin yield infrastructure platform plans to use the proceeds to scale a permissionless protocol layer, formalise its Curation+ investment service, and expand asset management, engineering and customer success teams to support a rapidly broadening client base.

Volume and TVL trajectory

The funding round arrives off a markedly steeper growth curve than OpenTrade’s June 2025 seed extension. The company says it has surpassed US$200 million in total value locked and processed more than US$250 million in transaction volume across 2025. The pace into 2026 is faster again: OpenTrade has reached US$300 million in transaction volume during the first four months of the year — already ahead of the full 2025 figure — and expects approximately US$1 billion across the full year.

The figures sit inside a stablecoin market that the company says has now grown to over US$300 billion in total supply. That growth is mostly USDT- and USDC-driven and matches the regional adoption patterns described in OpenTrade’s recently published Latin American stablecoin report, which found regional stablecoin transaction volume hit US$324 billion in 2025, up 89% year-on-year.

From yield-as-a-service to multi-pillar infrastructure

OpenTrade originally gained traction as a B2B2C “yield-as-a-service” platform — plug-and-play infrastructure that allows fintechs, exchanges, neobanks and non-custodial wallets to offer dollar- and euro-denominated stablecoin yield products without building investment, custody or operational systems themselves. Clients including Littio, Midas Kripto and Glim use the platform to deliver real-world asset-backed yield to retail users.

As volume scaled, three additional use cases emerged. Asset issuers wanted distribution into decentralised markets. Non-custodial wallets and platforms wanted to offer yield without sitting in the flow of funds. Institutions and treasuries wanted curated, mandate-driven strategies that could be deployed without building internal investment teams. OpenTrade’s response is two new infrastructure pillars on top of the original yield-as-a-service core: a permissionless protocol layer, and Curation+.

Curation+ and the Figment delta-neutral product

Curation+ is the formal articulation of OpenTrade’s investment strategy services for on-chain treasuries and platforms seeking institutional-grade portfolio design. Working with an FCA-regulated asset manager, every asset integrated into a Curation+ vault undergoes a formal investment committee review covering strategy exposure, diversification, performance history, risk profile, jurisdiction, structure and liquidity before inclusion.

The framework is already deployed in production. OpenTrade-curated products span blended real-world asset and DeFi portfolios for neobank partners, as well as Stablecoin Staking Yield — a delta-neutral staking strategy developed with staking provider Figment that surfaces protocol-fee yield to stablecoin holders without taking directional crypto exposure.

OpenTrade’s positioning against the wider DeFi vault curator category is explicit. Where most curators primarily select protocols, Curation+ combines regulated asset management oversight with active strategy design and execution. The structure is designed to meet the risk-management and reporting standards expected by institutional clients — the gap that has historically kept treasury and corporate balance sheet allocators outside on-chain yield.

Permissionless layer and Sierra launch

The other new pillar is a permissionless protocol layer. OpenTrade has deployed its infrastructure as a permissionless protocol that issues freely transferable, position-tracking tokens, allowing asset issuers — both traditional and on-chain — to access decentralised finance distribution channels without building their own infrastructure. Non-custodial platforms can integrate yield products by directing deposits into OpenTrade-powered vaults while remaining entirely outside the flow of funds.

The infrastructure is already live with its first implementation through Sierra Protocol. Sierra’s liquid yield token, SIERRA, is backed by curated vault strategies combining real-world assets including money market funds, commercial paper and trade finance with on-chain strategies managed through OpenTrade. The launch puts the permissionless layer in production as a working reference rather than a planned feature.

Investor commentary

David Sutter, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of OpenTrade, framed the round around the broadening use case set rather than a single product. “OpenTrade has made it simple for fintechs and neobanks to plug institutional-grade stablecoin yield into their products,” Sutter said. “As we grew, it became clear that our infrastructure could also serve non-custodial platforms, treasuries, and asset issuers that all need the same thing: a safe, scalable way to connect stablecoins to diversified yield strategies.”

Jay Wilson, Partner at AlbionVC, framed the company’s positioning around the convergence of TradFi, CeFi and DeFi. “OpenTrade is rapidly becoming the definitive yield infrastructure at the intersection of fiat and digital currencies,” Wilson said. “Its expansion into permissionless distribution and curated vaults is a natural next step, opening access for asset issuers and treasury managers globally.”

Samantha Lewis, Partner at Mercury, described the demand picture in terms of internal build-versus-buy economics. “Demand for safe, scalable, stablecoin yield is outpacing what the vast majority of teams can realistically build and manage themselves,” Lewis said. “OpenTrade abstracts away all complexity associated with the technology, risk management, and execution, giving platforms and treasuries a simple path to well-managed, transparently structured yield products.”

Itxaso del Palacio, General Partner at Notion Capital, was the most explicit on the strategic ambition. “Starting from yield, OpenTrade has a unique opportunity to own the stablecoin infrastructure layer,” del Palacio said. “This matters now because regulatory clarity is arriving, institutional demand is accelerating, and the rails are still pre-consolidation. The infrastructure gaps that matter most, including compliance and orchestration, treasury and liquidity management, and cross-border B2B payments, remain wide open, and OpenTrade is positioned to own them.”

Use of proceeds

The new funding will support continued expansion of OpenTrade’s permissioned and permissionless infrastructure and the growth of Curation+ services. The company plans to expand its asset management and trading team, increase engineering capacity, and build a dedicated customer success function to support its growing client base.

The capital deployment maps onto a thesis that “yield infrastructure” is a horizontal layer rather than a product category. With Binance Pay scaling QR payments and Mezo launching institutional Bitcoin yield products in the same window, the central design question for stablecoin and digital asset platforms in 2026 is increasingly which layers they build internally and which they integrate. OpenTrade’s bet is that yield is the layer most platforms will integrate rather than build.

FAQ

Who led OpenTrade’s $17 million round?
The round was led by Mercury Fund and Notion Capital, with participation from a16z Crypto, AlbionVC and CMCC Global — the same investor group that backed OpenTrade’s June 2025 round. The new capital lifts OpenTrade’s total funding past US$30 million.

What does OpenTrade do?
OpenTrade provides stablecoin yield infrastructure used by fintechs, exchanges, neobanks, non-custodial wallets, asset issuers and on-chain treasuries. Its platform is structured in three pillars: yield-as-a-service for consumer-facing platforms, a permissionless protocol layer for asset issuers and decentralised distribution, and Curation+ for institutional-grade vault curation combining real-world assets and on-chain strategies.

What are OpenTrade’s growth metrics?
OpenTrade has surpassed US$200 million in total value locked and processed more than US$250 million in transaction volume in 2025. It has already reached US$300 million in transaction volume during the first four months of 2026 and expects approximately US$1 billion in transaction volume across the full year.

The strategic question OpenTrade raises is whether stablecoin yield will end up consolidated under a small number of horizontal infrastructure providers — in much the same way that card processing or KYC consolidated into a handful of dominant rails — or whether the market remains fragmented across hundreds of bespoke implementations. Notion’s del Palacio is betting on the former, and OpenTrade’s growth profile through 2026 will be the practical test of that thesis.