Moving money globally is still fragmented and full of friction, especially when it comes to connecting traditional bank accounts to the blockchain, while New York-based startup Fund is stepping in to rewrite the plumbing.
World Fund recently announced a $72 million Series A funding round to scale its global payments infrastructure.
Now Fund has power the deposits as well as withdrawals and settlement flows. the biggest internet native capital markets in the world.
We're joining us live here at the New York Stock Exchange to discuss how fun is removing the technological barriers of value exchange.
Alex Fine, co-founder and CEO of Fun.
Alex, great to have you here.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you.
I appreciate you having me.
Well, with a name like Fun, tell us exactly what you do.
It's it's a good question.
We are the highest converting way to move money on a blockchain.
At our core, that is our underlying primitive.
Yes, and of course when it comes to what's happening in the blockchain infrastructure, this divergence betweenRDF and Dei has been unfolding in 2026.
So what do you plan to do?
Well, I think what's beautiful is it's, there's a divergence occurring, but really we think it's going to where crypto should be, where blockchains are really just a better backend for moving money.
And they're a better backend for financial applications that want to go global, that want to cut costs, that want to have more efficiency, that wanna have more liquidity.
And so, we're really bullish on traditional companies going on chain.
And leveraging blockchains in the back end and that's really our focus like those types of businesses and Alex, we're here at the halfway point of 2026 and we are looking at quite the downturn when it comes to the crypto market here and as you mentioned, we are focusing on the infrastructure when it comes to the blockchain.
So since you just did your Series A funding, what do you plan to do moving forward?
Yeah, I mean, crypto's going down and crypto's definitely been hit hard, but I think it's important to separate crypto from blockchains and, and blockchains are really just a database.
They're like AWS or Azure or Google Cloud, like it's just a different back end.
And we're seeing the adoption of stablecoins, tokenized equities, global payments, cross-border remittances.
Those are not down at all.
Those are continuing to be up and to the right.
And so in terms of where we're going and what we're really focused on, it's, it's those verticals and it's those use cases.
Yes, so you mentioned.
Stablecoins as well as RWAs and that is something that even the exchanges have been focusing on and they're entrenched in right now.
So give us an understanding of the technology required, especially when we're talking about 24/7, 365 markets.
Yeah, I mean, RWAs are kind of a buzzword, uh, but if you really think about it, blockchains are a database for value.
Value manifests in all kinds of ways, and so tokenizing equities is a great example of that in terms of like what's required technically, you can think of tokenizing a stock really analogous to tokenizing a dollar.
Where you have some issuer for dollars, it's circle, and they say, hey, let's take this $1 let's put it on a blockchain and we'll have a $1 in an account.
They're doing the same thing with equities where they're saying, hey, let's take Apple stock, Nvidia stock.
Someone is gonna hold it and we'll, we'll tokenize it and put it on a blockchain.
And what's powerful is when you do that, you give access to those assets to people.
Who wouldn't otherwise have access around the world.
And so you have a lot of economies where it's very difficult to access Western markets that really want to access Western markets.
A lot of people around the world who want to own dollars, who want to buy Nvidia stock, who want to participate in American capitalism, and this is the first time ever anyone from around the world can actually participate in Western markets.
That's really cool.
Yeah, because when you think about use cases for stable coins as well as RDBAs here in the US, you might think why, but when we're talking about areas in the world, especially developing economies where it's not easy to access the capital markets here in the US, then that does make sense.
But when it comes to funds, what is your vision moving forward for the organization, say 5 years from now?
Yeah, I mean, it starts with our vision for the world.
We, we really believe that we're going to have a large amount of value on blockchains.
We believe tokenized assets are gonna be really important to live on blockchains.
So what is the, what, what is, what is our vision?
We want to serve that future and we want to be the conduit, the front door for accessing that future, for accessing assets that live on blockchains, which we believe is going to be the future of all value of all assets.
So being kind of the, the Interface for the future of not only money but value as a whole.
And finally, before I let you go, I do want to ask you about regulation here in the US, in particular in the space that you're in.
So when we're talking about stable coins, of course the regulatory landscape looks different overseas.
So what do you think needs to happen here in the US?
I think the most important thing is clarity.
Now ironic that the act is actually called the Clarity Act, but Having more clear guidelines for what teams are allowed to do, what teams are not allowed to do, is very helpful for the founders who want to abide by American regulation and US rules and want to be based here in the United States, but really just need a very clear set of frameworks in order to do so.
Well, Alex, it was great having you here at the New York Stock Exchange today.
Thank you so much for joining us and thank you so much for sharing your perspective.
Thanks.
Appreciate it.
