Moving Money at the Speed of the Internet

A few years ago when we sketched out the very first Portal architecture, the idea was simple, even obvious, once you said it aloud:

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If information can cross the globe in milliseconds, why can’t money?

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Back then we were convinced that open-source blockchains would eventually scale to billions of users, but we also saw how raw the experience was with seed phrases nobody could remember, high transaction fees, and throughput that buckled the moment anything fun happened onchain. Our plan was to sand down those sharp edges and let developers focus on what matters: building products people actually want to use.

Stablecoins: the Trojan horse for better money

Very quickly, we fell in love with stablecoins and payments. Raj spent years at Visa watching wires crawl through mainframes while colleagues debated cut-off times and correspondent banking fees. The first time we sent a stablecoin across the world for mere pennies in a matter of seconds, it felt like clicking “Send” on an email circa 1996, you just knew the world would never be the same. 

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Today, with over $200 billion in circulating supply and $1+ trillion dollars of annual volume, stablecoins are quickly expanding the use cases from crypto native to everyday users. At Portal, we saw an uptick in builders from many markets such as Mexico, Nigeria, Argentina, Portugal, Chile, South Africa, and Indonesia look to our platform to build stablecoin first use cases like USD banking, payroll, freelancer business accounts, remittances, and other “boring” stablecoin use cases.

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It became pretty clear that stablecoins and “boring” use cases will be the driving force to scale blockchains to billions of users.

A spark with the Monad Foundation

It started off as a few quick brainstorm sessions with the Monad Foundation team to swap notes on the rapid evolution of the stablecoin landscape. Those “quick brainstorms” turned into a series of discussions, then shared docs, and finally an obvious question: “Why don’t we do this together?”

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Monad is the end-game architecture we’d been waiting for:

• EVM-compatible without the bloat – keep the network effects, lose the technical debt.
  
• Order-of-magnitude throughput – so the next viral app doesn’t melt the chain.
  
• Predictable, low fees – making onchain transactions (especially across emerging-market) actually viable.
  
  

In short, Monad solves the pain points our customers keep running into: fragmented liquidity, congestion, sticker-shock gas costs while leaving room for us to keep pushing the envelope on the developer experience.

What changes (and what doesn’t)

• Portal is becoming a Monad Foundation company. It will continue operating as an independent entity, with Parsa, Rami, and David at the helm, as CEO, COO, and CTO, respectively.
  
• Raj is stepping in as Head of Payments & Stablecoins at the Monad Foundation, where he’ll drive stablecoin ecosystem adoption by enabling issuers, payment platforms, financial institutions, and fintechs build, deploy, and accelerate their stablecoin based products.
  
• Portal’s platform stays neutral. Developers will still be able to integrate with any chain they choose; Portal’s job is to continue to push the envelope on developer experience and abstract away blockchain complexity from the user.
  
• Portal stays building. Expect more modules and everything a bank, fintech, or financial institution needs to launch internet-native money products.

Gratitude

To our investors who backed a “crazy” idea before stablecoins were cool, to the early customers who shipped a product on v0.1 of our API, and to every teammate who debugged prod into the late nights — thank you. You made this next chapter possible.

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The mission hasn’t changed: to move money at the speed of the internet and make it as trivial as sending an email. Joining forces with the Monad Foundation lets us run toward that future faster than we ever could alone, and we couldn’t be more excited for what comes next.