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Spark just moved $150 million into Uniswap v4 pools. The goal is straightforward: make stablecoin swaps faster and cheaper as the market splinters into dozens of competing tokens.
The stablecoin landscape is pretty much a mess right now. PayPal has PYUSD. Circle runs USDC. Tether still dominates with USDT. Robinhood joined the Global Dollar consortium. OpenUSD pulls in Stripe and Coinbase. And that’s before you get to Ethena’s USDe, Sky’s USDS, and hundreds of smaller tokens that keep multiplying. Every major fintech and banking group wants its own dollar-linked token, mostly to keep users locked inside their own ecosystem. The result is a fragmented market where moving money between platforms is slow, expensive, and kind of clunky. Spark, which is affiliated with Sky and built by Phoenix Labs, is betting that fragmentation is actually its opportunity.
How the DualPool Mechanism Works
Spark built what it calls a stablecoin FX layer on top of Uniswap. The core piece is a Uniswap v4 hook called DualPool. It’s not complicated in concept: liquidity sits in yield-bearing vaults and only gets pulled into active pools when a swap actually needs it. That keeps capital working while it waits, rather than sitting idle in a pool earning nothing. The result is more efficient transactions for institutions that need to move large amounts between stablecoins quickly.
In its first month running, Spark’s system handled about 30% of all stablecoin swaps on Uniswap, routing roughly $1.5 billion. That’s a real number. It probably surprised a few people inside the project too.
PayPal worked directly with Spark to boost PYUSD liquidity. The collaboration was specifically aimed at helping PYUSD compete more credibly against USDT and USDC, which have years of network effects and deep liquidity behind them. Spark has been signing similar infrastructure deals with other issuers, though it didn’t specify which ones beyond PayPal.
Spark Drops the Consumer App, Goes B2B
One of the bigger strategic calls Spark made was pausing its consumer app. Competing directly with Coinbase or PayPal for retail users is brutal, and Spark basically decided it wasn’t worth the fight. Instead, it’s positioning itself as backend infrastructure — the liquidity and yield layer that consumer platforms plug into.
The clearest example of that model is Robinhood’s Earn product. Robinhood routes deposits into a Morpho onchain vault that’s curated by Steakhouse Financial. Spark sits inside that structure. It gets exposure to retail deposits without ever touching a customer relationship directly. That’s the whole point. Spark gets scale, Robinhood handles the customers, and everyone avoids the headaches that come with running a consumer-facing crypto app in a heavily scrutinized regulatory environment.
It’s a business-to-business-to-consumer play. Probably the right call given where things stand.
Institutional Lending and the Push Toward $1 Billion
Spark’s institutional lending business is the other big piece. It has issued Bitcoin-backed over-the-counter loans through Anchorage, and the outstanding balance sits at about $260 million. The target is $1 billion by year-end. That means nearly quadrupling current balances in roughly six months. Ambitious, maybe, but Spark says demand from bitcoin miners needing operational capital is still there even as broader market conditions have cooled.
Revenue has taken a hit. Annual revenue dropped from around $80 million during the bull market to about $20 million now. That’s a steep fall. Spark frames it as manageable given strong fundamentals and rising institutional interest, but it’s still a significant contraction.
Spark Prime, the company’s hybrid prime brokerage service, blends centralized and onchain financial products. It’s deliberately in beta and holds around $20 million in outstanding loans. Conversations with traditional finance firms are picking up, partly driven by interest in crypto-native trading platforms like Hyperliquid. Spark won’t say exactly how many traditional finance firms it’s talking to, and details are murky.
To close deals with institutional counterparties, Spark is pursuing credit ratings from S&P and Moody’s alongside evaluations from crypto-native rating agencies. Getting a traditional credit rating is a slow process, but it’s basically a prerequisite for certain institutional investors and lending desks that can’t touch unrated counterparties. Spark seems to understand that. The crypto-native evaluations run in parallel, covering the onchain risk side that S&P and Moody’s won’t fully capture.
The bear market is real. Revenue is down. But Spark’s $150 million Uniswap deployment, $260 million in outstanding Bitcoin-backed loans, and a functioning integration inside Robinhood’s Earn product give it more concrete infrastructure than most DeFi projects can point to right now.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How much did Spark migrate into Uniswap v4 pools?
Spark migrated $150 million into Uniswap v4 pools, targeting stablecoin swap efficiency through a mechanism called DualPool.
What is Spark’s current Bitcoin-backed lending balance and its target?
Spark has approximately $260 million in outstanding Bitcoin-backed over-the-counter loans issued through Anchorage, with a target of $1 billion by year-end.
What happened to Spark’s annual revenue?
Spark’s annual revenue fell from roughly $80 million during the bull market to approximately $20 million currently.
