Former Citadel Team Raises $17 Million for Fin: A Global Stablecoin App That Cuts the Complexity

A group of ex-Citadel Securities engineers and quants has quietly closed a $17 million seed round for Fin, a mobile-first stablecoin wallet and payments app designed to let anyone send, spend, and earn yield on USDC (and soon other regulated stablecoins) with zero crypto jargon, no seed phrases, and no gas fees.

Led by CEO Parker Wojcik (ex-head of options market making at Citadel) and CTO Andrew Leone (former Citadel crypto trading infrastructure lead), Fin is positioning itself as the “Venmo for the global internet” — built entirely on regulated stablecoins and compliant on/off-ramps but without forcing users to understand private keys, bridging, or layer-2 sequencing.

What Fin Actually Does (and Doesn’t Do)

• Instant global transfers in USDC that settle in 2–4 seconds for free (subsidized by yield on collateral).
• One-tap fiat on-ramps via ACH, Apple Pay, and credit card in 40+ countries at launch.
• Automatic 4–6% yield on every dollar held in the app (currently via Circle’s USDC reserve lending program).
• Smart recovery via email + phone instead of 12-word phrases.
• No in-app token swapping, staking dashboards, or DeFi yield farming — deliberately simple.

The app launched in private beta in September 2025 and already has 38,000 waitlisted users and $42 million in deposited volume despite zero marketing.

The $17 Million Seed Round

The oversubscribed round was co-led by General Catalyst and former Citadel CEO Peng Zhao (personal investment), with participation from:

• 137 Ventures
• Reciprocal Ventures
• Circle Ventures
• Broadhaven Ventures
• Angels: Tom Howard (ex-Citadel global head of FICC), Coinbase board member Chris Dixon, and Plaid co-founder William Hockey

Valuation was not disclosed but sources familiar with the term sheet pegged it north of $110 million post-money.

Why Now?

The team believes the stablecoin market has finally hit the inflection point mainstream users need:

• Global USDC supply crossed $62 billion in November 2025.
• Circle and PayPal both launched high-yield savings products on USDC in Q3.
• New York, EU, Singapore, and UAE all issued clear stablecoin regulatory frameworks in the past 12 months.
• Apple and Google quietly relaxed App Store rules around embedded wallets.

Parker Wojcik summarized it bluntly in an interview: “We spent years building the most sophisticated trading systems on Earth. The irony is the average person just wants to send $50 to their cousin in Manila without paying 7% and waiting three days. Everything else — seed phrases, bridge risks, gas fees — is noise.”

Fin plans to launch publicly in 37 countries by March 2026 and is already in talks with three top-15 U.S. neobanks for white-label integration.

For the first time since Venmo’s early days, a team with real high-frequency trading DNA is betting they can make stablecoins as easy as fiat apps — and the $17 million check from some of the sharpest capital in finance suggests they might be right.