Squads Protocol Reaches $20B in Annualized Stablecoin Transfer Volume on Solana

Squads co-founder and CEO Stepan Simkin announced on September 18 that Altitude, the company's stablecoin business account, is now processing more than $20 billion in annualized stablecoin transfer volume, a milestone he framed against a 2021 Solana hackathon where the team left without placing.

"Kind reminder that we didn't win anything at the solana season hackathon in 2021 and now our protocol moves $20B+ in annualized stablecoin transfer volume, while our global business account competes with the worlds largest fintechs," Simkin wrote. "You can just do things on the fast chain."

The volume figure is self-reported by Squads' founding team and has not been independently audited. Squads' official protocol page lists more than $15 billion in secured assets and confirms over $5 billion in total stablecoin transfers since the protocol launched, figures that frame the $20 billion annualized run rate as a measure of current throughput rather than lifetime volume.

Altitude's Cross-Border Stablecoin Payments on Squads Protocol

Altitude is the business payments product built on Squads Protocol's on-chain smart account infrastructure. It operates as a USD business account for companies managing cross-border treasury: firms open an account without a U.S. entity or legacy bank partnership, and can send and receive ACH, wire, SEPA, and stablecoin transfers across more than 100 countries through licensed payment service providers including Bridge, MoonPay, Infinite, and Due.

Asset custody and money movement run on Squads Protocol, which uses formally verified smart contracts on Solana's ledger, secured by the network's validators, rather than centralized servers or third-party custodians. Controls layer up from programmable approval workflows and granular permissions at the product interface to on-chain settlement for every transaction.

The business payments layer sits within a broader Squads ecosystem that includes Squads Multisig, which the company reports is used by more than 450 developer teams to secure on-chain treasuries, and Fuse, a personal finance app. Squads told SolanaCompass that the $20 billion figure represents annualized stablecoin transfer volume across the full protocol, while Altitude itself now processes $1.7 billion in annualized payment volume.

Sub-300ms Subsidiary Funding After Solana's 250ms Upgrade

Simkin's announcement arrived the same day Solana activated 250ms slot times at epoch 1037, the fourth step in SIMD-0525's reduction from 400ms toward a 200ms target. He linked the two developments in a follow-up post, describing what sub-second settlement looks like for multi-entity business customers:

The traditional path for multinational subsidiary funding runs through correspondent banking chains with multi-day settlement, currency conversion at each node, and reconciliation across multiple ledgers. On Altitude, the same transfer settles on Solana and confirms in a fraction of a second. The slot time reduction compresses the window between transaction submission and finality, which Altitude's stablecoin settlement model converts directly into faster treasury operations.

From a 2021 Hackathon Loss to $42.9M and a Global Fintech Platform

Squads began as a developer-facing multisig product for Solana teams managing on-chain treasuries. The core infrastructure (formally verified smart accounts, on-chain custody, configurable permission sets) was built during those early years before the company expanded into consumer finance and then enterprise payments.

Altitude launched publicly in December 2025. By May 2026, when Squads raised $18 million in a round led by Solana Ventures, with Coinbase Ventures, Haun Ventures, Electric Capital, Placeholder, and Jump Crypto participating, the platform had processed $200 million in payments for exporters, global agencies, and cross-border remote teams. Total funding stood at $42.9 million per that announcement.

The distance from $200 million in payments at the May 2026 raise to a $20 billion annualized volume figure announced in September reflects both the scale of Squads Protocol's broader infrastructure activity and the accelerating throughput of Altitude's enterprise customer base.

Squads is not the only company treating Solana as the default layer for enterprise stablecoin rails. As we covered when Column N.A. launched native stablecoin payments with Solana as the API default, licensed fintechs and banks are increasingly architecting new payment products directly on Solana rather than adding blockchain capabilities on top of legacy infrastructure. Altitude builds from the blockchain side of that convergence, starting with on-chain infrastructure and layering in fiat rails through PSP integrations, rather than the bank side adding blockchain capabilities.

The infrastructure built during those early, unplaced years (the multisig security model, the formally verified on-chain logic, the protocol's validator-backed custody) is the same foundation routing enterprise treasury operations at $20 billion annualized in 2026.