Gluon
Gluon is a money app built on stablecoin rails rather than on a bank account.
- Category
- Fintech
- Fund
- NZVC II
- Website
- gluon.money
What Gluon does
Transfers arrive in seconds with no intermediary in between, a recipient takes one click to set up, and the Gluon Card spends anywhere Visa is accepted, online and in store, through Apple Pay or Google Pay and with no bank account behind it. Gluon Grow puts an idle balance into Bitcoin and Ethereum money markets for yield. Bette Chen and Ruitao Su founded the company after building Acala on Polkadot, which put a stablecoin, an exchange and liquid staking on that network.
The secret
Acala taught the founders that a new chain attracts speculators far more readily than it attracts people who want to move money. Gluon answers that by hiding the chain. The stablecoin rails stay underneath, and what a user sees is a balance, a card and a savings account.
Why NZVC invested in Gluon
We invested in Gluon because Bette Chen and Ruitao Su had already built serious infrastructure on Polkadot and drew the right lesson from it, which is that the rails matter far less than whether an ordinary person can use them. Gluon settles in stablecoin rather than through a correspondent bank, and that is what makes a transfer land in seconds and a card work with no bank account behind it. The team is building the consumer layer on top of those rails rather than selling the rails.