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 stablecoin yield firm OpenTrade as chairman, the company announced Friday — a sign of how fast traditional finance heavyweights are moving into crypto infrastructure.
Swift is the financial messaging network connecting more than 11,000 financial institutions worldwide and moving up to $1.5 quadrillion annually. During Campos’s tenure there, the network’s transaction volumes nearly doubled, OpenTrade said. He also served on the boards overseeing the Bank of England’s real-time gross settlement system and the CHAPS payments system, sat on digital bank Starling’s board, and currently chairs Payoneer Europe.
What OpenTrade Does — and Why Campos Joined
Founded in 2023, OpenTrade builds infrastructure that lets fintechs, exchanges and digital wallets offer dollar- and euro-denominated returns on stablecoin balances, backed by real-world assets (RWAs) — traditional instruments represented on a blockchain. Instead of building compliance and investment machinery themselves, businesses plug into OpenTrade. The firm lists JPMorgan, BlackRock, Franklin Templeton and Fidelity among the institutional partners providing those yields, according to CoinDesk.
“I’ve spent most of my career on the infrastructure the world uses to move money. Stablecoins are the next chapter, and yield is what makes them useful to businesses and the people they serve,” Campos said in the announcement.
Growth After the $17 Million Raise
The appointment lands nearly six months after OpenTrade raised $17 million in a strategic round led by Mercury Fund and Notion Capital with participation from a16z Crypto, bringing total funding to $32 million to date. Since then, the firm says it has processed more than $1 billion in transactions over the past 12 months and grown to $300 million in total value locked, up from just over $200 million in May.
OpenTrade says Campos will help it expand as more financial firms adopt stablecoins. The hire comes as the global stablecoin market has surpassed $300 billion in supply, driving demand for the kind of institutional-grade yield infrastructure OpenTrade sells.
Lazaro Campos (Credits: CoinDesk)
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Source: CoinDesk — read the full story there.
