Glacis Labs, the company behind multichain clearing platform ZeroDelta, has raised a $6.8 million seed round with participation from Franklin Templeton, Coinbase Ventures, Faction, Arrington Capital, IDC Ventures, and Paper Ventures. The startup plans to use the capital to extend ZeroDelta beyond stablecoin settlement into tokenized securities and foreign exchange, positioning the platform as a full-service clearinghouse for institutional digital asset flows.

What ZeroDelta Does

ZeroDelta lets banks, payment platforms, stablecoin issuers, exchanges, funds, fintechs, and wallets move digital assets across more than 40 blockchains through a single SDK integration. The platform executes par-value swaps between stablecoins, meaning institutions trade at face value with no price slippage and no market impact. Settlement is atomic: the asset transfer and the payment leg complete simultaneously inside a single block, which eliminates the settlement risk that plagues traditional multi-day settlement cycles. Compliance is built into the protocol itself rather than added as a separate layer. Know-Your-Business verification, travel rule reporting, and on-chain audit logging are all enforced at the protocol level, a design choice that matters significantly for regulated institutions.

Glacis reports that ZeroDelta has settled more than $1 billion in total volume and is currently running at a $1.5 billion annual pace. These figures come from the company's own website and have not been independently verified on-chain. ZeroDelta does not appear to have an associated protocol token as of publication date.

Filling the Gap Left by Everclear

The timing of this raise is not coincidental. Everclear, formerly known as Connext, shut down its protocol, foundation, and labs unit ahead of this raise after failing to build sustainable commercial traction despite hitting $500 million in monthly volume at its peak. Its CLEAR token fell 48% on the announcement. Everclear had pioneered netting-based cross-chain settlement, but according to reporting by The Block, it never developed the commercial depth needed to serve institutional clients and appeared to prioritize protocol liquidity routing over institutional B2B sales. Glacis is stepping into that vacuum with a compliance-first model designed specifically for corporate and institutional clients.

Investor Context

Franklin Templeton's participation signals more than financial conviction. The firm, which manages $1.78 trillion in assets, formally launched a dedicated crypto investment unit called Franklin Crypto in June 2026 and already operates tokenized fund products on public blockchains. Its investment in Glacis reflects a direct institutional interest in the settlement infrastructure that tokenized assets will require at scale. Coinbase Ventures, for its part, was the most active crypto venture investor by deal count in the first half of 2026, closing 30 investments across the sector.

The round follows a $2.1 million seed Glacis closed in 2024, led by Arrington Capital and Paper Ventures, both of which returned for this raise.

Glacis was co-founded by Jacob Blish, who serves as CEO, and Sam Patel. Blish previously worked at JPMorgan and later led growth at Lido Finance, scaling its total value locked from $100 million to $20 billion. He also co-founded Spruce, a startup that participated in Y Combinator's Winter 2021 cohort. Patel brings an enterprise technology background spanning VMware, Cisco, and KKR. The combination of institutional finance experience and enterprise sales depth is central to Glacis's pitch to regulated clients.

Why This Matters Outside the United States

The implications for South Asian and African markets are concrete. In South Asia, which posted an 80% increase in stablecoin-driven transaction volumes through mid-2025, remittance and B2B trade corridors between India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Gulf states remain expensive and slow because they depend on correspondent banking networks. ZeroDelta's multi-chain reach and built-in travel rule compliance align with what regulators in India (Reserve Bank of India oversight) and Singapore (Monetary Authority of Singapore stablecoin licensing) require of compliant crypto settlement infrastructure. Hong Kong presents a parallel opportunity: the Hong Kong Monetary Authority issued its first stablecoin licenses in April 2026, making both Singapore and Hong Kong natural entry points for ZeroDelta's institutional sales efforts in the region.

Africa presents a similarly direct use case. Sub-Saharan Africa received more than $205 billion in on-chain value between mid-2024 and mid-2025, a 52% year-over-year increase. Nigeria alone accounts for 60% of stablecoin inflows to the region since 2019. Nigerian fintechs now operate under a framework that recognizes digital assets as securities under the Investments and Securities Act 2025, and the Central Bank of Nigeria has begun relaxing restrictions on bank-to-crypto-service-provider partnerships. South Africa, Kenya, and several other countries have enacted or are drafting comparable licensing regimes. A KYB-verified clearinghouse with automated AML logging gives these newly licensed institutions a settlement layer designed to address the compliance requirements of their local regulators. That said, dollar-denominated stablecoins raise concerns about digital dollarization, a dynamic the IMF has flagged as politically sensitive in markets like Nigeria, where monetary sovereignty remains a live policy debate and an important counterweight to uncritically bullish adoption narratives.

The Larger Market

Glacis is entering a market that is growing rapidly on multiple fronts. The global stablecoin market cap stands at roughly $322 billion as of June 2026. Tokenized real-world assets outside stablecoins, including bonds, funds, and commodities, reached approximately $31 billion in July 2026 after growing at more than 200% annually between early 2024 and early 2026. BlackRock's BUIDL tokenized fund alone holds more than $2.5 billion as of May 2026. McKinsey projects the tokenized RWA market could reach $2 trillion by 2030.

Glacis's planned expansion into tokenized securities settlement puts it directly in that path, and the company enters this moment with a structural advantage its rivals lack: it is the institutional survivor in a segment that just lost its most prominent player. Everclear's shutdown has left a gap in netting-based cross-chain clearing, and the firms best positioned to fill it are those built around compliance and enterprise sales rather than protocol token economics. Markets in Singapore, Hong Kong, South Africa, and Nigeria all have active or emerging regulatory frameworks for tokenized securities, and each will need settlement infrastructure capable of satisfying local compliance requirements. Whether ZeroDelta can convert its early stablecoin volume into a durable position in that much larger market is the central question this raise sets out to answer.