Stablecoins began as a crypto-native product. Now they are being used to move and settle money at scale.
The stablecoin market cap grew from $5B in 2020 to over $308B in 2025. Along the way, stablecoins have evolved from a niche payment rail into a mainstream way to move value, with $46T in transaction volume last year. Regulation is starting to catch up as well: in a Deloitte survey of large enterprises, only 1% of CFOs said they do not envision using stablecoins in the long term.
As stablecoins become a standard way to hold and move value, the need for onchain FX markets grows. Spot FX is a $10T daily market, built by a banking oligopoly to preserve opacity and restrict access to liquidity. Operations are slow (T+2) and require credit lines, preserving an outdated and expensive walled garden.
Even though stablecoin adoption is accelerating and allows for near-instant, always-on settlements, FX markets still run on legacy plumbing, requiring days to transfer. There is currently no venue that combines stablecoin settlement with exchange-grade order execution, depth of liquidity, a transparent orderbook, and the controls and reliability required by professional market participants.
Stablecoins denominated in different currencies open a new landscape for competition, where broad access, instant settlement, and a transparent order book will compete with the walled garden.
That is the opportunity for Hibachi to build on.
Hibachi: The Missing Piece in Stablecoin FX
Hibachi is building an FX exchange for a stablecoin-settled world, spanning spot and derivatives. This is a venue where instant settlement is the default, with tight bid-ask spreads, deep liquidity, and matching speeds and uptime that support the needs of professional traders.
Why current options fall short:
Traditional FX Venues: Liquid and deep but only accessible via a request for quote from a bank; inaccessible without bank intermediation. Delivery requires a nostro account in each currency. Collateral ends up scattered across institutions and jurisdictions, and routine movement still depends on legacy T+2 settlement cycles and intermediaries.
Centralized Crypto Exchanges: Fast and convenient, but require trusting an intermediary with custody. Bankruptcies are rare, but the history is long, from Bear Stearns to FTX. When they happen, the downside is catastrophic. The lesson is simple: giving someone else control of your money is fine until it isn’t.
Onchain Venues: Transparent and self-custodial, but trading lacks privacy protections. When orders, positions, and capital moves are visible, other participants can trade ahead of large orders and copy strategies. Most venues also do not meet the compliance requirements regulated firms need, which functionally excludes institutional sources of liquidity.
In short, the market presents partial solutions: execution with custody and counterparty risk, or self-custody with transparency tradeoffs that do not work for professional FX trading.
Hibachi is building an FX venue to close that gap by designing for:
Instant settlement
Speed of execution, tight spreads, and deep liquidity
Private orders and positions without sacrificing the benefit of onchain verification
Solvency that can be verified
Custody options including self-custody and third-party custodian integrations
Compliance and reporting that meet the needs of regulated firms
Hibachi on Arc: Infrastructure for Always-On FX Markets
We’re proud to be a Circle Ventures portfolio company through our early participation in the Arc Builders Fund. We’re building our new FX exchange on Arc as it is the perfect foundation with its sub-second finality, stablecoin gas fees, and configurable privacy.
The future of FX is being rewritten in real-time. As digital assets achieve true monetary utility, stablecoin-native foreign exchange will emerge as the foundational layer for the internet of money.
Hibachi is architecting this transformation. While others debate whether this shift will happen, we’re building the rails that will carry trillions in value. The question isn’t whether stablecoin FX will become a core financial market. It’s who will have the vision and execution to define it.
That market is being built now. By Hibachi.
