The London-based stablecoin yield firm adds a payments heavyweight to its board nearly six months after a $17 million raise
The man who once ran the plumbing of global banking is now chairing a stablecoin startup. Lazaro Campos, the former CEO of Swift, has joined London-based OpenTrade as chairman, the company announced Friday.
Swift is the financial messaging network that banks use to talk to each other about moving money. OpenTrade wants businesses to offer yield on stablecoins.
Who OpenTrade is and what it does
OpenTrade was founded in 2023. It builds infrastructure that lets businesses offer dollar- and euro-denominated returns backed by real-world assets.
Think of it as a back-office kit for yield. A fintech, neobank or exchange wants to pay customers a return on their stablecoin balances. Instead of building the compliance and operational machinery itself, it plugs into OpenTrade.
Real-world assets, or RWAs, are traditional financial instruments represented on a blockchain. The pitch is that customers earn returns tied to conventional finance while holding digital dollars or euros.
OpenTrade lists JPMorgan, BlackRock, Franklin Templeton and Fidelity among the institutional partners providing those yields.
The appointment lands nearly six months after OpenTrade raised $17 million to expand its operations. That round, which closed in May 2026, brought the company’s total funding to $32 million to date.
The numbers behind the pitch
OpenTrade has reported more than $300 million in total value locked, the amount of capital sitting in its products. The company has also reported processing over $600 million in cumulative transaction volume.
The investor list leans heavily toward crypto-native and venture names. Backers include a16z Crypto, Circle, Mercury Fund, Notion Capital, AlbionVC and CMCC Global.
Circle’s presence is worth noting. Circle issues USDC, and OpenTrade CEO David Sutter previously headed Network Strategy at Centre, the Circle joint venture set up for USDC governance.
So the company already had stablecoin insiders running the show. What it adds with Campos is someone who spent years at the center of traditional cross-border payments.
Why a Swift veteran matters here
OpenTrade’s customers are financial businesses that care about governance, compliance and counterparty trust. A chairman who led the network banks rely on for payment messaging brings a kind of credibility that is hard to buy with a marketing budget.
There is some irony in the move. Stablecoins have often been pitched as a faster, cheaper alternative to legacy payment rails like Swift. Now Swift’s former chief is helping steer a company built on those very instruments.
What this means for the stablecoin yield market
OpenTrade’s model positions itself as compliant infrastructure, sourcing returns from established asset managers and banks, and letting partner firms distribute the product under their own brands.
That approach has clear appeal for neobanks and exchanges. They get a yield feature without building a treasury desk or a compliance department from scratch. OpenTrade gets distribution through other companies’ customer bases.
Risks remain. OpenTrade depends on the health of its yield sources, the appetite of fintechs to offer these products, and how regulators treat stablecoin returns in the markets it serves.
Its reported $300 million in TVL is a credible start, but the company will need to show it can scale that figure as competition for RWA-backed yield intensifies.
