Why Verda Bets on Brand and Owning the Customer in Emerging-Market Stablecoins

Portfolio and deployment

Alex Witt says 80% of the money goes to post-revenue companies and 20% to pre-seed bets. Portfolio companies include Mural Pay, Lumx and El Dorado, where Verda joined the last round alongside Paradigm and Coinbase Ventures. In Africa, it invested in Yellow Card through secondaries.

Witt says Verda Ventures has a deployment period of three and a half to four years and is a year and a half through it. Some of the remaining capital will go to doubling down on winners such as Alfred Pay and Lumx.

Customer and brand as moat

Alex Witt says Verda looks for companies that own the customer or client relationship, which she calls extremely sticky. With a brand, she says, a company becomes the default choice. She argues that with Claude and AI, an MVP can be built with relatively little effort, so the product is no longer the hardest part.

The FX opportunity

Witt calls FX the largest market by volume, at tens of trillions of dollars daily, and says it is still extremely inefficient. She expects breakthroughs in on-chain FX efficiency within twenty four months, and Verda's bet is that tokenized non-USD currencies will interact directly with USDT in the next twelve to twenty four months.

She predicts the most explosive stablecoin adoption growth over the next twelve to eighteen months in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia. She also says there is too much money chasing highly bid up opportunities.

Background and tools

Alex Witt says she joined Celo pre-testnet in 2019 as one of the first dozen people building it. She also runs Stablescape, which she says tracks over 3,500 stablecoin companies in real time and is free and open source.