Kado

Kado was a Web3 payments infrastructure company that built fiat on-ramp and off-ramp tooling for the Solana ecosystem and the broader multi-chain landscape. Founded in May 2021 by Emery Andrew and Vince Dowdle — who first connected during a Terra community hackathon — Kado was built on a single premise: if moving money from a bank account into a self-custody crypto wallet takes more than a few minutes, most people will not bother. The company set out to close that gap with a developer-embeddable widget and a consumer-facing ramp that worked across major blockchains without routing users through a centralized exchange.

Fiat On-Ramp as Infrastructure

Kado's core product was Kado Ramp, a white-label widget that cryptocurrency applications could integrate in under ten minutes. Rather than redirecting users to an external exchange to fund their wallets, developers could embed Kado's on-ramp directly inside their own user experience. The widget accepted bank transfers via ACH and wire from more than 11,500 US financial institutions, and processed Visa and Mastercard payments across more than 160 countries. Additional payment methods included Apple Pay, Google Pay, SEPA, and PIX, extending the platform's reach into European and Brazilian markets.

KYC onboarding was engineered for speed. Kado's verification flow took under five minutes with a reported 98% instant-approval rate — a meaningful differentiator in a category where slow or rejected verifications are a common reason new crypto users give up and return to centralized exchanges.

The early traction was real: Kado Ramp processed more than 1 million USD in transactions during its first week of operation, a signal that demand for non-custodial wallet on-ramps existed at scale.

Multi-Chain Coverage with a Solana Focus

Kado supported native on-chain deposits across Solana, Ethereum, Avalanche, and Cosmos IBC. For Solana specifically, users could purchase SOL or USDC and receive the assets directly in their Solana wallet without bridging from another network — eliminating a frequently frustrating step for users new to DeFi. Compatible wallets included Phantom (Solana's largest self-custody wallet), MetaMask (Ethereum), and Keplr (Cosmos).

The Solana fit was natural. Low transaction fees and fast settlement made Solana well-suited for on-ramp use cases: a user could fund a Phantom wallet with USDC in seconds at minimal cost, then immediately deploy capital into Solana-native DeFi protocols. Kado's integration made that chain of steps feel closer to a single transaction than a multi-platform process.

Product Suite Beyond the Ramp

Kado developed two products alongside the core ramp:

Kado Pay allowed users to spend crypto held in Web3 wallets at traditional merchants, connecting self-custody wallets to real-world commerce. This addressed a persistent gap between DeFi-native assets and day-to-day purchasing power.

Kado Save was a savings product built around stablecoin yields, designed to give users a destination for idle dollar-pegged assets without leaving the self-custody environment.

Together, the three products — Ramp, Pay, Save — formed a layered financial stack meant to serve users from first deposit through active use of their on-chain assets.

Funding and Investors

In March 2022, Kado closed a 5.4 million USD seed round led by Hashed, the Seoul-headquartered venture fund with broad exposure to layer-1 and DeFi ecosystems. Co-investors included Circle Ventures, Race Capital, Collab+Currency, Republic Capital, PrimeBlock Ventures, T&G Ventures, and angel investors including Blockworks co-founder Jason Yanowitz.

Circle Ventures' participation carried strategic weight. Circle is the issuer of USDC — the primary stablecoin Kado moved on-chain — so the investment aligned Kado's product roadmap with the direction of regulated dollar-denominated stablecoins at a time when USDC was expanding rapidly across Solana and other L1 networks.

The seed capital was earmarked for expanding blockchain and payment method compatibility, building out the B2B2C merchant layer, and growing the engineering team.

Acquisition by Swapped.com

On April 21, 2025, Swapped.com announced the acquisition of Kado Software. Swapped.com is a regulated cryptocurrency exchange and on-ramp platform serving more than 3 million customers across 150+ countries, with regulatory registrations from ASIC (Australia), Fintrac (Canada), and the Danish FSA. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition brought Kado's US operations and developer-focused product experience into a larger entity with established multi-jurisdictional compliance infrastructure. Emery Andrew, Kado's co-founder, remained with the combined company to lead US operations and product development. Andrew stated at the time: "By combining our expertise, we can accelerate the development of best-in-class Web3 products and user experiences."

Following the deal, the kado.money domain redirected to Swapped.com, where the on-ramp and off-ramp infrastructure now operates under the Swapped brand. The widget and API capabilities that Kado had built for third-party developers were absorbed into Swapped.com's B2B offering, continuing to serve crypto applications that need embedded payment rails.

Context in the Solana Ecosystem

Kado was among the earlier fiat on-ramp platforms to offer native Solana support, arriving at a moment when Solana-based DeFi was expanding rapidly and user onboarding remained a bottleneck for the ecosystem. The combination of Phantom wallet compatibility and sub-five-minute KYC made Kado a practical choice for Solana applications looking to bring new users on-chain without sending them away to an exchange first.

The company's acquisition in 2025 reflects a structural reality in the fiat gateway space: building and maintaining compliance across multiple countries and payment systems is capital- and license-intensive. Consolidation with established regulated entities has become the most common outcome for specialist on-ramp providers that built genuine technology but lacked the resources to scale global compliance independently. Kado's product lives on within Swapped.com; the brand itself was retired with the close of the deal.