Cross-Border Payments

38/1353 → 7/977; -2.09 percentage points of formation share.

What's notable here is not the payments rail itself but who is on the other end of it: nearly every company in this batch, from Coba to Cleva to Wallbit to Polar to Kontigo, is really solving the same problem for the same person, a Latin American or African knowledge worker who earns dollars from a US employer or client and needs to hold and spend that money without losing it to local currency swings. That convergence is a sign the category has narrowed from generic "cross-border payments" infrastructure into something closer to dollar-denominated banking for remote labor, with USD accounts, debit cards, and USDC rails as the shared toolkit rather than the differentiator. The formation's growth has cooled to 0.26x even as the closely related Neobank category is accelerating at 4.31x, which suggests capital and founders are migrating up a layer, building the full banking relationship on top of the payment rail rather than starting new payment rails from scratch. Kontigo's claim of $540k in deposits and 10,000 active users just 20 days after launching its peer-to-peer onramp shows there is real, fast-moving demand for this once the account exists, it is the rails themselves that are no longer the interesting part to build. This shift only became viable at this scale after USDC and stablecoin infrastructure matured enough post-2023 for companies like Kontigo to treat dollar settlement as a commodity layer rather than a core engineering problem, freeing them to compete on the banking experience for remote workers instead.

No comparable outside activity is connected yet.

These share a word with “Cross-Border Payments” but are tracked as separate categories. The real overlap below is the actual share of Cross-Border Payments’s companies also found in that category — not a guess.