OpenPayd has gone live on the Circle Payments Network (CPN), letting its business clients make cross-border payments that settle in stablecoins while both ends of the transaction deal only in fiat. The London-based e-money institution, founded in 2018, announced the integration on August 25, 2026, with two corridors already running: euros to Brazilian reais and pounds sterling to Mexican pesos.
CPN is a coordination layer that connects financial institutions to orchestrate cross-border payments settled in regulated stablecoins, USDC and EURC. OpenPayd’s clients send and receive ordinary currencies. The token leg sits between the sending and receiving sides, so the paying business never holds crypto-assets or runs distributed ledger infrastructure of its own.
“Clients can now access the speed and efficiency of stablecoin infrastructure while continuing to make global payments in the fiat currencies they already use,” said Michael Treacy, OpenPayd’s director of business development. Irfan Ganchi, Circle’s senior vice president of product management for payments, said the integration “extends cross-border payment capabilities to businesses through a single API connection.”
Stablecoins stand in for prefunded correspondent accounts
A conventional cross-border payment runs through correspondent banks. The sending bank credits an account held with a correspondent, which credits another institution in turn, until the funds reach the beneficiary’s bank. Each link in the chain needs money parked in advance in the destination currency, where it sits idle until used.
Both corridors run from Europe to Latin America. The paying business pays in its home currency, the beneficiary receives in theirs, and neither end holds a token. On the receiving side, the setup needs an institution authorized to pay reais or pesos into a local account. That requirement sets the pace for new corridors, because each one needs a licensed partner, country by country.
Circle’s network is growing fast from a small base
Circle’s second-quarter 2026 results, published on August 5, give a sense of CPN’s scale. The network reached $14.7 billion in annualized transaction volume for the trailing 30 days as of the end of the quarter, up 76% from the previous quarter. It had 175 financial institutions enrolled, up 29% over the same period.
Those figures are still modest next to corporate cross-border flows, and the quarterly growth is measured against a recent base. Circle announced the network on April 21, 2025, and released it in limited form the following month. Annualizing a 30-day window rather than the full quarter also gives the final weeks outsized weight.
OpenPayd works through four licensed entities
OpenPayd says it serves more than 1,200 businesses and processes more than $280 billion a year. Its clients include crypto-market players such as eToro, Kraken, OKX, and B2C2. It operates through four regulated entities.
- SettleGo Solutions Limited, an e-money institution authorized by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority.
- OpenPayd Financial Services Malta Limited, a financial institution regulated by the Malta Financial Services Authority (MFSA).
- OP Digital Services Limited, a VFA (virtual financial assets) service provider authorized in Malta.
- OpenPayd Canada Inc., a money services business registered with FINTRAC, Canada’s financial intelligence unit.
| Feature | Correspondent chain | Stablecoin coordination network |
|---|---|---|
| Liquidity | funds prefunded in each destination currency | liquidity drawn at the time of the transaction |
| Availability | business-day settlement windows | token transfers around the clock |
| Number of intermediaries | varies by corridor, often several banks | one institution at each end, plus the network |
| What the business sees | a foreign currency transfer | a foreign currency transfer, with the token leg kept internal |
Neither company disclosed pricing for the two corridors, guaranteed delivery times, or per-transaction limits. The release says payments settle “near-instantly” and “in seconds.” Those terms describe the token transfer, not necessarily when the final beneficiary can use the funds.
A direct stablecoin transfer shows why the design matters. It would require every business to have a wallet, a key custody policy, and an accounting treatment for the digital asset it holds. The coordination network shifts those obligations to member institutions, which carry them under their own licenses and for their own account. The client business keeps its books in ordinary currency.
That places the announcement in a specific family of setups. The token stays inside the chain, behind an interface denominated in fiat, and what the business buys is a faster time to funds rather than a ledger technology. The trade-off is the intermediary’s position: it keeps control of both conversions and of the FX spreads it applies.