Spark Drops Consumer App to Power DeFi Backend
Get the Finance newsletter
Daily finance — markets, central banks, M&A, the prints that move money. Free.
- Spark shelved its consumer app indefinitely, pivoting from competing with Coinbase, PayPal and Robinhood for users to a B2B2C model that supplies yield and liquidity to apps consumers already use, CEO Sam MacPherson said
- Robinhood Earn's $200 million vault, launched at roughly 7% APY on USDG, routes funds through a Morpho onchain vault curated by Steakhouse Financial, with Spark's spUSDG serving as one of three collateral sources
- Spark's annual revenue fell from about $80 million during the bull market to roughly $20 million today, while Bitcoin-backed OTC loans through Anchorage stand at $260 million outstanding with a $1 billion year-end target
- Spark migrated roughly $150 million into Uniswap v4 pools pairing USDS against USDT and PYUSD via a hook called DualPool, capturing about 30% of stablecoin-to-stablecoin swap volume and routing $1.5 billion in its first 30 days
- The stablecoin market is fragmenting across PayPal's PYUSD, Circle's USDC, Tether's USDT, Robinhood's Global Dollar consortium membership and Stripe/Coinbase's OpenUSD, with Spark positioning as a neutral intermediary layer
- Spark is pursuing credit ratings from S&P and Moody's alongside crypto-native agency Credora to ease institutional onboarding, as MacPherson projects onchain payments reaching $3 trillion by 2030
Why it matters: Spark's B2B2C pivot lets it capture retail deposits (like the $200 million Robinhood Earn vault) without owning customer relationships, but the strategy depends on issuers like PayPal continuing to route through neutral infrastructure rather than keeping liquidity locked inside their own chains — a bet that breaks if stablecoin fragmentation turns into full vertical integration.
