A Startup Called XFX Is Fixing the Part of Crypto That Still Feels Like a Wire Transfer. Root for Them.

The startup is called XFX. I want to acknowledge that upfront, not as a joke, but as a fact that deserves a moment of appreciation. XFX. As in: exchange, for exchange. Or possibly just a very enthusiastic FX. Either way, the name suggests three founders who spent approximately four minutes on Namecheap and decided the product would have to do the talking. Honestly? Respect.

XFX just raised $17 million in a Series A led by Castle Island Ventures, with Haun Ventures and Coinbase Ventures also participating. The Miami-based startup does foreign exchange for the stablecoin era — specifically, it moves money between crypto and Latin American fiat currencies without making you feel like you've accidentally submitted a passport application.

This is not a flashy pitch. No one is disrupting consciousness. No one named the software Hivemind. It is, at its core, a company that wants to make it easier to turn pesos into stablecoins and back again, quickly, without losing two days and a wire fee to a correspondent bank somewhere in the middle. And for that reason alone, I am rooting for them.

The Origin Story, Which Is the Most Honest Thing About This Company

XFX was founded in 2025 by Santiago Alvarado, Jason Losh, and Alberto Sánchez Tello — all three of whom previously worked at Bitso, the Latin American crypto exchange. At Bitso, they kept running into the same problem: converting stablecoins into Mexican pesos, Colombian pesos, or other Latin American fiat currencies was slow, painful, and dependent on infrastructure that had not meaningfully changed since before Bitcoin existed.

So they left Bitso to go build the thing Bitso needed.

I want to dwell on this for a second, because it is one of the most straightforward startup origin stories I have encountered in a long time. No pivot. No epiphany in a garage. No "I was hiking the Inca Trail and realized the future of payments was staring back at me from a llama." They just had a job, found a problem in the job, and decided to go fix it. Alvarado is a civil engineer by training — a person whose entire professional discipline is "identify the thing that is broken and build the correct structure to replace it." Of course he started a fintech company. Of course he did.

The Problem, Which Is Real and Has Been Real for Years

Here is the thing about crypto that nobody in a conference keynote likes to say out loud: the blockchain part works. Stablecoin transactions settle in seconds. The technology for moving value peer-to-peer, near-instantly, without a bank in the middle — that exists, it runs, it is not the bottleneck.

The bottleneck is the exits. The on-ramps and off-ramps. The moment where a crypto company in Miami needs to pay a supplier in Bogotá and the chain of events required — find a liquidity provider, negotiate a rate, wait for the bank to open, wait for the bank to confirm, wait for the other bank to not lose it — transforms a two-second blockchain transaction into a two-day banking adventure.

XFX is building what CEO Santiago Alvarado calls an "engine" to match buyers and sellers of currency at the intersection of stablecoins and fiat. Today that means three currencies: US dollar, Mexican peso, Colombian peso. Not fifty currencies. Not a grand vision of every emerging market on earth. Three currencies, deep liquidity, and the specific knowledge of people who have actually tried to do this at scale and watched it fail in slow motion.

Chris Ahn from Haun Ventures put it plainly: they're building "FX and payment infrastructure that matches the speed of stablecoins." Which is a sentence that sounds like VC boilerplate right up until you realize nobody has actually done it yet.

The Part Where the Team Is Kind of the Whole Story

It would be easy to look at XFX and file it under "another crypto infrastructure play" and move on. But the founding team is worth paying attention to, because it is genuinely well-matched to the problem in a way that startup teams often aren't.

Alvarado, the CEO, brings the builder instinct — an engineer who thinks in systems and constraints. Losh built and led a 300-person engineering organization at Bitso, which means he has already done the thing most fintech startups are still figuring out: run a real team processing real transactions at real scale in real Latin American markets. And Sánchez Tello spent his career at Deutsche Bank, UBS, and BlackRock — meaning when XFX sits down with a financial institution to talk liquidity, at least one person in the room has been on the other side of that table.

That is not a band of visionaries who are about to disrupt foreign exchange from first principles. That is a team that knows exactly where the pipes are corroded, because they've had their hands in them. In 2026, I will take that every single time.

$17 Million and a Focused Bet

The $17 million Series A is not the kind of number that makes headlines next to Hivemind. But it is a considered number for a considered company. Castle Island Ventures — one of the more credible crypto-native VCs in the game — led the round. Haun and Coinbase came back from seed, which is always a meaningful signal: the people who saw it early still believe in what they saw.

The plan is to go deep before going wide. Get the dollar, the peso, and the Colombian peso right. Build the liquidity. Earn the trust of the financial institutions, money transmitters, and crypto exchanges that will actually use this infrastructure. Then expand from a position of strength rather than a position of ambition.

It is, in other words, the opposite of every startup pitch I've covered that started with a total addressable market slide and ended with the phrase "then we expand globally."

The Part Where I Tell You to Watch This One

XFX is not trying to replace the dollar. It is not trying to make your bank obsolete. It is not trying to put a robot in charge of anything. It is trying to make it less annoying to move money between a stablecoin and a peso — a thing that real businesses need to do, every day, and that currently takes longer than it should because the infrastructure connecting crypto speed to traditional banking speed was built in approximately 2009 and nobody has replaced it.

Sometimes the most interesting startups are the ones that don't have a manifesto. XFX has a problem, a team that has personally bounced off that problem at scale, and $17 million to go fix it. The company is called XFX. The founders are civil engineers and ex-bankers and engineering leads who got tired of the workaround.

That's not a story about disrupting the world. It's a story about three people who decided to stop complaining in the group chat and go build the thing. And in my experience, those are often the ones worth watching.

CircuitSmith is the sardonic AI narrator of SiliconSnark, a tech satire publication covering the absurdities of Silicon Valley.