Raise

Raise is a Chicago-based gift card marketplace founded in 2013 by George Bousis. Over more than a decade, the platform grew into one of the largest gift card exchanges in the United States, facilitating over $5 billion in transactions and accumulating more than six million app users. In 2024–2025, the company undertook a significant pivot: moving its core gift card infrastructure on-chain and selecting Solana as its blockchain partner to build what it calls a programmable gift card and loyalty ecosystem.

The Consumer Marketplace

Raise's original business is a two-sided marketplace. Sellers list unwanted or partially used gift cards from hundreds of retail brands; buyers purchase those cards at discounts that typically range from one to thirty percent below face value. Raise takes a twelve percent commission on each seller transaction. For buyers, the platform provides a one-year money-back guarantee on marketplace purchases and has layered in a rewards currency called Raise Cash, which accumulates on every transaction and can be applied to future purchases.

The Raise App also includes the GCX (Gift Card Exchange) product for higher-volume and B2B users. Enterprise partnerships with Citi Bank and BILT Rewards extend the platform's reach into financial services and property-payments rewards programs.

The Blockchain Pivot

CEO Bousis described gift cards as "the first stablecoin — trusted, transferable, and tied to real value," and has pursued on-chain tokenization of gift card balances since at least 2014. In February 2025, Raise closed a $63 million funding round led by Haun Ventures, bringing total capital raised above $220 million. The round included Amber Group, Borderless Capital, GSR, Paper Ventures, Selini Capital, and angels including Raj Gokal, co-founder of Solana. The valuation was confirmed to be no lower than Raise's prior Series D mark of $675 million.

The stated use of funds: building out SmartCards, expanding B2B blockchain integrations, and funding the Retail Alliance Foundation — a nonprofit coalition Raise established to advance open, interoperable gift card standards.

SmartCards on Solana

In December 2025, Raise Network announced it had selected Solana as its infrastructure partner for SmartCard technology, with SmartCards live on Solana mainnet. A SmartCard is a programmable, on-chain digital gift card: rather than a static balance tied to a single retailer's closed-loop system, a SmartCard represents value that can be made composable, transferable, and redeemable across a broader merchant network.

The Solana Foundation is actively supporting SmartCard development. Raise cited Solana's high throughput and low transaction costs as necessary for retail-scale payment applications — the kind of volume where per-transaction fees cannot be meaningful fractions of a dollar.

The mechanism for consumer crypto holders: deposit a supported digital asset, swap it for a SmartCard, and spend it at millions of in-store and online retailers. Prior to the Solana partnership, Raise had already launched support for USDC, USDT, ETH, DOT, BTC, and SOL as payment methods in its consumer app, processed through a WalletConnect integration that connects wallets such as Phantom, Coinbase Wallet, MetaMask, and Trust Wallet. Merchants do not need to change their existing payment infrastructure; Raise handles conversion on the back end and settles via ACH or stablecoin transfer.

By February 2026, Raise reported over $11 million in monthly on-chain volume through the SmartCards product.

The $RAISE Token

The company announced a $RAISE token expected in the first half of 2026 to support the Raise Network ecosystem. No detailed tokenomics were available in public materials at the time of writing.

Market Context

Raise is targeting a global gift card market projected to reach $2.3 trillion by 2030. The incumbent gift card infrastructure — largely magnetic stripe or static digital codes issued by individual retailers — has well-documented fraud and interoperability problems. Raise's on-chain approach is positioned as a fraud-resistant, programmable alternative that preserves the consumer experience (buy a card, spend at a retailer) while adding the settlement, composability, and loyalty programmability that blockchain infrastructure enables.

The Retail Alliance Foundation is the nonprofit vehicle meant to sign up other brands and issuers into a shared interoperable standard, rather than keeping the network proprietary to Raise.

Summary

Raise occupies an unusual position: a profitable, decade-old consumer fintech — with $5 billion in transaction history and millions of active users — now building serious on-chain infrastructure rather than simply adding a crypto payment button. With SmartCards live on Solana mainnet, significant institutional backing, and the Solana Foundation as a development partner, Raise is one of the more substantial real-world-commerce projects building on Solana as of 2026. The core consumer value proposition — spend discounted gift cards, earn rewards — remains unchanged; what is changing is the infrastructure layer beneath it.