Kevin Lehtiniitty has worked on stablecoins since before most banks had a view on them. He helped launch TrueUSD, was chief product officer at Prime Trust and later technical co-founder of Fortress, before founding Borderless.xyz.
Borderless.xyz gives payment companies a single API to licensed local providers, handling the conversion between stablecoins and local currency and the last-mile transfer on domestic payment rails. The company says its network now reaches 113 countries.
In this In Profile, Kevin Lehtiniitty, CEO and founder at Borderless.xyz, discusses the last mile of stablecoin payments, the gap between what is announced and what works, and why compliance needs to travel with the payment.
Tell us more about your company and its purpose
Borderless.xyz is the platform companies use to scale stablecoin payouts and collections across 113 countries on local rails.
You integrate once and get one API to the local providers in every region, 19 licensed providers across 72 currencies and 132 local rails. Each transaction covers the conversion between stablecoin and local currency and the last-mile transfer on the domestic rail, and it works with the wallet and compliance infrastructure you already have.
The platform has three main layers. Connectivity moves the money. Above it sits the operations tooling you would otherwise build, from rail monitoring to RFI case management and automated reconciliation, so adding a provider adds coverage rather than headcount. The top layer is intelligence from the network’s volume. Because we see every corridor across every provider, you can tell whether the rate you pay is competitive, and act when it isn’t.
Our purpose is to make stablecoins and local banking interoperable everywhere. Stablecoins settle in seconds but the hard part is getting it to land in local currency in your country, especially in emerging markets.
What are some of your recent achievements you’d like to highlight?
The one I’d point to first is the pilot we announced with Mastercard in August. Mastercard Crypto Credential brings a common standard and real governance to how institutions trust each other on digital asset payments. Today a receiving institution re-runs KYC on a customer the sending institution already cleared, because it has no way to rely on someone else’s compliance work. The money arrives in seconds and then waits on trust. The pilot runs that standard across our network so trust can travel with the payment.
The second is the network itself. We built the first payments network for stablecoins, and two years on it’s still the broadest, with 19 licensed providers reaching 113 countries and 72 currencies over 132 local rails. Most of that growth came from customers asking us for the next market. Every provider we add is a local expert with its own licences, so coverage grows without our customers taking on another integration.
Lastly, it’s what our customers have built on top of us. Some of the largest institutions moving stablecoins today run part of their payout and collection infrastructure on our network, and they keep adding markets on it. That’s the value of Borderless.xyz in a sentence. You go live once, and every market after that is a configuration change rather than another build.
How did you get into the fintech industry?
I’ve been working on stablecoins for more than a decade. I helped launch TrueUSD, the first fully reserved US dollar stablecoin, before USDC existed. The framework we built there held full reserves in cash and equivalents at a qualified custodian rather than on a corporate balance sheet, and had them audited. That’s recognisably what the GENIUS Act now asks of every US issuer.
Payments is really what interests me as well. It was watching what happened the moment a dollar that lived on chain needed to become a dollar in a bank account. Every hard problem sat on that boundary of fragmentation, from the banking relationships and compliance to who carries the liability when something goes wrong.
I’ve always believed the value of stablecoins is in cross-border and global transfers and spent the following years building the rails that connect the two sides, first for exchanges in the US and now for payments companies everywhere.
What’s the best thing about working in the fintech industry?
I spent more than 200 days travelling last year, because payments are local and you have to go and see that for yourself. A lot of this industry is about in-person relationships. For example, in June I was in Mexico City with our Latin American providers, and most of what we talked about was how a payout actually lands and why one into Colombia behaves so differently from one into Brazil. The people who run the rails know it, so you go meet and see it in real life.
What I keep coming back to is how much has changed in a few years. When I started in payments, a domestic transfer in most of the world meant waiting a day or two. Now you land in São Paulo and everyone from the taxi driver to the bank is on PIX, and the money moves in seconds. Same story with UPI in India and SPEI in Mexico, and dozens of other countries have built something similar. The strange part is that the moment money has to cross a border, all of that speed disappears. It goes back through correspondent banks and takes days, because the wires between countries were built for a different era. Stablecoins are the first thing that moves between countries and we’re working on the layer where those two things meet, at the moment both of them are maturing.
What frustrates you most about the fintech industry?
The gap between what is announced and what is actually working in practice can be frustrating. Every week someone announces that stablecoins have solved cross-border payments. Then you assume they’re a few weeks from launching in ten countries.
Then you actually start integrating or working with them and see the gaps. The rails listed are only supported in beta, no licence applications, broken sandboxes, etc. Announcements run well ahead of what’s live, and you can’t see any of that from the outside. A lot of what looks reliable from the outside barely works once you put real volume through it, and you only find that out after you’ve signed and started building.
That costs companies months of engineering time and a lot of credibility with their own customers. The ones that will matter in five years are the ones putting the same effort into making things work as they put into announcing them.
How have your previous roles influenced your career?
Every role handed me a different piece of the problem. At TrueUSD I worked on issuance, and the lesson there was that a stablecoin is only as good as the trust behind the reserve.
At Prime Trust I was Chief Product Officer and built the US fiat rails for exchanges like Binance US and Kraken. That’s where I quickly figured out the rails are the hard part.
Later I was the technical co-founder of Fortress and in between I spent time as the customer, one step removed from whoever owned the rails. Every compliance escalation and every stuck payment went through a middleman. I remember exactly how that felt, and Borderless is built so our customers never sit in that seat. They contract directly with the providers moving their money and own those relationships. We build the connectivity, transparency and back office tooling to scale.
What’s the best mistake you’ve ever made?
The best mistake was not shipping fast enough early on. We spent too long trying to get things right before anyone could use them, and every one of those months was a month without customer feedback. What I learned is that you don’t find out what’s wrong with a product by thinking harder about it. You find out by putting it in front of the people who have to run their business on it, and then fixing what they hit. A lot of the good decisions we’ve made came out of a customer telling us something wasn’t working, and the sooner they could tell us, the faster we could fix this moving forward.
What has the future got in store for your company?
There’s a lot in store. Several institutions are testing their onramps and offramps on our infrastructure right now, with plans to scale, and that’s why the next twelve months are the most exciting stretch we’ve had. The pieces we spent two and a half years building are starting to compound.
The network keeps growing wherever our customers pull us. Latin America and Africa are our deepest coverage today, and [Asia and the GCC] is the build for the rest of this year. We built the back office tooling to scale. The work that starts the day an integration ships is what stops most companies from ever running a second provider so continuing to build tools that allow our customers to scale seamlessly such as reconciliation, RFI case management, provider status monitoring, etc.
We’ll take what we learn from the Mastercard Crypto Credential pilot into the wider network, so compliance work done once can be trusted everywhere the payment goes.
The Benchmark is the one I’m most excited about. Every quarter it gets closer to being the public reference for what it costs to deliver a stablecoin payment into any country. I want that number to be something anyone can look up before they sign a contract. There’s more on the way that I can’t talk about yet but lots of exciting things in store.
What are the next key talking points or challenges for your industry as a whole?
Regulatory clarity: The CLARITY Act was blocked in the Senate [in September], so US market structure rules are on hold. The groundwork is laid, with the GENIUS Act and MiCA settling how a compliant issuer looks, but it’s still early.
Compliance: The second is getting compliance to move with the payment. Today a receiving institution re-checks a customer the sending institution already verified, so money that settles in seconds still takes days to clear. Solving that is more of a coordination problem than a technical one, and whoever gets it right unlocks a lot of speed that’s already sitting there.
Last-mile settlement: More than 70 countries now run instant domestic payment systems, and stablecoins are the first thing that can link them in real time but where the industry still has to prove itself is the final step into a local bank account or wallet because that is where it varies.
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