In a significant move for financial privacy on blockchain, Payy, a developer specializing in Zero-Knowledge (ZK) proof-based privacy stablecoins, has successfully raised $6 million in a seed funding round. The investment was led by FirstMark Capital, with participation from Robot Ventures and DBA Crypto, bringing Payy's total raised capital to $8 million.
The capital will primarily fund team expansion and accelerate the development of the Payy Network, a proprietary Ethereum Layer 2 network designed explicitly to shield sensitive institutional financial data from public exposure. The company's core mission addresses a critical pain point in decentralized finance: the lack of transactional privacy for enterprises, where every transaction on a public ledger like Ethereum is visible, exposing details such as transaction histories, wallet balances, and trading positions.
Payy's technological foundation rests on Zero-Knowledge proofs, a cryptographic method that allows a transaction to be verified as valid and settled on a blockchain without disclosing the sender, receiver, or amount. The dedicated rollup network will batch transactions off the main Ethereum chain, aiming to ensure scalability, cost-efficiency, and full compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
The drive for this solution stems from clear institutional demand. "Today, sending a stablecoin payment is like posting your bank statement on a public website. That’s a dealbreaker for any serious business," said Sid Gandhi, CEO of Payy Network. The service is already live with over 100,000 users across 120 countries, processing approximately $130 million in annualized transaction volume, and includes the Payy Visa card, a non-custodial stablecoin card with privacy features launched in 2025.
Payy has outlined a clear development timeline. The Payy Network testnet is scheduled to launch next month, allowing developers and early institutional partners to experiment. The mainnet launch is targeted for this summer. Adam Nelson, Partner at FirstMark, stated that Payy is fixing a glaring shortcoming by providing "financial-system-level privacy for stablecoin spending, without giving up usability."
