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Sphere Labs
Sphere Labs is a Boston- and Delaware-based fintech building the payments infrastructure for the stablecoin economy. Founded in 2022 by Arnold Lee and Luigi Charles, the company runs two products: SpherePay, a B2B cross-border payments API that moves money using a 'stablecoin sandwich' - converting local currency into a stablecoin, routing it across borders, then settling into the destination currency in 15-30 minutes; and SphereNet, a 'sovereign-grade' settlement ledger built on the Solana Virtual Machine for regulated financial institutions. Often described as a 'Stripe for crypto,' Sphere pairs developer-friendly APIs and SDKs with embedded compliance to help fintechs, institutions and businesses in emerging markets move value fast, transparently and legally. It raised a $5M strategic round in December 2024 led by Coinbase Ventures and Kraken Ventures.
Arnold Lee
Arnold Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Sphere Labs, the software company behind SpherePay, a cross-border stablecoin payments API, and SphereNet, a Solana-virtual-machine settlement ledger built for regulated fintechs. A Columbia computer science grad who first stumbled into Bitcoin in 2009 trying to buy video games, he spent his early career in embedded systems for IoT startups before incorporating Sphere a week after the FTX collapse, off the back of a global Stripe hackathon win and a stint in Jump Crypto's incubator. Sphere now moves billions in annual volume through corridors legacy banking forgot - Latin America, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and the Middle East - on the thesis that every payments company eventually becomes a compliance company.