Rhino.fi provides a stablecoin activation stack that helps fintechs, payment processors, neobanks, and other businesses accept and use stablecoins without building the underlying infrastructure themselves. Its technology supports deposits, chain and asset abstraction, cross-chain movement, settlement flows, liquidity access, and the operational infrastructure needed to make stablecoin payments work in practice. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Rhino.fi Founder Will Harborne to learn more.
Will Harborne’s Background
When asked about his background, Harborne shared:
I’m an engineer by background and studied at Cambridge in the UK.
I joined Tether early, at a time when stablecoins were still a very niche part of crypto and almost nobody really appreciated how important they would become.
I worked on launching USDT on Ethereum, which was one of the early steps in taking stablecoins from a closed exchange tool into something much more open and programmable.
Looking back, that was a front-row seat to the beginning of a very big shift in financial infrastructure.
I later founded Rhino.fi, where we now focus on helping businesses use stablecoin rails in a way that is simple, reliable, and enterprise-ready.
How Rhino.fi Started
When asked how the idea for the company came together, Harborne explained:
Rhino.fi started from a problem we ran into ourselves.
We were originally building an early DeFi super app with trading, yield, and other products, but the hardest part was not the app experience itself. It was getting users and liquidity in from all the different chains.
We ended up building a lot of infrastructure just to make onboarding, deposits, routing, and asset movement work properly.
Over time, it became obvious that this infrastructure problem was bigger than the application problem.
So we shifted the company toward that. What started as something we built for ourselves became the core product we now offer to other businesses.
Harborne’s Responsibilities
When asked about his primary responsibilities, Harborne said:
As founder, my role is a mix of product, strategy, hiring, fundraising, and working closely with customers and partners.
In practice, a lot of my time goes into understanding where the market is going, what larger customers need, and how we make sure the product evolves from crypto infrastructure into something that can support mainstream financial use cases.
A big part of the job is helping the company make the jump from being technically impressive to being operationally indispensable.
One-To-One Stablecoin Transfers
When asked about his favorite memory working for the company so far, Harborne recalled:
One of my favourite moments was launching our one-to-one stablecoin feature.
On the surface, it sounds simple: allowing someone to take, say, 1000 USDT on one chain and receive the exact same number of another stablecoin, 1000 USDC, on another chain, one-to-one.
A few years ago, I probably would have looked at that and thought it was not technically flashy enough to be interesting.
But what I learned is that the features that look simple are often the ones that matter most to real users, and the complexity behind the scenes to make it look that simple is really tough to build and scale.
In payments, exactness matters. If a merchant is expecting a specific amount, the infrastructure has to deliver that cleanly, without slippage or unnecessary complexity.
What made that moment special was the level of inbound demand we saw for it, especially from real businesses supporting real payment flows rather than just DeFi-native users.
That was the point where I felt we had really matured, from building a DeFi product into building real infrastructure that companies and end users actually rely on.
Core Products And Features
When asked about Rhino.fi’s core products and features, Harborne detailed:
Rhino.fi provides what we call a stablecoin activation stack.
In simple terms, we help fintechs, payment processors, neobanks, and other businesses accept and use stablecoins without having to build the underlying infrastructure themselves.
That includes deposits, chain and asset abstraction, cross-chain movement, settlement flows, liquidity access, and the operational layer that makes stablecoin payments work in practice.
The goal is to make stablecoin rails feel less like crypto plumbing and more like modern financial infrastructure.
We are focused on removing complexity so our customers can launch stablecoin products quickly, reliably, and at enterprise standard.
Our most demanded feature is our Smart Deposit Addresses.
Moving From DeFi To B2B Fintech
When asked about challenges in the sector and how Rhino.fi overcame them, Harborne noted:
The biggest challenge was recognising that our original market had limits.
We peaked in DeFi and it became clear that the DeFi-native user base was not growing fast enough to support the scale of business we wanted to build.
That meant making a difficult transition out of a market we knew very well and into B2B fintech, where the customer expectations, buying process, and operating model were completely different.
It was a painful transition. We had to learn enterprise sales, think much more deeply about compliance and reliability, and build for a customer that cared less about novelty and more about outcomes.
But it was absolutely the right move.
Today, the opportunity feels dramatically larger because we are no longer building for a capped crypto-native market. We are building for the future financial infrastructure market.
Technology Evolution
When asked how Rhino.fi’s technology has evolved since launching, Harborne explained:
We started by building user-facing DeFi products, so the early focus was on crypto-native workflows.
Over time, the technology evolved into a deeper infrastructure stack designed to manage multi-chain stablecoin flows, deposits, liquidity, routing, and settlement in a way that businesses can depend on.
The biggest shift has been from building for crypto power users to building for companies that want the benefits of stablecoins without needing to understand the technical complexity underneath.
That has required us to become far more rigorous around reliability, predictability, compliance, and ease of integration.
In many ways, the technology has grown up alongside the market.
Major Company Milestones
When asked about some of Rhino.fi’s most significant milestones, Harborne said:
We tend to think about milestones less in terms of headlines and more in terms of the size and sophistication of customers we are able to serve.
When we first started working with businesses, many were relatively small, sometimes doing around $1 million a month in volume.
For me, the big milestones have been each time we win a larger client and prove to ourselves that we are becoming more enterprise-ready.
One major milestone was closing Wirex. They are one of the biggest players in the space, with a strong retail product and infrastructure around card payments, crypto, and stablecoins. Winning them as a client felt like a genuine level-up for us. It validated the product, but just as importantly, it pushed us to improve our feature set and operating standards to support a much larger platform.
Another significant milestone was closing Extended. They are one of the strongest teams in the perpetuals space, and working with them pushed us to increase the size of transactions we could support instantly. Their users need to move large amounts of capital quickly, so serving them forced us to make the infrastructure more robust.
That kind of customer is valuable not just commercially, but because it helps sharpen the product.
A more recent milestone was submitting our EU regulatory and payment services licence application. That marks an important next phase for the company and opens the door to serving a broader set of fintech, enterprise, and regulated financial customers across Europe.
KettlePay Customer Success
When asked to share a specific customer success story, Harborne highlighted:
KettlePay is a good example of the kind of customer we love working with.
They process high-value stablecoin payments for real-world commerce, including categories like real estate and luxury goods, where exact settlement and speed really matter. In total they facilitate >$50M / month of transaction value.
Their main payment corridor, Base to Tron, was difficult to operate reliably at scale, especially with slippage, liquidity constraints, and reconciliation overhead.
Rhino.fi helped them bring settlement on that corridor down from roughly 15 minutes to under 60 seconds, with zero slippage and no manual top-ups.
That is exactly the category we are building for: businesses that want to use stablecoins in serious payment flows without having to build all the underlying infrastructure themselves.
Funding And Revenue Growth
When asked about funding and revenue metrics, Harborne shared:
We initially raised venture funding in 2021.
We were fortunate to build meaningful revenue from the product through 2022 to 2024, and that allowed us to keep investing in the business and in growth.
Today we are a team of nearly 30 people, serving a growing set of clients and generating real revenue from the platform.
On the B2B side in particular, growth has been very strong.
Over the last six months, we have seen periods of 100% month-on-month revenue growth, and we are reinvesting that momentum into scaling the platform and serving larger and more sophisticated customers.
The reason we are leaning in is simple: the market opportunity is vast.
Market Opportunity
When discussing the total addressable market Rhino.fi is pursuing, Harborne explained:
We think the opportunity is extremely large because stablecoins are becoming a new settlement layer for global finance.
Over the next decade every fintech in the world will need to accept and transact with stablecoins, and won’t want to build that infrastructure from scratch.
In the near term, the market is fintechs, payment processors, neobanks, exchanges, and enterprises that want to integrate stablecoin payments, treasury, and deposits.
Over time, that expands much further to any business that moves money internationally or wants faster, cheaper, and more programmable financial infrastructure.
So we do not see ourselves as serving a narrow crypto market. We see ourselves as building for a much broader financial infrastructure market that is only just starting to emerge.
Competitive Differentiation
When asked what differentiates Rhino.fi from its competition, Harborne emphasized:
Our background is unusual because we came out of actually building and operating in very complex on-chain environments (DeFi) ourselves.
We did not approach this market from theory. We lived the pain points first-hand.
That means we understand the messy reality underneath stablecoin infrastructure, not just the headline narrative around adoption.
We also focus very specifically on making stablecoin rails usable for businesses, which means simplifying multi-chain complexity, reducing integration burden, and building for operational reliability.
More broadly, we are trying to bridge two worlds: deep crypto-native technical expertise and the needs of regulated, enterprise-facing financial companies.
That combination is still relatively rare.
Future Goals
When discussing Rhino.fi’s future goals, Harborne said:
Our biggest goal is to become truly enterprise-ready at global scale.
We want to make it easy for businesses around the world to work with stablecoins through infrastructure that is reliable, compliant, and simple to integrate.
We are particularly focused today on Africa, Latam and European markets, where we think there is a real opportunity to build a strong native infrastructure provider for banks, fintechs, and enterprises.
A lot of the stablecoin ecosystem today is centred in New York, and there is a great group of companies emerging there.
But category leaders will emerge across all jurisdictions.
That is why getting regulated in the EU (for example) and supporting European stablecoins and European businesses is such an important part of our roadmap.
We want Rhino.fi to be one of the companies that helps define what enterprise-grade stablecoin infrastructure looks like in these markets.
The Stablecoin Infrastructure Shift
When invited to discuss another topic, Harborne concluded:
One point I would emphasise is that the stablecoin conversation has changed quite dramatically.
A few years ago, the question was whether stablecoins would matter at all.
Now that question is over.
Stablecoins have already proven that they are here to stay.
The more interesting question now is who will build the infrastructure layer that makes them usable for mainstream businesses.
That is the shift we are building for at Rhino.fi.