Tether and Fasanara Capital Commit $400 Million to Launch StableFund, a Stablecoin-Backed Private Credit Vehicle
Across dozens of fast-growing economies, small businesses share a familiar problem: a fintech app can get them a customer, a supplier, even a way to accept payments — but not the working capital to bridge the days or weeks between fulfilling an order and getting paid for it. Banks in these markets often won’t lend against that gap at all, or price it so high it isn’t worth taking. Tether and Fasanara Capital are betting that stablecoins, not banks, are the fix.
The two firms announced StableFund on September 9, an evergreen private credit vehicle seeded with $400 million in co-investment from Tether and Fasanara, with an ambition to raise up to $3 billion more from institutional investors over time. The fund’s mechanics are narrower than the headline number suggests: it isn’t handing out crypto loans or accepting digital assets as collateral. Instead, Fasanara will manage the fund’s investment strategy, deploying capital into short-term, asset-backed loans for small and medium-sized enterprises through its existing fintech lending network, which spans more than 60 countries. Tether’s role is to co-originate deals and embed USDT into the settlement and financing infrastructure underneath those loans.
“USD₮ was built to be money that works everywhere, across borders, around the clock, without friction,” Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said in the companies’ announcement. Fasanara CEO Francesco Filia framed the partnership as a matter of complementary strengths: “Tether brings something unique to that equation: the largest stablecoin network in the world, a crypto-native investor base with significant capital capacity.”
The timing lines up with a broader shift in where private credit is headed. The asset class has grown into an estimated $3 trillion global market and is projected by industry forecasters to reach $5 trillion by 2029, driven largely by non-bank lenders stepping in where traditional banks have pulled back. Global financing gaps for small and medium-sized businesses are estimated at roughly $5.7 trillion — a shortfall StableFund’s backers argue stablecoin-based settlement can help close by cutting the cost and friction of moving money across borders compared with traditional correspondent banking.
For Tether, StableFund extends a pattern of pushing USDT beyond simple trading and remittances into real-economy financing infrastructure, following earlier moves into gold-backed products and other asset classes. For Fasanara, a London-based asset manager with more than $6 billion under management across asset-backed credit and fintech lending, the partnership brings a much larger balance sheet and distribution network than the firm could access on its own. Whether the fund can actually deploy $3 billion of institutional capital at scale — and do so profitably in markets with historically higher default risk — will be the real test of whether this becomes a template other stablecoin issuers try to copy, or a one-off experiment.
Stablecoin-linked financial products and private credit investments carry counterparty, liquidity, and default risks distinct from holding cryptocurrency directly. Nothing here is financial advice. New to how stablecoins function day to day? Start with Coin680’s Bitcoin Academy.