Sorted Wallet has closed a $4.4 million seed round co-led by stablecoin giant Tether and blockchain infrastructure firm Gnosis, as the race to turn stablecoins into everyday payment infrastructure shifts from ambition to execution. The round included participation from Movement Labs, Angel Invest, and angels connected to RWA.io, along with $1 million in strategic backing from Vox Solutions, a telecommunications infrastructure provider brought in specifically to strengthen Sorted’s mobile-operator integrations.
The raise is a follow-on for Tether, which previously led Sorted’s $1.5 million pre-seed in September 2024. Since then, the company says its wallet has surpassed 500,000 downloads across 160 countries, with particular traction in Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, and Bangladesh — markets where the proposition is less theoretical and more urgent.
The Problem Worth Solving
For most people in the developed world, moving money is invisible infrastructure. For billions of others, it remains stubbornly expensive, slow, and gatekept by institutions with little incentive to change. Sorted’s thesis is that stablecoins — cryptocurrencies pegged to fiat currencies like the US dollar — already solve the technical problem. What’s missing is a delivery layer that doesn’t require users to know what a blockchain is.
The wallet runs on both feature phones and smartphones, requires less than 10MB of storage, and is built around self-custody. It’s a product philosophy borrowed from mobile money pioneers like M-Pesa, which didn’t succeed by educating users about telecom infrastructure but by making the outcome dead simple.
“Three years ago we built a wallet for a $20 phone. Nobody else thought it was worth building for. This round is how we find the next 100 million.” — Stephen Browne, CEO, Sorted Wallet
The target user is a migrant worker sending money home, a freelancer in a high-inflation economy holding savings in USDT, or a small merchant in a country where the local currency has lost significant purchasing power. In those contexts, stablecoins aren’t a speculative asset — they’re a practical tool that many users have already found through informal channels. Sorted’s bet is that formalizing and dramatically improving that experience is a very large opportunity.
Why the Timing Makes Sense
Stablecoin transfer volumes surpassed $33 trillion globally in 2025, a figure that reflects a genuine shift in how the asset class is being used. Regulatory clarity has also improved across the EU, UK, and several Southeast Asian jurisdictions, and a new generation of Layer-2 networks has pushed transaction costs to fractions of a cent — viable, finally, for everyday micro-transactions.
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino framed the investment in the language of financial inclusion rather than crypto adoption: “Over the years, digital asset use cases have evolved from trading tools to real-life applications.” He added that reaching the next wave of users will require infrastructure that works for “hundreds of millions of people who cannot afford smartphones or data plans.”
That framing matters. Tether — issuer of USDT, currently the largest stablecoin with a $185 billion market cap — has been systematically building out wallet and payments infrastructure in emerging markets. The Sorted investment is consistent with a broader portfolio strategy that recently included a $134 million raise focused on global stablecoin infrastructure and a $5.2 million bet on Ark Labs for programmable Bitcoin settlement.
What Sorted Actually Builds
The product is a mobile-first wallet designed to abstract away crypto complexity. Users send and receive stablecoins using phone numbers, hold dollar-denominated balances without a bank account, and access cross-border transfers at a fraction of traditional remittance costs. Self-custody is a core design principle — Sorted handles compliance and on-chain execution in the background, but users retain control of their funds.
The feature phone compatibility is the genuine differentiator. Across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, feature phones remain the primary internet device for hundreds of millions of people. Fintech products that require a modern smartphone and a data plan quietly exclude the populations most likely to benefit from better financial infrastructure. Sorted’s architecture was built specifically around this constraint.
The Competitive Landscape
Sorted is not operating in empty space. Yellow Card, Bitso, and Chipper Cash all work in overlapping territory. PayPal’s PYUSD has introduced stablecoins to hundreds of millions of existing users. Visa and Mastercard have been building stablecoin settlement rails for years. And infrastructure players like Bridge (now Stripe), BVNK, and Rain are competing for the layer Sorted will depend on.
The regional picture is also intensifying. Across Asia, a growing number of firms are racing to build stablecoin payment infrastructure, with cross-border settlement, compliance, and liquidity management emerging as the key battlegrounds. Countries that delay regulatory clarity, analysts have argued, risk being left behind.
Sorted’s founders don’t dismiss the competition — they argue for a focus advantage. Larger players are distracted by enterprise and B2B use cases, incumbents are constrained by legacy architecture, and most consumer-facing products are still optimized for smartphone users with reliable data connections. A small team optimizing for a specific experience in specific markets is a wedge that’s still available. The $4.4 million is how they find out if that’s true.
