Paystand, which is building an Ethereum blockchain-based service to enable B2B payments with zero fees, raises $50M Series C, bringing its total raised to $85M
It's pretty easy for individuals to send money back and forth, and there are lots of cash apps from which to choose.
Context & Ripple Effects
Paystand's $50M Series C is a scale-up of a bet it made in early 2020, when its $20M Series B framed the pitch: make B2B transactions as easy as consumer cash apps. The difference now is that the rails are explicitly Ethereum-based and the wedge is zero fees — an attack on the per-transaction take rate that funds most payment processors.
The raise lands in a crowded lane: Fundbox has raised $300M+ for a B2B payment and credit network, Balance just took $25M for B2B checkout for merchants and marketplaces, and Paystone's 2021 haul shows service-business payments drawing capital across the board. Paystand is the one arguing the cost base itself — network fees, not software margins — should go to zero.
First-order effects
- With $85M total raised, Paystand can fund enterprise sales against the incumbent processors its Ethereum rails bypass — competing on fee structure rather than features.
Second-order effects
- Fee-funded rivals like YapStone (which raised $71M to take on PayPal and Stripe) face pressure on their core pricing: if blockchain settlement genuinely delivers zero-fee transfers, their per-transaction revenue model becomes the thing buyers negotiate against.
- Ethereum gains a marquee B2B payments reference customer at a moment when the network's own metrics have been soft — real-world transaction volume from Paystand-style services is the usage case Buterin himself points to as the 'search-and-ads' revenue engine for the chain.
Third-order effects
- If zero-fee blockchain settlement holds up at scale, B2B payments infrastructure splits into two camps — take-rate networks versus free-rails-plus-software-subscription — forcing every processor to reprice or reposition as a software vendor.
- The pattern points toward payment value migrating from transaction fees to workflow and credit layers (Fundbox's lending, Balance's checkout), with the settlement rail becoming commoditized plumbing underneath.
The trend: B2B payments are being rebuilt on public-blockchain rails that strip out per-transaction fees, shifting processor economics from interchange toward subscription software and attached credit.