Why Ensemble is Backing Stablecore’s Mission to Bring Community Banks into the Stablecoin Future

Ensemble is thrilled to announce our investment in Stablecore, the infrastructure platform enabling banks and credit unions to offer stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and other digital asset services. The company has raised $20 million in funding, led by Norwest and with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Curql, BankTech Ventures, Bank of Utah, EJF Ventures, Bankers Helping Bankers Fund, and the backing of more than 200 limited partner financial institutions.

Read Stablecore's press release here.

Co-founded by Nick Elledge, alongside Alex Treece and Eduardo Montemayor, the team blends crypto-native engineering talent (largely ex-Coinbase) with deep experience selling into financial institutions. That combination has proven essential: Stablecore’s product allows banks to navigate a digital overhaul with zero disruption and total control.

Stablecore sits at the center of a historic shift in financial infrastructure. Blockchain-based payments are set to accelerate their push into the mainstream in the wake of the GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025. The act establishes a regulatory framework for payment stablecoins, clearing the way for banks to issue and support digital dollars directly. 

The United States’ 8,000+ community and regional banks and credit unions are ill-equipped to compete under the new regime. These traditional lenders don’t yet have infrastructure to accept digital assets as deposits or collateral, while their competition in the newly minted stablecoin market is newer, faster-moving fintech platforms. Stablecore equips smaller banks to stay relevant by giving them the tools to operate in a digital asset world, offering modern financial products paired with the trust and flexibility their customers expect.

We sat down with co-founder Nick Elledge to talk about the wave of regulatory clarity behind stablecoins, the future of tokenized deposits, and why banks are suddenly racing to modernize their infrastructure.

Here’s what we learned:

• The GENIUS Act is a turning point. Signed in July 2025, the act established a regulatory framework for payment stablecoins, clearing the way for banks to issue and support digital dollars directly.
• A neutral safety layer for banks. Stablecore provides the technical bridge between bank cores and blockchain infrastructure, allowing institutions to offer stablecoins and digital assets without disrupting legacy systems.
• Equipping Main Street for the digital age. As fintech and crypto firms apply for bank charters, Stablecore gives community and regional banks the tools to compete.
• Tokenized deposits are the next frontier. Unlike stablecoins, tokenized deposits are FDIC-insured and yield-bearing. Stablecore is building the infrastructure to power them.
• Modern rails, familiar institutions. Stablecore’s mission is to make trusted banks blockchain-compatible, ensuring customers get faster, cheaper, programmable financial experiences without leaving their primary financial institution.

See below for more. 

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Interview with Stablecore co-founder Nick Elledge

Stablecore’s raise comes on the heels of a seismic regulatory shift. The GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025, is the first major U.S. legislation to formally define and authorize the use of payment stablecoins. The law supposedly marks the end of crypto’s “Wild West” era, or, as Nick puts it, “crypto putting on a suit and tie.”

A stablecoin is a digital asset designed to maintain a fixed value—usually pegged to the U.S. dollar. Unlike cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, which fluctuate in price, stablecoins are built for predictability and utility, allowing for instant dollar transfers across the globe at any time. The recent GENIUS Act, among other market-defining measures, requires the coins be backed one-to-one by cash or short-term treasuries, allowing for instant redemption for dollars.

The law also limits the role of stablecoin issuer to specific regulated financial institutions. But community and regional banks aren’t ready. Their infrastructure can’t speak to blockchain networks, and their internal resources can’t compete with crypto-native lenders and fintech platforms, who are racing to establish banking entities sanctioned to issue digital payment options. Large payments players like Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard are leaning into the market, while firms like Uber and Shopify are beginning to accept stablecoin payments. 

“Stablecoin send-and-receive is quickly becoming a new payment rail. There's already trillions in volume on it, and no banks participate in it today. All of it is outside of the formal banking system.”

The battle for Main Street’s savings

What happens when you walk into a bank with a million dollars in Bitcoin and ask for a mortgage? Frustration on all sides, likely. Your loan officer wants to give the loan, the bank might even recognize that your digital assets have value, but it has no infrastructure to accept them, no underwriting model to assess them, and no operational process to support that type of request.

“For banks to stay relevant and be able to play here, there's just nothing in their existing tech stack that talks with anything on a blockchain at all.”

Community and regional banks are the most logical, secure, and proven home for long-term personal assets, leveraging their existing trust relationships and customer bases. But in the new legal framework, a bank that may have served a family for decades is now constrained by a technical gap where other players are moving quickly. The decentralized network of 8,000+ regional lenders stands to be eroded if digital-native platforms attract deposits by offering blockchain-ready tools. 

“Finance apps  and crypto exchanges are all converging on trying to do everything a bank does for you, trying to be your central home for your finances and banking”.

User-friendly, interoperable

Much of the reason traditional lenders are unable to react quickly is linked to the firmly entrenched banking core providers. These are software platforms that manage the moment-to-moment ledgering for millions of accounts (e.g., ensuring that your balance drops when you pull money out of the ATM). In the near-term, at least, there’s no pathway to moving the country’s banks off of these core systems.

“Right now there are so many spreadsheets and so much reconciliation. Central clearing houses, record keeping, and generally just, ‘How do we settle this transaction? I've got to give you the money and you've got to give me the thing.’ Blockchains are not good for everything, but they are very good at that.”

Built specifically for banks on these outdated systems, Stablecore offers what it calls a “digital asset core”—an infrastructure layer that plugs into legacy bank systems, enabling lenders to offer digital asset products without overhauling their existing tech stack. For a small fraction of the cost, Stablecore replaces a multi-year internal R&D effort.

Additionally, rather than forcing banks to choose a single vendor, Stablecore allows them to integrate with multiple custodians, issue or support any compliant stablecoin, and offer digital asset products—all from within their existing tech stack.

“We give the banks ultimate flexibility. It's very easy to onboard and offboard any number of digital asset providers, or to have multiple custodians. It  reduces the risk for the bank, because now the bank doesn’t have to make a wager on whether this or that stablecoin will be in fashion in 5 years. They can just ride the waves calmly, accepting whatever their customers want to use. That's a huge value proposition.”

This makes Stablecore built for a fragmented future. Nick sees stablecoins “like toothbrushes—everyone’s going to have one, and you won’t want to use anyone else’s.” In that world, the winners won’t be those who pick the right token or custodian, but the players with interoperability and flexibility baked in.

Tokenized deposits are the next evolution

While stablecoins are the focus of current regulatory momentum, tokenized deposits may prove to be the more transformative long-term shift in banking. Stablecoins, by design, exist outside the deposit framework. They aren’t FDIC-insured, can’t earn interest, and can’t be lent against. 

Tokenized deposits solve that problem. They function like stablecoins—fast, global, programmable, and blockchain-native—but with all the regulatory and operational benefits of traditional bank deposits. They’re issued by the bank, insured like any other deposit, and eligible to generate yield or be used as collateral.

As Nick put it, “Tokenized deposits are the bank’s answer to stablecoins.”

This addresses a real infrastructure need: if a tokenized Apple stock sells at 2 a.m. on a Sunday, the cash leg of that transaction must settle just as quickly as the asset leg. That’s not possible with legacy systems, but it is with tokenized deposits, which operate on-chain and in real time.

The broader vision is a banking system where 24/7 programmable money becomes the norm, not the exception. Consumers and businesses won’t necessarily know their deposits are tokenized—just as most people don’t think about cloud computing when using mobile banking apps. But they’ll notice that their money moves faster, settles more reliably, and works better across platforms.

“Banks are rational actors, and when they see that something is needed in order to satisfy customer need, or that they can upgrade their back end infrastructure to reduce costs and have better record keeping, they're going to respond to that––and they are responding to that.” 

Nick’s return to founder life

For Nick, building Stablecore is a return to a startup life he knows well. Nick previously co-founded DataFleets, an encrypted data infrastructure company he launched at Stanford and led through acquisition in 2021 for over $100 million. There, he saw firsthand what it looks like when a highly technical team punches above its weight. That experience left a mark. 

“I need the whole organization’s mission to be making a difference,” he said. “But I also need to be able to make a difference inside that organization. That’s why I love being a startup founder.”

At Stablecore, Nick is recreating that dynamic. The company’s work isn’t flashy, by his own description. 

“It’s not sexy,” he said plainly. “But it’s work that has to be done to upgrade the 1970s banking system to today.”

The Stablecore team includes former Coinbase engineers, and Nick himself brings enterprise sales and regulatory experience from stints at Andreessen Horowitz, McKinsey, and global private equity firms. Together, they’re attacking a narrow but critical layer of complexity: the connective tissue between legacy banking infrastructure and the new world of digital assets.

“We work hard, but it doesn’t feel like a grind. Everyone’s energized by the mission. You feel alive.”

Working with Ensemble

Ensemble has worked with Nick before—as both a founder and a collaborator—and we were excited to partner with him again for Stablecore. Nick is a stellar operator on all fronts, with the track record to prove it. He’s also a founder who knows how we operate, understands our commitment to the companies we back, and sees the value of a venture firm whose expertise aligns directly with the work at hand.

Nick shared that from his earliest interactions with Ensemble, it was clear the relationship would be different. “I’ve been very impressed with the Ensemble team,” he told us. “You all bring humility and sharp thinking. That combination is rare.”

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If you or someone you know is building this future, or thinking about it, we’d love to hear from you.

‍Collin West (collin@ensemble.vc)

Conrad Shang (conrad@ensemble.vc)

Ian Heinrich (ian@ensemble.vc)

Aidan Gold (aidan@ensemble.vc)