Loop Crypto

Loop Crypto was a crypto payments infrastructure company that built smart contract-powered recurring billing and stablecoin autopay rails for merchants, SaaS businesses, e-commerce platforms, and billing software providers. Founded in early 2022 by Eleni Steinman and Shane van Coller — who had been building together since 2018 and encountered the recurring payments problem firsthand at a prior crypto startup — the company operated until February 2026, when it wound down its standalone platform after being absorbed into Lead Bank.

What Loop Crypto Built

The central problem Loop addressed was one that any crypto-native business had run into: unlike credit card networks, blockchains have no native mechanism for recurring, authorized charges. Every payment on-chain requires a new transaction signed by the user. Loop solved this with smart contract infrastructure that let a customer authorize their wallet once, granting Loop's contracts permission to pull a defined amount at each billing interval. Subsequent charges happened without the customer taking any further action — semantically equivalent to how a stored credit card works for subscription billing.

Merchants integrated Loop via an API or through direct connectors to established billing platforms including Stripe, Chargebee, and OpenPay. Once integrated, Loop handled the full payment lifecycle: rendering a checkout interface, capturing wallet authorization, executing recurring charges on schedule, running a basic dunning sequence for failed payments, and settling proceeds either in crypto or in fiat. The fee for this service was 0.75% per transaction.

Supported Chains and Tokens

Loop operated across a wide network surface. On the EVM side, supported chains included Ethereum mainnet, Optimism, Base, Polygon, Arbitrum, and BNB Smart Chain. Loop also supported Solana, which — alongside Optimism and Arbitrum — was among the platform's most active networks, selected by merchants for its low transaction fees and deep exchange integration.

The supported token set was deliberately broad. On EVM chains, Loop accepted all ERC-20 tokens and native tokens for one-time payments and invoicing; on Solana, all SPL tokens were in scope. In practice, stablecoins dominated: they accounted for roughly 98% of Loop's payment volume. USDC was the primary currency, reflecting merchants' preference for price-stable billing rather than exposure to asset volatility across monthly subscription cycles.

Target Market and Product Lines

Loop positioned itself as infrastructure for several overlapping customer segments. SaaS companies and creator platforms — Discord communities, API-plan providers, paid content subscriptions — were the primary audience. The platform was lean enough to suit a solo developer shipping a paid service, with a product surface covering checkout, recurring charges, and basic dunning, though it lacked the enterprise-grade policy engines and advanced retry logic offered by larger payments orchestration platforms.

Beyond recurring billing, Loop offered crypto invoicing tools, wallet-charging capabilities, and a path for businesses to accept stablecoins directly within Stripe's existing payment flow. The fiat settlement option meant merchants did not need to hold digital assets themselves, lowering the operational bar for non-crypto-native businesses.

Funding and Investors

Loop raised $4 million in a seed round in April 2022, followed by a $2 million strategic round in August 2025, bringing its total disclosed funding to approximately $6 million. Backers included a16z crypto, Fabric Ventures, VanEck, and Archetype.

Acquisition by Lead Bank and Shutdown

In December 2025, Loop Crypto announced it was joining Lead Bank. Lead Bank is a 97-year-old Kansas City, Missouri community bank that was acquired in 2022 by a group of technology executives led by Jackie Reses. Under new ownership, Lead Bank repositioned itself as a banking infrastructure layer for fintechs and crypto companies, and in 2025 raised a $70 million Series B at a $1.47 billion valuation from investors including a16z, ICONIQ, Greycroft, Ribbit Capital, Coatue, Khosla Ventures, and Zeev Ventures. Lead Bank had by that point already partnered with Visa and Stripe on stablecoin-linked card initiatives, making Loop's stablecoin processing expertise a natural fit.

The rationale for the combination was strategic: Loop had built operational experience at the intersection of payments, blockchain infrastructure, and compliance — precisely the capabilities Lead Bank needed as regulated stablecoin adoption accelerated across financial institutions. Rather than operating as an independent product, Loop folded into Lead Bank's broader infrastructure, with its team and technology absorbed to strengthen Lead's digital asset payments capability.

Loop's standalone platform was put on a wind-down schedule following the announcement. Existing customers were given more than 60 days to migrate off the platform, with a service termination date of February 13, 2026. As of mid-2026, the loopcrypto.xyz domain is no longer resolving, confirming the complete cessation of independent operations.

Legacy

Loop Crypto was an early demonstration that recurring billing on crypto rails was technically achievable at production scale across multiple chains. Its 98% stablecoin payment mix reflected a broader market trend: businesses interested in crypto payments want the efficiency of on-chain settlement without the volatility of holding volatile assets, and USDC-denominated subscriptions served that need cleanly. The team's acquisition by a regulated, a16z-backed bank rather than another crypto-native company signals where the stablecoin payments stack is heading — into chartered financial institutions that can offer the compliance and settlement guarantees that enterprise merchants require.