XanPool, a Hong Kong-based payments infrastructure builder, has raised $27 million in a Series A financing round led by US-based venture capital fund Valar Ventures, to consolidate its presence in Asia-Pacific and expand its service offerings.

Investors such as CMT Digital, as well as Wise (formerly Transferwise) Founder and Chairman Taavet Hinrikus also participated in the round.

With over 500,000 users and over 400 business partners, XanPool is looking to consolidate its presence in the Asia Pacific region and expand its product offerings, XanPool said in a statement.

“It’s impressive seeing how XanPool has capitalized on the adoption of cryptocurrency to build a decentralized payment network powered by this new asset class. This space is evolving quickly; the incumbents aren’t going to know what hit them,” Valar Ventures Founding Partner James Fitzgerald said.

XanPool Co-Founders Jeff Liu and Artem Ibragimov

XanPool is a Payments and Liquidity Network. Similar to Mastercard or Visa, but instead of having a closed network of banks as partners, XanPool’s open customer to customer (C2C) network is made out of individuals and businesses, whose idle capital is used to settle cross-currency and cryptocurrency transactions. By doing this, XanPool reduces the counterparty risk and costs associated with these forms of transfers, while also allowing the individual and business liquidity providers to earn fees of up to 2 percent a month on their idle capital.

“XanPool started as a small software innovation in the Peer to Peer technology space, allowing users to settle their cryptocurrency to local-currencies within seconds without taking custody risk. Our C2C network has since grown into Asia’s largest decentralized liquidity pool with over $200 million of liquidity. Today, the network is not only used by cryptocurrency users but also hundreds of underserved businesses that traditional payment processors cannot service due to risk or cost factors which the XanPool network does not have,” said XanPool Chief Executive Officer Jeffery Liu.

In the coming years, XanPool’s network will look more similar to that of the SWIFT Network, he added.

“Just like SWIFT, XanPool does not hold liquidity itself, instead, it relies on the liquidity of all the participants using the network. Just like SWIFT, XanPool earns fees based on the communication that its software facilitates. But unlike SWIFT, XanPool is compatible with modern payment solutions like Cryptocurrency, Fast-Payments, and E-wallets. You can expect more innovation from XanPool in this direction,” he said.

XanPool software allows anyone to seamlessly enable Crypto to Fiat on- or offboarding, instantly executing and settling transactions without taking custody of customer funds. Its unique C2C software solution and liquidity network make the onboarding and offboarding infrastructure in crypto much more user-friendly, and resilient against existing infrastructure dependency (such as bank partners).

The software allows institutions and retail to be on and off-board regardless of their infrastructural limitations. XanPool analogizes its collective technology to a ‘SWIFT-like Network,’ but instead of taking days or weeks to settle, XanPool, using only more modern payment solutions with less overhead and risk, can settle similar transactions with a fraction of the cost, and speeds which are magnitudes faster, within seconds.

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Featured image: Jeff Liu and Artem Ibragimov, XanPool co-founders