Stabledash Live · · 22 min
Stablecoin Banking for Businesses on the Frontier and Bill Pay on Solana
With 
Stepan Simkin, Altitude
Key takeaways
Stepan Simkin says Squads multisig secures about $10 billion in value on Solana, including about $2 billion in stablecoins.
Altitude layers payments, yield and cards with bill pay, accounting and invoicing, and plans an agentic automation layer on top.
Simkin says the core challenge now is making self-custody feel custodial, while ACH pull from a stablecoin balance remains an unsolved problem.
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Summary
Stepan Simkin says Altitude, built out of Squads, aims to give frontier businesses a single self-custodial stablecoin account that replaces a traditional bank.
Stepan Simkin, who leads Squads and Altitude, says the Squads multisig secures about $10 billion in value on Solana depending on crypto prices, with about $2 billion of that in stablecoins. Altitude is his company's attempt to let businesses run entirely on stablecoin rails through one self-custodial account, including a bill pay feature that pays vendors from a stablecoin treasury via ACH, wire, SEPA or stablecoins.
From multisig to bank account
Simkin says Squads never had a bank account and always used stablecoins as its default treasury. Altitude grew out of that habit. He describes three layers: a core of payments, yield and cards; workflows such as bill pay, accounting and invoicing; and a planned automation layer he calls the agentic layer.
He says Circle once allowed third-party payouts from stablecoin to fiat, then dropped the feature. Bridge, which he met before the Stripe acquisition, was one of the first to offer it again, which he says let customers hold a stablecoin treasury in a self-custodial account and pay others.
“Self custody is just it's it's a massive unlock. Right? Allows us to go global from day one and then, you know, selectively figure out where we want to be connected to Fiat rails, right, and and facilitate that connectivity.”
Stepan SimkinOwning the stack
Simkin calls owning most of the stack one of the company's biggest advantages: built on Solana, Altitude owns the protocol, API and product layers, which he links to agent workflows.
Payroll and corridors
The hard problem, he says, is ACH pull from a stablecoin balance, needed by US companies that want to run payroll and connect tools such as Deel or Gusto. He praises Deel for building a global contractor platform but says it and Rippling stay focused on specific geographies, and he wants a stablecoin-first payroll platform to appear. He sees demand for Singapore dollar and UAE dirham payouts, calls the US, Europe and UK well covered, and expects stablecoin settlement to happen in the middle of payment flows.
Businesses on the frontier
Altitude targets businesses in crypto, AI, quantum, biotech and defense. Simkin says crypto companies typically juggle four separate accounts that Altitude combines, and that 65 to 70 percent of its focus is on established crypto firms holding stablecoin balance sheets. He also reports unexpected demand from merchants selling physical goods.
Simkin's argument rests on self-custody. He says the work now is making it indistinguishable from a traditional bank account in user experience, and that it lets Altitude go global from day one and connect to fiat rails selectively.
Bridge, Circle, Gusto, and Squads come up most.
- People
- Stepan Simkin
- Drew Rogers
- Zach Fowler
- Companies
- Altitude
- Bridge
- Circle
- Gusto
- Squads
- Rippling
- Rise
- Stripe
- Deel
- Dfns
