Payy Network Raises $6M Seed to Build a Stablecoin Network with Privacy by Default

Money on-chain has a funny habit. It talks too much. Every transfer, every balance, every move laid bare like a confession nobody asked for. Transparency gets sold as virtue, but in practice it turns strategy into spectacle. So Sid Gandhi and Calum Moore studied the noise and built something quieter. Not louder tech. Smarter restraint.

Payy Network, the New York-based privacy-first stablecoin Layer 2, just pulled in $6M in seed funding, led by FirstMark Capital, with Robot Ventures and DBA Crypto stepping in like they have seen this movie before and know how it ends. Total funding now sits at $8M, stacking on top of a $2M pre-seed when this whole thing was still wearing its Polybase name tag.

And the numbers whisper before they shout. Over 100,000 users. Around 120 countries. Roughly $130M in annualized transaction volume moving through a system built on a simple idea that somehow everyone else skipped. If stablecoins are going to power global payments, maybe broadcasting every transaction to the world is not the selling point.

Payy does not just process payments, it lets them breathe. A non-custodial wallet. A card that spends USDC like it is native currency. Zero-knowledge proofs doing the quiet work in the background, keeping transaction details private without turning compliance into a guessing game. Privacy without paranoia. Compliance without compromise.

FirstMark Capital leading this round tells you exactly how this is being framed internally. This is not a crypto experiment. It is infrastructure. The kind that institutions can actually use without explaining to their boards why competitors can see their entire transaction history.

Sid Gandhi brings the Apple-honed instinct for privacy. Calum Moore brings the systems mindset to make it scale. Together, they pivoted from a Web3 database into something a lot more dangerous. A payment network that understands discretion is not a feature, it is the product.

The takeaway writes itself if you are paying attention. The winners in stablecoins will not just be faster or cheaper. They will be the ones that understand how money behaves when grown-ups are in the room.