Making Global Business Run on Solana: Squads

With over $15 billion already secured on their infrastructure, Squads is now betting big on a future where every global business runs its financial operations through stablecoin rails on Solana. At Breakpoint 2025, co-founder and CEO Stepan Simkin revealed Altitude—a groundbreaking business account platform that could fundamentally reshape how companies worldwide manage their money.

Summary

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Squads, the leading smart account and multi-signature infrastructure provider for Solana and SVM, has evolved from securing crypto treasuries to building what could become the future of global business banking. Since 2021, the company has been developing critical infrastructure that now protects billions in value for major Solana ecosystem players.

The revelation of Altitude marks a strategic pivot for Squads. After observing that many of their multi-sig customers were essentially using the product as their de facto business bank account—running payroll and financial operations entirely on stablecoin rails—the team recognized an opportunity to build purpose-built infrastructure for this use case.

Altitude offers businesses the ability to create both dollar and euro accounts, send and receive both fiat and stablecoin transfers, access a complete CFO suite including bill pay, invoicing, and accounting, and earn yield on capital held within the account. This represents a comprehensive solution that bridges traditional finance with the efficiency of blockchain-based rails.

The platform targets businesses that already hold stablecoins on their balance sheets, but Simkin's vision extends far beyond crypto-native companies. The ultimate goal is enabling any global business to leverage Altitude for their financial operations, potentially disrupting traditional banking infrastructure across the world.

Key Points:

The Three Advantages of Stablecoin Rails

Squads has identified three transformative advantages that building on stablecoin rails provides over traditional fintech infrastructure: reach, speed, and autonomy.

The reach advantage fundamentally inverts the traditional fintech expansion model. Conventional financial technology companies face enormous barriers when expanding globally—they must secure licenses, establish local banking partnerships, and navigate complex regulatory frameworks market by market. This process consumes significant time and capital. With stablecoin rails and self-custodial accounts, Squads can create accounts for customers globally without these regulatory hurdles. The model becomes "go global first, then establish local connectivity" for fiat on-ramps, off-ramps, and card services where it makes strategic sense.

Speed represents another crucial advantage. Because Altitude is built natively on Solana, businesses can access DeFi yields, real-world asset yields, and trading capabilities at unprecedented speeds. What would traditionally require six months of partnership negotiations becomes a simple integration for Squads' customers, dramatically accelerating time-to-market for financial services.

Autonomous Finance and Programmable Guardrails

The concept of autonomous finance—where AI agents manage financial operations independently—has been a persistent promise in fintech. However, Simkin argues that current implementations are fundamentally limited because they require human intervention. Agents, despite their intelligence, cannot be fully trusted: they can be compromised, hallucinate, or make errors. When dealing with money, "almost always right" simply isn't acceptable.

Squads' solution pairs "probabilistic intelligence with deterministic execution." In practical terms, this means businesses can grant an AI agent access to their financial account while implementing strict programmatic guardrails that define exactly what the agent can and cannot do. This architecture enables dramatically greater autonomy in financial operations while maintaining security through immutable, on-chain constraints.

The implications are significant: bill pay that automatically verifies and executes payments, treasury operations that run on schedule without human involvement, portfolios that rebalance across yield sources automatically, and foreign exchange operations that optimize based on market conditions rather than human memory.

Grid API and Developer Infrastructure

Beyond the consumer-facing Altitude product, Squads is positioning itself as foundational infrastructure for the next generation of financial services companies. Their API product, called Grid, enables other builders to leverage Squads' technology to construct their own financial applications.

Simkin emphasized that entrepreneurs interested in building major financial services companies should consider Solana as their foundation, using Squads infrastructure to accelerate development by an order of magnitude. This positions Squads not just as a product company, but as a platform play that could underpin an entire ecosystem of stablecoin-based financial services.

Facts + Figures

• Squads has been developing on Solana since 2021, making them one of the longer-standing infrastructure providers in the ecosystem

• The platform currently secures over $15 billion in value across the Solana ecosystem

• Squads infrastructure powers treasury programs, staking, and validator operations for major Solana ecosystem teams

• Altitude supports both dollar and euro account creation for businesses

• The platform includes a full CFO suite with bill pay, invoicing, and accounting functionality

• Traditional fintech partnership negotiations can take six months; stablecoin rail integrations can be accomplished through simple technical integrations

• Altitude currently targets businesses that already have stablecoins on their balance sheet, with plans to expand to all global businesses

• Squads' Grid API will be detailed further in a presentation by Carlos at the same event

Top quotes

• "For a lot of them, the multi-sig became the de facto business bank account. They would run payroll, do all kinds of financial operations, essentially entirely on stablecoin rails using our infrastructure and Solana."

• "When you're building on stablecoin rails, the model is flipped. By using self-custodial stablecoin accounts, you can create a stablecoin account for each of your customers globally without any regulatory hurdles."

• "First you go global and then you establish the necessary local partnerships where you think it makes the most sense for your business."

• "In traditional fintech, what would take six months of negotiating partnerships for us is just a simple integration."

• "The agents, while clearly smart enough to run financial operations on our behalf, they can't be trusted. They can be compromised. They can hallucinate. They can make mistakes. And when it comes to money, almost always right is not good enough."

• "You solve that by pairing probabilistic intelligence with deterministic execution."

• "Intelligence isn't the main bottleneck today. The rails are."

• "If you're thinking about building the next giant financial services company, I encourage you to do this on Solana, and you can use our infrastructure to do this 10x faster."

Questions Answered

What is Altitude and who is it designed for?

Altitude is a global business account platform built entirely on stablecoin rails on Solana. It allows businesses to create dollar and euro accounts, send and receive both fiat and stablecoin transfers, access comprehensive financial tools including bill pay, invoicing, and accounting, and earn yield on their capital. Currently, Altitude focuses on businesses that already hold stablecoins on their balance sheet, such as crypto-native companies, DAOs, and blockchain projects. However, the long-term vision encompasses any global business seeking to run financial operations more efficiently through stablecoin infrastructure.

How does building on stablecoin rails differ from traditional fintech expansion?

Traditional fintech companies face a laborious market-by-market expansion process requiring regulatory licenses, local banking partnerships, and significant capital investment for each new geography. This can take years and millions of dollars. Stablecoin rails invert this model entirely—by leveraging self-custodial accounts, a company can offer services globally from day one without navigating individual regulatory frameworks. The strategy becomes establishing global reach first, then selectively building fiat connectivity and local partnerships in high-priority markets. This dramatically reduces both the time and cost required to offer financial services internationally.

How does Squads enable truly autonomous financial operations?

Squads addresses the trust problem in autonomous finance by combining AI intelligence with programmatic, on-chain guardrails. Rather than giving an AI agent unlimited access to financial accounts—which creates unacceptable risk due to potential compromises, hallucinations, or errors—Squads allows businesses to define strict rules about what an agent can and cannot do. These constraints are enforced deterministically through smart contracts, meaning even a malfunctioning or compromised agent cannot violate them. This architecture enables practical autonomous finance: automatic bill payment verification and execution, scheduled treasury operations, portfolio rebalancing, and optimized foreign exchange transactions.

What is the Grid API and why should developers care about it?

Grid is Squads' API product that allows developers to build their own financial applications using Squads' battle-tested infrastructure. For entrepreneurs looking to create financial services companies, Grid offers a significant acceleration—Simkin claims it can speed development by ten times compared to building from scratch. This means startups can focus on their unique value propositions rather than rebuilding fundamental account management, security, and transaction infrastructure. Grid essentially positions Squads as a platform layer for the emerging stablecoin-based financial services industry.

Why does Squads believe "the rails are the bottleneck" for autonomous finance?

Despite significant advances in AI capability, truly autonomous financial operations remain elusive in traditional finance. Simkin argues this isn't because AI isn't smart enough—it clearly is—but because existing financial infrastructure cannot safely accommodate autonomous agents. Traditional banking rails lack the programmability to enforce constraints on what an agent can do. Blockchain-based smart contract rails, by contrast, can encode precise rules that execute automatically and cannot be circumvented. This makes Solana's infrastructure uniquely suited to enable the autonomous finance future that traditional fintech has promised but cannot deliver.

How much value does Squads currently secure and who uses their infrastructure?

Squads currently secures over $15 billion in value across the Solana ecosystem. Their infrastructure is used by major projects for treasury management, staking operations, and validator security. While specific client names weren't detailed in the presentation, Simkin indicated that many of the most prominent Solana ecosystem teams rely on Squads' multi-signature technology for their critical financial operations.