Exclusive: Squads unveils stablecoin account for businesses
Squads CEO Stepan Simkin explained why the firm launched Altitude and how he’s thinking about stablecoins
Papuchalka – kaelaimages/Shutterstock and Adobe modified by Blockworks
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Squads, which developed a multisig protocol on Solana, has a fun announcement: They’re launching Altitude. Basically, it’s a stablecoin-native account that allows companies to open and fund a dollar account without having to rely on traditional banks or a US entity.
Squads CEO Stepan Simkin thinks of stablecoin-native as an account that exists “on a decentralized blockchain, and as long as the blockchain is running the program, the protocol will continue running. And so that gives you very different guarantees, where it’s true ownership, it’s true programmability, and it’s real transparency.”
As part of the unveiling, Altitude also received a strategic investment from Haun Ventures, though Simkin declined to give me exact figures.
However, this isn’t just a new development, and the team isn’t just looking to capitalize on how hot stablecoins are right now (though, it’s an added bonus that they’re launching Altitude at this time).
Simkin told me that he initially met Haun’s Chris Ahn two years ago, but they started to mull the concept of Altitude roughly a year ago.
With the launch out of the way, where does Simkin see Altitude in a year?
“I think in a year, I would like us to have a consistent user base of real businesses that rely on Altitude to manage their financial operations,” he said.
“It’s very achievable, particularly in the way things are progressing today, both in terms of things we’re able to build, partners we’re able to work with, but also what we talked about before, right? We’re a tech firm, and the [adoption of stablecoins] around the world is happening right now.”
The goal for Simkin — outside of Altitude — is to “shift the conversation towards figuring out how we can make general-purpose blockchains work for institutions and work for payments as opposed to [launching on special purpose] chains […] and then have this segregated system.”
This post was updated at 10:30 a.m. ET with corrections to transcribed audio.
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