HIFI Builds the Operating Layer for Programmable Money

Money can now cross a blockchain in seconds and still spend days trapped in the machinery around it. A stablecoin transfer may settle continuously, but the bank account, compliance review, wallet, card payout, currency conversion, and reconciliation process often live in separate systems.

HIFI is building the layer that makes those systems behave like one product.

Founded in New York in 2022 by CEO Zach Walsh and COO Mohamed "Mo" Afifi, HIFI provides developer infrastructure for moving and programming money across stablecoins and bank rails. Its API covers the steps around a transaction, from accepting funds and verifying counterparties to routing value, applying controls, and settling into a bank account, wallet, card, or tokenized asset.

The company recently raised a $37M Series A led by Left Lane Capital. HIFI plans to use the capital for additional licenses, team growth, international expansion, cards, and tokenized capital-markets products.

The financing is important, but the more useful signal is that HIFI is already operating in production. The company reports more than $7 billion in annual processing volume, while Circle and DTCC provide independent evidence that its infrastructure is moving money and participating in live tokenized-asset workflows.

About HIFI

HIFI is infrastructure for developers building financial products. Its customers include fintechs, marketplaces, exchanges, and financial institutions that need to connect digital dollars with bank accounts, local payment rails, cards, wallets, and blockchain networks.

The product is organized around a simple idea: money should be programmable after it enters a system, not merely transferable.

HIFI lets teams accept deposits from banks, cards, and wallets; define approvals, limits, and routing rules; convert between fiat currencies and stablecoins; send payouts through local and cross-border rails; and issue or redeem tokenized cash and real-world assets.

That range matters because a fast settlement rail does not create a complete financial product. A global payroll app still needs identity checks, banking endpoints, foreign-exchange handling, transaction monitoring, reconciliation, and a way to manage exceptions. A marketplace needs split routing and treasury controls. An institutional trade needs privacy, custody, liquidity, and audit-ready records.

HIFI's value proposition is to place those functions behind one integration.

The Problem Behind Programmable Money

Stablecoins turned dollars into software objects that can move continuously. The surrounding financial stack did not become software at the same speed.

Developers still have to connect wallets, banks, payment processors, local payout networks, compliance vendors, custody systems, and blockchain protocols. Each new market can introduce another bank relationship, regulatory regime, currency, settlement schedule, and failure mode.

That fragmentation becomes a product constraint. A customer does not care which provider caused a transfer to stall. The application owning the user experience inherits the problem.

HIFI is trying to absorb that complexity below the application layer. Its platform normalizes inflows, applies programmatic controls, and routes outflows across supported banks, cards, wallets, stablecoins, and tokenized markets. Compliance functions such as KYC, KYB, sanctions screening, and monitoring run inside the transaction lifecycle rather than as an external checklist.

The promise is not that every rail becomes identical. It is that developers can operate them through a consistent control plane.

Production Evidence Across Payments and Markets

HIFI says it now processes more than $7 billion per year. The company also reports that usage among existing customers grew more than fourfold during the six months before its Series A, and that companies building on HIFI had onboarded more than 10,000 businesses and 200,000 individuals.

Those figures are company-reported, but partner evidence helps show what sits underneath them.

Circle's HIFI case study reported that, as of March 2026, HIFI had moved more than $100 million through Circle Payments Network and more than $500 million in USDC across remittances, payroll, marketplace payouts, and business-to-business cross-border payments. Circle also reported hundreds of thousands of monthly transactions across more than 150 countries.

HIFI's own Dapper Labs case study says the company processes more than 100,000 transactions a day for Dapper's digital-collectibles marketplaces. That relationship illustrates the invisible-infrastructure thesis: a fan buys a collectible while HIFI handles stablecoin settlement and the movement between onchain and fiat systems underneath.

The company is also moving beyond payments. In July 2026, DTCC named HIFI among more than 30 firms that participated in production trades involving DTC-tokenized assets. The workflows included Treasury and repo delivery-versus-payment, securities lending, collateral, equity transactions, and margin activity.

HIFI did not run that market alone. Its inclusion matters because it places the company inside a real institutional operating environment, not a tokenization demonstration with no production counterparties.

From Payment API to Money Control Plane

HIFI's product surface is widening in three directions.

The first is geographic coverage. The platform connects stablecoins with domestic and cross-border rails such as ACH, RTP, Fedwire, SWIFT, SEPA, PIX, SPEI, and FPS. Circle says its network helped HIFI open routes in markets including Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, and Hong Kong without rebuilding each connection from scratch.

The second is how money exits a system. HIFI supports bank payouts and wallets, and it now combines stablecoin settlement with Visa Direct for push-to-card transfers. That lets a platform move value from a USDC balance to an eligible card without requiring the recipient to manage a crypto offramp.

The third is institutional finance. HIFI is extending the same orchestration model toward onchain repo, tokenized funds, Treasury operations, private settlement, and the cash leg of transactions on networks such as Canton.

Across all three, the strategic asset is not a single payment method. It is the policy and execution layer that decides what capital can do, where it can go, and which checks must pass before it moves.

Leadership and Operating Philosophy

Walsh and Afifi started HIFI in New York in 2022. The company says its team includes builders with experience at Uber Payments, Mastercard, Visa, Block, Google, and Stanford Blockchain Research, and that it is built across New York City and Abu Dhabi.

Its public operating principles fit the infrastructure challenge. HIFI asks employees to think in systems, write decisions down, treat security and compliance as first-class work, learn in production, and design for long-term value.

Those ideas are easy to print on a careers page. They become meaningful only when the product has to handle irreversible transfers, regulatory exceptions, and settlement across systems that do not share the same clock.

The Series A adds pressure as well as capacity. Left Lane Capital led the round, Matt Miller joined the board, and Antler says Tether also participated. HIFI now has to expand licensing and product coverage without turning one integration into a collection of loosely connected features.

Why HIFI's Hiring Matters

HIFI says it is hiring across engineering, compliance, and go-to-market. The current careers page is the reliable place to review active roles because individual openings change.

The mix of functions is a market signal. Stablecoin infrastructure does not scale on software alone. Every new corridor and product adds questions about licenses, banking relationships, transaction review, custody, security, operational support, and customer implementation.

Engineering hiring suggests a larger control surface. Compliance hiring suggests the company expects more regulated volume and more edge cases. Go-to-market hiring suggests HIFI is moving from proving the infrastructure works to making it a default choice for teams building on programmable money.

That combination is harder than adding one more payment rail. It is also where a durable infrastructure company can separate from an API wrapper.

Why HIFI Matters Now

Stablecoins have already shown that value can move at internet speed. The next competition is over everything required to make that speed usable inside a serious financial product.

HIFI is betting that developers do not want to become payments companies, compliance operations, and liquidity coordinators just to launch an application. They want one programmable layer that connects the old financial system with the new one and exposes enough control to build something differentiated above it.

The company still has to prove that its platform can preserve reliability as it adds licenses, countries, cards, custody, and capital-markets workflows. Institutional infrastructure is judged less by the best-case demo than by the exception at 2 a.m., the audit trail six months later, and the transfer that must not move.

That is why HIFI is worth watching. It is not merely making stablecoins easier to send. It is trying to make programmable money behave like dependable infrastructure.