HIFI Raises $37 Million to Scale Tokenized Capital Markets
Stablecoin accounting just became a more urgent priority for institutional teams. On 24 September 2026, HIFI, a New York-based provider of API infrastructure for stablecoin payments and tokenized assets, announced a $37 million Series A round led by Left Lane Capital. The company says the capital will accelerate its tokenized capital-markets infrastructure and broaden its product suite. Combined with a recent DTCC production-trade milestone and a newly announced Visa partnership, the raise signals that the plumbing connecting traditional finance rails to digital asset settlement is maturing at a pace that accounting teams can no longer treat as a future-state problem.
What HIFI Actually Does and Why the Scale Matters
HIFI sells API infrastructure that bundles money movement, compliance workflows, and settlement into a single integration spanning both bank rails and digital assets. The company reports processing more than $7 billion in annualized volume across 87 countries. That reach positions it as a mid-layer between legacy payment networks and the emerging tokenized-asset ecosystem rather than a niche crypto-native tool.
The infrastructure stack in plain terms
At its core, HIFI abstracts the complexity of routing a payment or a securities settlement through whichever rail is most efficient, whether that is a bank wire, a stablecoin transfer, or an on-chain tokenized security. For an accounting team, this matters because each of those rails carries different recognition, measurement, and disclosure requirements. A wire transfer is straightforward. A stablecoin settlement may require the firm to assess whether the asset meets the definition of cash or a cash equivalent under ASC 230 or IAS 7. A tokenized security settlement adds another layer: is the underlying instrument recognised at fair value through profit or loss, at amortized cost, or under the equity method?
Volume and geography create audit trail demands
Processing $7 billion-plus in annualized volume across 87 jurisdictions means clients using this infrastructure are generating transaction data across multiple currencies, time zones, and regulatory regimes simultaneously. For any accounting firm auditing or preparing financials for a HIFI client, that creates a substantial data-completeness challenge. Ensuring the completeness of the population of transactions, a fundamental audit requirement, becomes technically complex when settlement may occur across on-chain and off-chain legs of the same trade.
The DTCC Connection and What It Means for Stablecoin Accounting
The Series A announcement points to HIFI's participation in DTCC's July 2026 production trades using DTC-tokenized securities, alongside BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and Nasdaq. This is not a sandbox experiment. Production trades mean real securities, real settlement finality, and real balance-sheet entries. That distinction matters enormously for accounting purposes.
Settlement finality and trade-date accounting
When a tokenized security settles on-chain within minutes rather than the traditional T+2 cycle, the accounting entry date changes. Under trade-date accounting, the asset and corresponding liability or cash entry are recognised at the point the trade is executed. But if settlement now occurs almost simultaneously, the gap between trade date and settlement date, which historically gave firms time to reconcile, compresses to near zero. Back-office and accounting systems not designed for this cadence will struggle with cutoff accuracy, particularly at period end.
USDC accounting in an institutional settlement context
If stablecoins such as USDC are the settlement medium in these tokenized-securities trades, the question of how to account for the stablecoin leg sits alongside the securities leg. The FASB's ASC 350-60, which introduced fair-value measurement for certain digital assets, does not explicitly cover stablecoins pegged to fiat. Accounting teams have generally treated fiat-pegged stablecoins as financial assets measured at amortized cost, where the peg holds, but any de-peg event or credit risk on the issuer could require reclassification. Firms participating in, or auditing entities that use, HIFI's infrastructure for stablecoin settlement need a documented position on this classification before trades begin, not after.
The Visa Partnership and the Stablecoin Payout Question
Separately, HIFI disclosed a partnership with Visa announced earlier in September 2026 to extend its stablecoin settlement platform to money transfers and card payments. The partnership is initially structured to support stablecoin-funded payouts to more than 4 billion Visa cards worldwide.
Recognition when stablecoins fund a card payout
A stablecoin-funded card payout involves at least two accounting events: the derecognition of the stablecoin on the payer's balance sheet and the recognition of either a payment expense or a liability reduction, depending on the transaction type. If the stablecoin is held at amortized cost and the payout occurs at par, no gain or loss arises. But if the stablecoin fluctuates in value between acquisition and disbursement, a realised gain or loss must be recorded. In a high-volume, multi-currency environment like HIFI's described use case, that calculation needs to be automated and auditable.
Market context: stablecoins at $295 billion
The broader stablecoin market has now exceeded $295 billion in total supply, with Tether's USDT representing approximately $183.4 billion and Circle's USDC at nearly $76 billion, according to data cited in the announcement. Visa separately reported that its stablecoin settlement volume reached a $20 billion annualized run rate, described as more than 15 times the level a year earlier. These are not marginal figures. They represent settlement volumes that, if routed through infrastructure like HIFI's, will appear on the balance sheets and income statements of institutional counterparties at scale.
For accounting firms serving institutional clients active in stablecoin settlement, understanding the stablecoin accounting implications of the CFTC and SEC tokenization push is increasingly essential context for advising on these positions.
Accounting and Audit Implications for Firms and CFOs
The HIFI raise is a useful forcing function for accounting teams to assess their readiness across three dimensions.
Balance sheet classification
Stablecoins used purely as a settlement medium and held for very short periods, measured in hours or days, may be classified as cash equivalents if they meet the ASC 230 or IAS 7 criteria: readily convertible to a known amount of cash, with an insignificant risk of value change. Where holding periods are longer or issuer credit risk is non-trivial, classification as a financial asset at amortized cost or fair value through other comprehensive income may be more appropriate. The choice should be documented in the entity's accounting policy and applied consistently.
Transaction completeness for digital asset accounting software
Auditors working on clients using multi-rail settlement infrastructure need to confirm that their digital asset accounting software captures every leg of a stablecoin or tokenized-security transaction, including any on-chain confirmation hashes, timestamps, and counterparty identifiers. Where a single economic transaction crosses both bank rails and blockchain rails, ensuring the two data populations reconcile is a non-trivial audit procedure. Firms that have not yet built or sourced this capability should treat the growth of infrastructure like HIFI's as a reason to accelerate that work.
Cross-border tax exposure on stablecoin flows
With HIFI operating across 87 countries, clients using the platform for cross-border stablecoin settlements will generate potential tax events in multiple jurisdictions. Whether a stablecoin transfer constitutes a disposal, a payment, or a receipt of property depends on the jurisdiction. In the US, the IRS treats stablecoins as property under the digital asset framework, meaning any difference between the acquisition cost basis and the fair value at the time of use is a taxable event. CFOs overseeing cross-border treasury operations using stablecoin rails need a per-jurisdiction policy for tracking and reporting these events. For a deeper look at the securities side of this landscape, the tokenized securities accounting after the SEC exemption ruling is a useful reference point.
Internal controls over tokenized asset positions
For entities participating directly in tokenized-securities trading, as DTCC's July production trades illustrate is now possible, internal controls need to address the authorisation, recording, and custody of on-chain positions. Traditional securities controls built around DTC book-entry records may not automatically extend to tokenized equivalents held in a digital wallet or smart contract. CFOs and their external auditors should confirm that the control environment has been updated to cover both representations of the same asset.
What Accounting Teams Should Do Now
Three practical steps deserve attention this quarter. First, document a formal accounting policy for stablecoin classification and measurement before any stablecoin-settled trades appear on the balance sheet. Second, assess whether existing crypto bookkeeping software captures multi-rail transactions completely, covering both the on-chain and off-chain legs of each settlement. Third, map the jurisdictions in which stablecoin-funded transactions occur and confirm that the tax treatment for each jurisdiction is reflected in the firm's compliance calendar. The HIFI raise is a signal that institutional adoption of this infrastructure is accelerating. Accounting readiness needs to keep pace.
Source: The Block
Frequently Asked Questions
How should stablecoins used for institutional settlement be classified on the balance sheet?
If the stablecoin is held only for the duration of settlement, typically hours or a single business day, and the peg to fiat is robust, classification as a cash equivalent under ASC 230 or IAS 7 may be defensible. Longer holding periods or material issuer credit risk generally point toward classification as a financial asset, measured at amortized cost or fair value. The key is that the policy is documented before any transactions occur and applied consistently across all periods.
Does a stablecoin-funded card payout create a taxable event in the US?
Under current IRS guidance, stablecoins are property. Using a stablecoin to fund a payment is treated as a disposal of that property at its fair market value on the date of use. If the stablecoin was acquired at a different value, the difference is a capital gain or loss. For high-volume treasury operations, this means every individual disbursement must be tracked with a cost basis and a disposal value, which is why automated digital asset accounting software with lot-level tracking is essential.
What is the accounting challenge when settlement moves from T+2 to near-instant?
Traditional back-office systems were built around a gap between trade date and settlement date. With on-chain settlement, that gap compresses significantly. Accounting teams must ensure their systems can record the asset and cash entry at the correct date without relying on the settlement lag as a reconciliation buffer. Period-end cutoff procedures also need to be updated to capture trades that settle in the final hours of a reporting period.
How do auditors confirm completeness of transactions across bank rails and blockchain rails?
Auditors need to obtain a complete population of transactions from both data sources: the traditional bank statement or payment system records and the on-chain transaction history. These two populations must be reconciled to each other and to the entity's general ledger. Procedures typically include confirming that every on-chain transaction hash corresponds to a recorded ledger entry and that no on-chain activity falls outside the recorded population. This requires either direct blockchain querying capability or a reliable data feed from the infrastructure provider.
Does HIFI's $7 billion annualized volume give a sense of how much stablecoin exposure could appear on client balance sheets?
Not directly, because not all of that volume will be stablecoin-denominated, and the volume figure represents flows rather than period-end balances. However, it does illustrate the scale of transaction populations that accounting teams may need to process. Even a small fraction of $7 billion in annualized flows, if stablecoin-settled, could generate thousands of individual taxable events and balance sheet entries per year for a single institutional client.