Neo · · 27 min
HEVN Explained: Moving Money for the Commodity Traders Banks Put on Hold
With 
Peter Volnov
Key takeaways
HEVN, the stablecoin settlement platform co-founded by Peter Volnov, got into Y Combinator when it was one month old.
Peter Volnov says banks delay traders who pay into 20 different countries, and that million dollar payments to new counterparties stall on compliance attention, not liquidity.
HEVN asks for invoices, contracts and logistics documents above set limits, and Volnov says the goal is to make compliance faster and more predictable.
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0:00Hosts open the show and welcome Peter Volnov1 of 10
Summary
Peter Volnov says banks put cross-border traders on hold, and HEVN's answer is compliance that is faster and more predictable, not easier.
HEVN, a global business operating system and stablecoin settlement platform for companies that trade across borders, got into Y Combinator at one month old. Co-founder and CEO Peter Volnov says the company serves traders and resellers whom traditional banks routinely put on hold.
From HOT Labs to HEVN
Peter Volnov and his cofounders exited HOT Labs earlier this year. Their new company, HEVN, offers accounts through sponsor banks in the US, Europe, the UAE, LatAm and Puerto Rico.
“So the goal is here is not to make compliance easier. I think the goal here is to make it faster and more predictable.”
Peter VolnovWhy banks hold traders
Peter Volnov says a bank's ideal customer has a limited number of counterparties that are verified once and are "very predictable every month." A trader who sends money to 20 different countries through many entities gets the opposite: delays and random holds. Traders cannot tell a supplier that a payment has been sitting in their bank for two weeks, he says.
HEVN targets traders and resellers rather than manufacturers. According to Volnov, it offers local bank accounts with cryptocurrency rails in the UAE, supports Singaporean rails for paying offshore, and gets better forex rates in many currencies by using different liquidity providers. Dakota is one of its providers.
Where payments get stuck
Peter Volnov says million dollar plus transactions with new counterparties currently do not work. In his view liquidity is not the problem. These payments need more attention from compliance teams, and when crypto sits in the middle, a bank sees a company off-ramping a million dollars without the full trail of the transaction. For now HEVN focuses on small businesses with volume below $500,000.
Documents and AI agents
HEVN declines transactions above set limits that lack the full story: invoices, contracts and logistics certificates. Looking ahead, Peter Volnov expects systems where compliance teams share information instantly, document requests go out instantly, and AI agents respond on the company's side.
Volnov presents HEVN as a bet that the bottleneck in cross-border trade is the speed of compliance, not access to money. On his account, the fix is complete paperwork collected up front and compliance teams that can share information, so payments arrive on a predictable schedule.
Roots, Dakota, Y Combinator, and Starlink come up most.
- People
- Peter Volnov
- Companies
- Roots
- Dakota
- Y Combinator
- Starlink
- HotLabs
- Breeze
- HEVN
- Dfns
- SpaceX
