The unglamorous end of crypto had a very good day. Twenty five million dollars went into a point of sale company in Singapore, Stellar cleared 211 transactions a second, a self custody money app opened in more than 150 countries, and a credit ratings giant bought the people who audit the contracts.
- SBI Group joined dtcpay’s $25 million Series A as a strategic investor.
- 211 transactions a second, held across 100 consecutive blocks, is Stellar’s new record.
- Self custody, stablecoins and Apple Pay funding now arrive inside one app in 150+ countries.
- The code library behind $37 trillion of transfers now belongs to S&P Global.
Each of the four is about value reaching the person it’s meant for, and not one of them is a token launch. That’s what adoption looks like once it stops being an announcement.
A Singapore payments firm closes $25 million
Source: The Block
dtcpay, a Singapore stablecoin payments company founded in 2019, closed a $25 million Series A with Japan’s SBI Group joining as a strategic investor. Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India led the round, whose first tranche was announced in April. Genedant Capital and existing investor Kwee Liong Tek also took part.
The company works the end of crypto that faces a counter. It runs a digital payment token point of sale service for in store merchant payments, settles cross border payments, and launched a stablecoin to fiat Visa Infinite card in Singapore.
Founder and chief executive Alice Liu said the company raised the money “to fundamentally change how money moves across borders.” Its previous round, a $16.5 million pre Series A, closed in June 2023.
Zypto take: Capital is landing on the acceptance side now, on terminals and settlement rather than order books. That’s the side where a business decides whether crypto is a payment option or an experiment.
Zypto Pay already runs that side, online and in person, with 0% merchant side processing fees and settlement in fiat or crypto.
Stellar clears 211 transactions a second
Source: CryptoSlate
Stellar activated Protocol 28 on September 17, and the network separately recorded a sustained 211 transactions per second across 100 consecutive blocks, a record. That throughput came from the gradual rollout of parallel transaction set downloading rather than from the upgrade itself.
Protocol 28 is the kind of maintenance that matters later. CAP-85 lets multiple smart contract instances upgrade at once through a shared executable reference, which narrows the window during a security fix when some contracts are running new code and others are still on the old.
CAP-86 adds sparse map functions so stored data can migrate progressively, and CAP-83 lets validators move through consensus stages without waiting on a complete transaction set. The activity underneath: roughly $884 million of stablecoin supply, about $294 million of DeFi value locked, and a tokenized real world asset market cap near $3.3 billion, third largest of any chain and up $149.4 million over 30 days.
Zypto take: A settlement network’s speed record is only interesting because of what is riding on it, and on Stellar that’s increasingly dollars headed somewhere specific.
USDC on Stellar is what becomes physical cash at a participating MoneyGram location through USDC to Cash, and Stellar is the network that route runs on.
A self custody money app launches in 150 countries
Source: Cointelegraph
Tools for Humanity, the company co-founded by Sam Altman and Alex Blania, launched a self custodial financial app called World Money, available in more than 150 countries with features varying by location.
It sends stablecoin payments to a username, buys and sells digital assets through integrated exchanges, pays rewards on holdings through a Vault feature, and opens mini apps including Kalshi, Credit and Morpho. A Stripe partnership lets US users fund accounts and buy stablecoins with Apple Pay.
The company has split its two jobs across two apps, with World ID handling verification and World Money handling the financial side. Its original app launched in May 2023, World App 3.0 followed in October 2024, and virtual bank account pilots began in November 2025.
Zypto take: The shape is the story. Self custody, stablecoins and a way to use them in the real world are arriving as one product rather than three, because that’s what people want once they hold something.
Zypto App is built exactly that way, with keys on your own device across 20+ blockchains and cards, bill payments and mobile top ups in the same place. Download Zypto App.
A ratings giant buys a smart contract auditor
Source: CoinDesk
S&P Global agreed to acquire OpenZeppelin, the smart contract security firm founded in 2015. Terms were not disclosed and the deal is subject to closing conditions. Co-founder and chief executive Demian Brener will keep running OpenZeppelin as a separate unit.
The numbers explain the interest. Contracts built on OpenZeppelin’s open source library have carried $37 trillion in cumulative transfers, and the firm has run more than 900 security engagements, finding over 10,000 vulnerabilities before they reached production.
S&P said the deal “complements S&P Global’s risk assessment and ecosystem development capabilities in digital asset markets.” It follows the ratings group leading a strategic investment that extended crypto data firm Kaiko’s Series B to $110 million earlier this month.
Zypto take: A credit ratings company buying an auditor tells you what institutions now treat as a risk worth pricing. Code is being assessed the way a balance sheet is.
Businesses asking that same question about their own holdings is why Zypto’s custody services carry SOC 2 Type I and II, ISO 27001:2013 and CCSS Level 3.
Key Takeaways
- Acceptance is where the money is going. A point of sale company raising $25 million says more about everyday adoption than a listing does.
- A throughput record only matters once something is riding on it. On Stellar that’s stablecoin supply and $3.3 billion of tokenized real world assets.
- Holding your own keys and using the value in daily life are converging into one product, because splitting them never made sense to the person doing both.
- When a ratings agency buys an auditor, code risk has become financial risk, and it gets priced like everything else that reached that point.
