Weekly Newsletter,
KlarnaUSD: upgrading payments
Klarna’s move onchain highlights how blockchain can transform instalment payments, underwriting, and real-time settlement.
Most corporate stablecoin announcements feel pretty incremental at this point. Klarna’s recent one is however more interesting to take a closer look at. With 114 million users and a global footprint, Klarna is the first consumer payments giant to issue a stablecoin designed for everyday spending. It’s launching on Tempo, the payments-focused blockchain being built by Stripe.
Why does it matter? Klarna’s "Buy Now Pay Layer" (BNPL) business model is built on instalment payments and real-time underwriting. Today, those flows ride on traditional legacy rails and all that that entails. Slow settlement, high cross-border fees, and fragmented liquidity across markets. Bringing this logic onchain changes the product in ways traditional infrastructure simply cannot support.
Onchain settlement makes BNPL instantly global. But more importantly, it unlocks programmability. A BNPL loan denominated in a stablecoin can be paid back continuously rather than in fixed chunks, users could route yield from onchain savings products directly into instalments, and Klarna’s massive book of receivables could eventually interface with onchain credit protocols. Tempo also adds an additional layer: Stripe is designing it for AI-native commerce and KlarnaUSD will be the first consumer stablecoin to operate in that environment. It is not hard to imagine AI agents handling subscription management, pay-per-use digital services, or usage-based financing, all denominated in KlarnaUSD.
This is a serious example where KlarnaUSD shows how stablecoins can upgrade core payment products like BNPL, cross-border settlement, and consumer checkout. Not by reinventing them wholesale, but by making their underlying rails faster, cheaper, and programmable.
Also this week
- Polymarket tops US App Store after CFTC approval
- Binance names Co-Founder Yi He as Co-CEO of crypto exchange
- Paul Atkins: Innovation Exemption for Crypto Firms Coming in January
- Kalshi and Polymarket post strongest months yet with nearly $10 billion in combined November volume
- Kalshi becomes CNN's official partner, integrating prediction market data into programming
- Fusaka rollout kicks off Ethereum’s new twice-a-year hard-fork schedule
Relevant financial updates
- Ostium*, offers on-chain perpetual swaps tied to stocks, commodities, indices and FX, pitching self-custody and auditable market rules as a crypto-native alternative to broker-run contracts for difference (CFDs). The protocol received funding from LocalGlobe, Susquehanna International Group (SIG), Crucible Capital, GSR
- Fin* (fka. TipLink), is a company that builds payment infrastructure focused on high‑value payments and cryptocurrency-to-bank rails. Fin raised $17mln in a Series A funding round led by Pantera, with participation from Sequoia, Samsung Next and others
- Nexton is a liquid staking platform on the TON blockchain. It allows users to stake TON to any liquid staking protocols. They have raised a strategic round of $4mln, anchored by a new investment from Danal Pay, one of Korea's largest regulated payment companies with participation from Amber Group and TON Foundation among others
- Rayls, offering an EVM-compatible platform designed for financial institutions and supports asset tokenisation, cross-border and intra-institutional transactions, had its TGE and is currently trading at a $192mln FDV
- Kalshi*, a prediction market platform, that enables users to buy and sell binary event contracts on real-world outcomes, raised a Series E funding round of $1 billion at an $11B valuation. The round was led by Paradigm, with participation from Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Meritech Capital, IVP, ARK Invest, Anthos Capital, CapitalG, and Y Combinator
- Kraken acquired Backed Finance*, an asset tokenization platform driving the issuance of xStocks
- Antithesis, a platform that uses deterministc simulation testing, running large-scale, production-like simulations to surface the kinds of edge cases that can blow in live networks, raised a $105 million Series A led by Jane Street
- Bitstack, France’s leading Bitcoin savings application, announced a $15 million Series A funding round led by 13books Capital, with participation from existing investors AG2R LA MONDIALE, Plug and Play Ventures, Serena, Stillmark and Y Combinator.
- Axis*, a quantitative yield protocol aiming to bring institutional trading strategies onchain, has raised $5 million in a private funding round led by Galaxy Ventures with participation from OKX Ventures, CMT Digital, FalconX, GSR, Maven 11, CMS Holdings
*Underlying TBV portfolio position | Prices as per 05/12
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