When Neil Staunton left ClearBank's stablecoin project last year, he took with him a nagging problem that most people outside crypto finance barely know exists: the sheer inefficiency of moving digital dollars across blockchains.
Now, as CEO of Superset, Staunton thinks he's found the fix. On February 11, his New York-based startup closed a $4 million seed round to build what it calls a "Unified Liquidity Execution layer"—essentially, plumbing that lets stablecoins flow more freely across the fragmented landscape of 20 to 30 blockchains. 7RIDGE and Exponential Science Capital co-led the round. Charles McManus, who co-founded and ran ClearBank before stepping down, joined as chairman and investor.
It's a modest raise by crypto standards. But the backers suggest Superset is betting on infrastructure over hype—a path that's gained traction as stablecoin adoption inches toward mainstream finance.
The Credibility Play
McManus brings something startups in this space often lack: legitimacy from the traditional banking world. Under his tenure, ClearBank built UK banking rails that now handle billions in transactions. His involvement signals that Superset isn't just another DeFi experiment—it's aiming for institutional acceptance.
"On-chain markets won't reach institutional scale unless liquidity becomes more efficient, transparent, and predictable," McManus said when the funding was announced. He described Superset's mission as tackling "a hard infrastructure challenge," which, in fintech speak, means unsexy but essential.
7RIDGE's pedigree doesn't hurt either. The firm acquired Trading Technologies in 2021—a legacy name in market structure—and later partnered with private equity giant Thoma Bravo. Exponential Science Capital, meanwhile, has been backing digital asset infrastructure plays, including a recent $3 million round in Obligate, an on-chain capital markets platform.
Why Liquidity Fragmentation Actually Matters
Here's the problem Superset is trying to solve: stablecoins—those dollar-pegged digital tokens—now circulate to the tune of $300 billion. That figure has held steady since October 2025, according to data from DeFiLlama and CoinMarketCap. Last year alone, on-chain stablecoin transactions hit $33 trillion, a 72% jump from 2024, per Bloomberg citing Artemis Analytics.
But all that volume is scattered. A trader executing a large order on Ethereum might get decent pricing. Move that same trade to Arbitrum or Polygon, and liquidity thins out. Slippage spikes. Capital sits idle on chains where it's not needed.
Staunton, who cut his teeth building stablecoin infrastructure at ClearBank, puts it plainly: Superset "unifies liquidity into a single shared market" so that liquidity providers can "deploy capital once and access volume and yield wherever trading occurs."
In practice, that means using LayerZero—a cross-chain messaging protocol—to create what the company calls virtual cross-chain pools. Instead of liquidity sitting in isolated silos on each blockchain, traders on any chain can theoretically tap into total global depth. Whether that works at scale remains to be seen.
A Team With Blockchain Bona Fides
Superset's founding lineup reads like a roster of people who've been in the trenches of institutional blockchain projects—the kind that move slowly but matter more than the latest meme coin.
Ben Haslam, the CTO, previously served as Lead Blockchain Engineer at Arqit Quantum. Krishna Kumar Swaminathan, the Co-CTO, spent roughly two decades at JPMorgan, where he worked on Quorum and JPM Coin—two projects that aimed to bring blockchain tech into the belly of traditional finance. Swaminathan's involvement is particularly notable; JPM Coin processes over $1 billion in transactions daily, a rare blockchain success story inside a major bank.
That's the sort of experience investors betting on infrastructure over speculation tend to value.
Mainnet Soon, Questions Later
Superset plans to launch its mainnet on EVM-compatible chains this quarter, with efforts to scale total value locked ramping up in Q2. Broader multichain support will follow—though the timeline there is, as with most crypto projects, somewhat elastic.
The company claims to be working with more than 10 stablecoin issuers, including StablR, Quantoz, Brale, M0, and Plume. It also cites $4.6 billion in liquidity depth on its platform. Both figures come directly from the company and haven't been independently verified. (A healthy dose of skepticism is warranted until mainnet performance data becomes public.)
Superset also touts potential capital efficiency improvements for liquidity providers and reduced slippage for large trades compared to fragmented alternatives. That's the pitch, anyway. Whether institutions actually adopt the infrastructure—and whether the economics work once real trading volume flows through—will be the real test.
The Bigger Bet
Superset's raise reflects a broader shift in crypto finance: away from speculative tokens and toward the boring-but-necessary infrastructure that could, maybe, help digital assets cross the chasm into traditional finance. Stablecoins are the most obvious bridge—they're already used for remittances, cross-border payments, and treasury management in parts of the world where banking rails are unreliable.
But for that bridge to hold institutional weight, the underlying plumbing needs to work seamlessly. Superset is betting it can provide that layer. Whether $4 million and a strong team are enough to solve a problem this complex, we'll find out soon enough.
For now, McManus and company are placing their chips on infrastructure. In crypto, that's either the smartest bet on the table—or the longest.
