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In the latest sign of digital currencies coming to the fore, the most famous startup incubator in Silicon Valley will allow the spring cohort of entrepreneurs to receive their funding in stablecoins. YCombinator, whose alumni include the founders of Airbnb and DoorDashannounced Tuesday that founders can choose to receive their usual allocation—usually about $500,000—in Circle-issued USDC.
Founders of startups that choose stablecoins can choose to receive tokens on different blockchains such as Ethereum and Solana, Nemil Dalal, a visiting partner at Y Combinator who focuses on crypto, said. luck. He added that Y Combinator may expand to other stablecoins depending on demand.
“Stablecoins are one of the main pillars for us,” said Dalal, referring to one of the areas where Y Combinator wants to see more startup ideas. “So we want to live and breathe that too.”
Price agnostic
While many crypto venture capitalists have allowed startups in their portfolio to take funding from stablecoins for some time, more traditional tech investors have not provided that opportunity to founders. Dalal, for example, said he doesn’t know of any legacy VCs that offer that option. “We are excited for a world where, in the future, we think many startups will eventually start raising capital on-chain,” he said.
Stablecoins have been around for over a decade but, historically, their adoption has been primarily limited to crypto traders looking for a non-volatile asset to park income. In the last two years, however, stablecoins have exploded headlines following the push of Wall Street and corporations that see assets as a faster and cheaper way to move money.
Big tech has taken notice, especially after President Donald Trump signed into law in July a bill regulating crypto assets. The fintech giant Stripes completed a $1.1 billion acquisition of stablecoin startup Bridge in February 2025 and since then BACKING proprietary blockchain designed for stablecoin transactions. The cloud infrastructure company Cloudflare Office has partnered he intends to launch his own stablecoin in September. And the buy-now-pay-later firm Klarna has Cebu launched in his own sign also in November.
Those announcements largely came during a more bullish crypto market that saw Bitcoin and other tokens hit all-time highs. Today, sentiment has dipped as the world’s largest cryptocurrency is nearing a multi-month low. However, Dalal, the visiting fellow at Y Combinator, said the bearish outlook does not apply to stablecoins. “The excitement around stablecoins is only growing,” he said. “It’s essentially agnostic of prices.”
