Picture this: you finish a design gig for a client in Singapore, send an invoice at 9 p.m. your time, and before you’ve even closed your laptop the money is already sitting in your wallet. No bank delays. No 5% forex fees. No awkward “please approve my PayPal” dance. That future just got $5 million closer to reality.
A little-known startup called AllScale quietly announced a seed round this week that has the crypto payment crowd buzzing. Five million dollars, led by YZi Labs, to build what they’re calling the world’s first self-custody stablecoin neobank. And honestly? The more I dig into it, the more I think this could be one of those quiet projects that actually moves the needle for real-world crypto adoption.
The Round Itself Says a Lot
The lead investor, YZi Labs, dropped the money through their EASY Residency Season 2 program—basically their version of a startup accelerator on steroids. They were joined by Informed Ventures and Generative Ventures, plus a handful of heavy-hitting angels. The fact that this round happened in late 2025, when most VCs are still licking wounds from the last cycle, tells you the traction must be pretty serious.
YZi didn’t mince words in their announcement: “early indicators of strong product-market fit, supported by organic traction and solid retention metrics.” Translation? People are actually using this thing and sticking around.
What Exactly Is AllScale Trying to Build?
Think of it as the love child of Revolut and MetaMask—but one that never touches your funds.
Most “crypto banks” or neobanks today are custodial. You send them USDC, they hold the private keys, and you pray they don’t get hacked or go bankrupt. AllScale flips the script: you keep full control of your keys, yet the experience feels like a normal banking app.
How do they pull that off without scaring off normal humans? Three big technical bets:
- Passkey-based wallets – no more 12-word seed phrases you’ll inevitably lose
- Account abstraction – making smart-contract wallets behave like regular accounts
- Paymaster sponsorship – someone else (usually the platform) pays your gas fees so transactions feel free
Add LLM-powered financial assistants that can read invoices, suggest splits, or chase late payments, and suddenly you’ve got something that feels magical instead of clunky.
The Team Behind the Magic
I always look at the founding team first, because great tech is worthless without people who’ve shipped before. AllScale’s crew is legitimately stacked.
Ex-Binance, ex-OKX, ex-Kraken, ex-Block (the Square one), plus engineers who cut their teeth at Amazon and TikTok. These aren’t wide-eyed ideologues; they’re the folks who already built pieces of the infrastructure most of us use daily.
When people with that kind of resume decide to go all-in on non-custodial infrastructure, I pay attention.
“A stablecoin-powered non-custodial neobank finally gives SMBs the speed, control, and access to advanced financial products that were previously reserved for large enterprises.”
David Yin, Partner at Informed Ventures
Why Microbusinesses and Freelancers Are the Perfect First Users
Let’s be real—most Western knowledge workers still get paid through direct deposit and barely notice friction. The pain is felt hardest by:
- Freelancers in Nigeria getting dinged 8-12% to cash out PayPal
- LatAm developers waiting 5 business days for Wise transfers
- SEA content creators losing 20% to local bank conversion rates
Over 1.4 billion adults remain unbanked globally, and hundreds of millions more are “under-banked” even if they have an account. Stablecoins are already eating remittance corridors alive (just look at USDT volume on Tron), but the “last mile”—actually spending or invoicing professionally—has stayed painful.
AllScale’s bet is that if you make professional invoicing, checkout pages, and payouts as easy as Stripe, but settled instantly in stablecoins with zero custody risk, entire economies unlock.
Early Traction Hints This Isn’t Just Hype
The company is already partnered with some of Africa’s largest freelancer communities and plans to launch in Latin America next quarter. Organic growth plus partnerships usually beats paid acquisition in this space.
They’re also an official ecosystem partner of BNB Chain, which gives them cheap, fast settlement and access to OPbnb and other L2s for near-zero fees. Smart move—Solana might be sexier right now, but BNB still moves insane stablecoin volume in emerging markets.
The Bigger Picture: Is This the Missing Piece for Mass Adoption?
I’ve been in crypto long enough to have seen a hundred “PayPal killer” pitches. Most died because they solved a problem crypto natives cared about but normal people didn’t.
AllScale feels different because the target user already experiences daily pain with legacy rails. When your client pays you in USDC and it lands in seconds instead of days, the value proposition writes itself.
Perhaps the most interesting part? They’re deliberately stay non-custodial. In a world where exchanges keep getting hacked and regulators keep circling, giving users real sovereignty while preserving UX might be the only sustainable path forward.
If AllScale nails the execution—and early signs say they might—we could look back in a couple years and realize this $5 million seed was the moment stablecoins finally crossed the chasm from speculative asset to boring, everyday payment rail.
Either way, I know one thing for sure: the next time a client asks “can you accept crypto?” my answer is going to be a much happier “yes.”
