# Rain, backed by $250 million Series C led by ICONIQ, opens Western Union cash network Stabledash Live, a Stabledash show. Aug 24, 2026. Charles Yoo-Naut. https://live.stabledash.com/shows/the-live-show/episodes/inside-rains-western-union-partnership-stablecoins-to-cash-sVo-XXjJtRI Rain's CTO says the company is moving past stablecoin cards to a wider platform, with Western Union's Digital Asset Network letting users swap stablecoins and cash. Rain, which raised a $250 million Series C led by Iconiq in January 2026 at a $1.95 billion valuation, is integrating Western Union's Digital Asset Network into its platform. Co-founder and CTO Charles Yoo-Naut says the network lets people walk into a Western Union location to convert stablecoins into cash, or hand over cash and get stablecoins back in their app. ## Cash at the last mile Yoo-Naut calls the Digital Asset Network "a new network that Western Union has been working on" and says the integration is the most exciting part of the partnership. Rain is opening it up for all of its customers, not only the Western Union program. Rain also added Mastercard Principal Membership in May 2026, alongside its non-bank Principal Membership with Visa. ## Beyond dollar stablecoin cards Yoo-Naut says the pitch a year ago was dollar-backed stablecoin cards for everyone. Now Rain is building a full platform for launching global programs, which may include virtual accounts and wallets. He says dollar stablecoins still carry the most volume, but he sees CBDCs, tokenized deposits in the US and tokenized real-world assets coming up, and argues the future is much broader. The company is also organizing sales around use cases. Yoo-Naut says a cross-border B2B payments company, a global neobank or a firm like Western Union will be sold the capabilities it needs as a package. ## Rewards and acquisitions Rain acquired Uptop, a card-linked rewards program reaching beyond sports into retail, entertainment, travel and dining. It then launched rewards as a service, letting any partner run a program with rewards held on chain. Yoo-Naut says an experiment with Avalanche showed that adding rewards as an option increased spend by around 25%. Rain also bought Guardrail, a security infrastructure company it had been a customer of. Yoo-Naut ties the deal to investment in security "in the era of mythos level models." ## A partner to watch Yoo-Naut points to Carta, a Rain partner that is distributing its card through brokerages such as Raymond James, comparing the approach to Amex's work with Charles Schwab and Morgan Stanley. Taken together, Yoo-Naut's account shows Rain using its new capital to widen what it offers: cash access through Western Union, support for more tokenized assets, on-chain rewards and more security, all sold as packages built around how customers use them. ## Key takeaways 1. Rain raised a $250 million Series C led by Iconiq in January 2026 at a $1.95 billion valuation. 2. Rain is integrating Western Union's Digital Asset Network so users can turn stablecoins into cash, and cash into stablecoins, at Western Union locations, and is opening it to all its customers. 3. Rain launched on-chain rewards as a service, and Charles Yoo-Naut says an Avalanche test lifted spend by around 25% just by offering rewards. ## Chapters - 0:00 Western Union moved at startup speed despite legacy infrastructure - 3:00 Western Union's network lets Rain partners swap stablecoins and cash - 5:19 Large enterprises need a forward-deployed co-creation approach - 8:08 Rain grows from stablecoin cards to a full tokenized platform - 12:06 Uptop acquisition brings sports clients and on-chain rewards as a service - 18:12 Guardrail acquisition strengthens security, with more deals coming - 19:54 Carta reaches wealthy clients through brokerage distribution ## Transcript **Charles Yoo-Naut** (0:00) Come. Thank you. Yeah. Good to see you guys. Excited to be here. **Host** (0:04) I think I'm I'm realizing that we actually haven't had you on stable dash live. No. We haven't sat in virtually. **Charles Yoo-Naut** (0:10) We did New York City last year, and then we did NSF **Host** (0:15) earlier this year. But, yeah, never... It's gonna be strange not being in person with you guys. Yeah. It's it's normally the the opposite. We kind of... We'll meet people on the the stream, and then we'll say, okay. That was awesome. Let's go, like, sit down with them in person. So we're going we're going in reverse here. We we had Malcolm on a couple hours ago. He was bringing us into the the big launch of of the day. Why don't we start there, and then we can kind of get... Honestly, into anything else that you're thinking through. We've we've had a a ton of different conversations with you, your background, what you're building. Would love to just open the floor and expose whatever is most exciting to you right now after that. I know this was pretty last minute. Agenda's pretty loose. Yeah. What's most exciting is the the launch of the Western Union Stable Card program. **Charles Yoo-Naut** (1:02) We've been working with Western Union for a while now to to get this program live, and it's really been a pleasure to work with such a, like like, legendary business. Like, everyone's heard of Western Union. And to see them really pushing forward on... With stable coins and really innovating in a space, we're just honored to be able to partner with them here. **Host** (1:26) We were we were gonna ask the same thing. I'll let you take it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We asked Malcolm as he as he departed his **Host** (1:33) appearance just like, you know, what should we ask Charles? What's, like, the one question you wanna leave Charles with? And he he actually was, like, ask him what it was like working with an organization like ours and compared to, like, you know, maybe a a younger firm. What what was it like working with Western Union and Malcolm and team? **Charles Yoo-Naut** (1:52) We we were very impressed, you know, working our... Most of our customers are startups moving very fast, and, you know, we're trying to keep up with them. And working with Western Union didn't feel that different. Of course, like, they have a lot of legacy infrastructure that they're built on top of. So that is usually, like, the biggest constraint is they're trying to adopt this new technology, adopt stablecoin, and get it to work with infrastructure that was built decades ago and with agents spread across the entire world. Like, human human agents, real agents spread across the entire world. And so that is really the only thing that's limiting their speed. But the people actually at Western Union and their willingness to work with us and to do something innovative, like, that was at the same pace as any of the other startups that that we work with. **Host** (2:40) Is there anything that, like, while you're working with Western Union that might have been like, hey. We can actually take this and apply this to the work we're doing with startups? Like, I imagine, like, as you're going through this process, is there anything product wise that you're like, wait. Why didn't we think of this? Why wasn't this implemented? Or even just the way that you're approaching bringing some of these products to market with with other teams. Well, the thing that is really exciting about the Western Union partnership is that we're actually integrating **Charles Yoo-Naut** (3:10) their digital asset network, Dan, and opening up for all of our customers. So Dan is is a new network that Western Union has been working on, and it's basically the ability to go into a Western Union location and be able to convert USBT or stablecoin into cash and also go back or to take cash and then get a stablecoin inside your app. And that is first launching inside the the Western Union stable card app, but it will soon be launching to all of RAIN partners globally. So that's being able to use this network of agents that Western Union has developed over the years and then now expose them to this new infrastructure. **Host** (3:51) That's like a huge huge capability that we've unlocked by partnering with Western Union, and I'm really excited about as a new capability for us. You know, it's funny. We've actually talked about this a few times, but that just connected the dots for me. I didn't realize that that was gonna roll... Be an option for other, you know, RAIN card clients because that's a big pain point right now. I think one time I went to use my CAS card at a local ATM, and it was like a six and a half percent fee to, like, go cash. Because, know, it was just whatever the bank was charging, and because it was Visa, they would do it. So that's, like, a huge unlock. Because, again, like, I don't know. I just, like, got trash removed from the side of my house. I think I was like, you gotta pay me in all cash. Like, I still need cash. It's always the trash, guys. **Host** (4:35) It's The only time. Know, local services, **Host** (4:39) know, they'll give you the cash discount. Because, like, in... To some degree, like, cash is Now my second is a digital j j and k hauling from **Charles Yoo-Naut** (4:50) But how about 2 k? In a lot of days or a lot of businesses, cash is still king. So Sablecoins allow you to get that instant settlement cross border payments done super cheap, super fast. But for that last mile, a lot of times, actually do want to have cash in hand, or you wanna take the cash you do have and then move it into this Internet money and have the benefit. So being able to go seamlessly between the two and and use them where it best fits or where you need it, that's that's really valuable. **Host** (5:19) Yeah. Bring us into, Charles, as you think about really the scale, the size of clients you're you're speaking with, what Western Union... Just from a legacy standpoint, but also you're saying these a... The distribution, the volumes, the... Like, this isn't like, you know, we... It's fun to cover both sides of the spectrum on the show. We talked to folks like OverseepPay, we were just talking with. Sounds like we're in touch with them. Like, you know, just getting going right out of the gate, and, you know, volumes are starting from zero but growing, and it's great to, you know, a company that's been around for this long, has presence all over the world. Like, RAIN can operate on both sides of that spectrum. Speaking specifically to the Western Union side, these, like, high volume global scaled scaled use cases, like, what are you seeing right now in the business on that side of the spectrum? What's exciting? Any thematic things that are happening as you guys grow more of these these global global presence? **Charles Yoo-Naut** (6:20) It's it's very fun working on both sides and for for different reasons. On on the Western Union side, it... It's really... What we've kind of positioned the go to market, the the motion is very different than working with, like, an overseer. On the working with the Western Unions of the world, we have to take a little bit more of a a partnership mindset of, hey. We're gonna work together and cocreate something new and think about how we can rethink your business or not just slap on stablecoins onto Western Union, but actually, like, what does it mean to rethink economics, the monetization strategy, the capital efficiency of the business using stablecoins? And then on our side, it's become a little bit more forward deployed where we're having a team of people from implementation to compliance to engineering, working with the... Whatever business it might be hand in hand and designing something together and cocreating something together. And that's, for us, very exciting because we're able to take what this business for... Western Union, for example, is very good at and then redesigning it for this new age and still be able to leverage the assets that they developed, and then that's their moat. But we've we've actually made their moat more powerful now because we introduced all these efficiencies. We'll allow them maybe to go into new markets, to monetize in new ways. So it's it's exciting to be able to take a business that already has a lot of ex... Exciting assets, has a lot of exciting capabilities, has a, you know, brand that they've already have built over decades, and then rethink that with SablePoints in mind and with new technology in mind. So, yeah, it's a little more of this, like, for deployed.. Partner go to market versus Oversee is a little brother's stage business. They they know what they're trying to do, and we're just there to, like, enable that. It's a little bit less, like, co creating with them. **Host** (8:08) It's been a gift to see the evolution of this business from, you know, the the the tooling to the tooling to, like, a first party use case to a platform use case to, you know, really even going beyond the card here in many ways as well for... On all the infrastructure that lives around it. How... As you think about the the evolution of what's next, it looks like even reading the website right here, stablecoin payments platform for the tokenized future. How how are you thinking about the landscape differently today than you were maybe even a year ago? I feel like the momentum of tokenized assets, even for us on the show, like, we... We're talking less about just stablecoins these days, and it's going way more into, like, the tokenized asset or tokenized market more broadly. What's that like for you from your vantage point? **Charles Yoo-Naut** (9:02) It's evolving from... I I would say the the simple pitch maybe a year ago was, you know, US dollar backed, stablecoin backed cards for everyone. And now we're really building this full platform that is not just about cards, but it's about everything that our customers need to launch a global program. So that might be virtual accounts. It might be wallets on and on rep. And, of course, cards are really important. And then dollars... Backed stablecoins is still the one that has the most volume, but we're starting to see whether it's CBDCs in different countries, whether it's tokenized deposits in The US, and also all these other tokenized RWA assets coming up, it's... The future is much broader than just US dollar backed stablecoins. It's around how do we tokenize the entire economy realize the benefits of bringing everything on chain and the efficiencies that that will power. So businesses transitioning from, hey. We're a single product company, mostly enabling US dollar backed stablecoins and and allow you to spend the cards to really building this full stack platform for all digital assets, all tokenized assets. **Host** (10:08) Question on the go to market side of this. We've we've, you know, we've we've been exploring these different areas by channel. I'm forgetting the gentleman's name we had on lately to demo the AgenTex side of this, like the the... What's the name of this again? You've kind of siloed this into there was a it was a great name. Stokes? Yeah. Yeah. We have the agentic control layer. I think you were talking to Brian on the team. Yeah. Do you see these things as like... So you you have all these different categories of where these tools come to life. For you, are you thinking about, you know, focusing just on kind of the... Like, if you're building go to market sales team, which you are, it looks like right now, a lot of open roles there, are you on the sales side saying, we're gonna build a team that can really sell all of this as a flexible package and toolkit? Or are you saying, you know, we're gonna really have these use case or channels specific go super deep? How are you how are you thinking about all of these things coming together? **Charles Yoo-Naut** (11:13) Orienting the business more around use cases and solutions. So whether it's the Western Unions of the world or it's global neobanks. So, yeah, if you go by different industries, different use cases, this is really what we're orienting around is if you are a cross border b to b payments company. What are the capabilities that you need? And we're gonna sell you that as a package. We're... Not always is gonna be something that Rain developed in house. You know, we partner with a lot of people for some of the stuff that we're offering as well. Some of the people, you know, have been on your show before. But our customers shouldn't really care. We're gonna deliver that solution for them, and we're gonna find the best way to deliver that solution. So it's less around, hey. Let's sell cards and let's sell wallets and virtual accounts. So, hey, we're... You're coming to us and you have this problem, and then we're gonna figure out together how to solve it. Shout out to the the marketing team for this side by side. **Host** (12:06) I really... Lucas and team, I like the buy industry and buy use case. That's really nice. Yeah. Charles, I'd love to dive into because this is kinda... We asked we asked Malcolm. We said, like, where does this go next? And he was like, loyalty. And I was like, well, okay. I think we could read some of the writing on the wall. Without getting into what they're doing, maybe just more generally, you know, you guys acquired Up Top. Up Top's card linked rewards program. It's going beyond sports to offer rewards across retail, entertainment, travel, dining, and more. How should neobank card builders be thinking about loyalty programs? We've seen just, like, these cash back wars, and, you know, it's like, okay. Who has the bigger war chest, and who's who's willing to subsidize cash back the most? It's like, at some point, that's gonna end. That's not gonna retain your users. People are just gonna leave to the next best cash back program. Why this Up top move, and how... How are you encouraging teams to be thinking through loyalty? Good question. **Charles Yoo-Naut** (13:05) That was a very exciting acquisition for us for multiple different reasons. One is sports and entertainment was a vertical that we didn't really have any experience in. We didn't have any customers in, and now we're able to sell into the cabs, into the pistons, into LSU with Up top as kind of the tip of the spear there, and then then offer them the full breadth of the range services. So now we unlock a whole different vertical that we didn't have any experience in. And then the experience that Uptown had in rewards and thinking through how do you build loyalty and incentivize different activities on the card has been invaluable. We just launched our rewards as a service recently, so we allow any RAIN partner to launch a rewards program. All of the rewards are on chain, which is a pretty exciting new capability. So that means that you can do things like borrow against it. You can stake them. You can create a liquidity pool against them. It's just a new primitive that our customers can use and their customers can use to build anything. And what we saw was a lot of customers were coming to us and asking about rewards. They kind of assumed that Yeah. And rewards just were together in one and that we would have a solution. We didn't really. We just kinda left it up to them to figure it out. So now we do have an answer for that, and it comes with a shared liquidity option. So you can get rewards one place and another and pull them together to do a redemption. It comes with this redemption layer. So we... We're starting with statement credits. We're starting with hotels. We're starting with flights. But in the future, that becomes more unique experiences that whether it's tickets to the World Cup or an experience with a player that's who you're a fan of. I think that's where rewards are going nuts is people are starting to value experiences a lot more than purely cash and unique experiences you can get anywhere else. So it's just another tool that we... Our customers can use to develop whatever experience they want. And we're starting to see is our customers are really building for a specific niche, whether it's high net worth, whether it's freelancers, whether it's a remittance use case. Those different use cases, rewards might look slightly different because the competitive landscape is different because what people are optimizing for is different. So if you're Western Union, the way you think about loyalty is probably very different than if you're a cast, for example, **Host** (15:37) or a I mean, this is a pretty crazy crazy line here from the the blog post with Up Top. It says, Up Top is experienced in powering rewards programs for sports teams, Cavs rewards for the Cleveland Cavaliers, Pistons rewards for the Detroit Pistons. You set the program for LSU Athletics. In the Cavaliers program, sponsors have seen a 21% lift in spend from enrolled members and a 51% boost in TeamShop sales since launch. Wow. That's crazy. Yeah. 51 **Charles Yoo-Naut** (16:09) Yeah. And and we did an experiment with Avalanche on our rewards and just introducing rewards as an option increased spend by around 25%. So, yeah, rewards really does move the needle in terms of spending. And in certain markets, just to be competitive, you have to have some sort of a wind off. **Host** (16:28) Yeah. I'm looking here to... In The US, 90% of credit card spend happens on rewards cards. That's 90... I'll say it again. Yeah. 90% of credit card spend happens on rewards cards. So the idea of, like, RAIN treating this specifically at... For people who are building these programs, having rewards be a a first class asset part of it makes makes a ton of sense. So exciting. Charles, do do you know the Sara team? Have you met MJ running around **Host** (16:56) new New York? **Charles Yoo-Naut** (16:58) CERO? I don't think so. **Host** (17:00) C e r o. And and they're interesting. Like, his approach... Their approach was instead of having cash back go to, you know, even, like, cash back or rewards, They're working with Megapot to go towards a lottery. So then the idea is eventually, you know, sometimes you'll just hit a free purchase, and the $100 purchase or the tickets you bought to the, you know, to the Knicks game are just gonna be free because you hit part of the lottery. And it's like just that paradigm of thinking, like, what do people want when they're spending? Like, what are those rewards that kind of, you know, give you that dopamine hit, whether it's, you know, the tickets you won or, okay, I get a free upgrade, you know, when I'm going. It's it's it's it's an interesting psychological experiment to to really think about what is impactful. **Charles Yoo-Naut** (17:43) Yeah. Hey. We're we're kind of taking an infrastructure approach and trying to be not opinionated. Hey. Here's the tools and letting our customers design what they want around those tools. If we're just giving everyone the same thing, then it's really difficult for our partners to differentiate and find out what makes them special. So a lot of our infrastructure is built with that in mind. It's like, hey. Should be able to mold this in a way that you can offer something unique to the market and not just the same thing that everyone else is offering. **Host** (18:12) The the sports wedge as like the first use case that Up Top went after and really focused on, you know, one makes a ton of sense. But the way that that wedge and the economics of what is happening there between a sports organization and a fan base and the... Personally, like, starting... Just thinking through this personally has been really interesting. Like, the economy of sports fans and clubs is so... It resembles so much, I think, what a, you know, stablecoin empowered or neobank empowered ecosystem can look like between users and facilitators of of value. It's so fascinating to me. So it makes a ton of sense. And you guys have have been, you know, Up Top is one of a few really strategic acquisitions. Who else have you guys been? **Charles Yoo-Naut** (19:04) Fern, I believe. Anyone else I'm missing? I think a couple. We we we announced the acquisition of Guardrail a couple months ago. That was Guardrail. Security infrastructure company. It was a... We were a customer of Guardrail. They came onto the team a couple months ago, and that's just really around our investment in in security, especially in the era of of mythos level models. Yeah. Security is essential for any business, especially any business in stablecoins and in an on chain context because the risks of getting it wrong is so high. Yeah. The guardrail team in house and and beefing up our security infrastructure has been has been really important. Yeah. So that that was a really important acquisition, and then we have a few more that we hope to announce in the the coming months. Oh. **Host** (19:54) Yeah. Man, it's been a crazy year. Stablecoin cards on the rise. Any any teams that we haven't met with that we should talk to building in this new bank space that have kinda popped up and taken a unique approach? **Charles Yoo-Naut** (20:08) I think you you know a lot of them, but one that doesn't really get a lot of the Charles is trying so hard not to pick favorites. That's the that's, like, the dilemma. One that is... Has really gotten a lot of attention in kind of the stablecoin space because on the outside, it doesn't look like stablecoin power at all is is Carta, which is really actually one of our friends that went live. And I think now, recently, they raise around with Galaxy, and they show up on payment scans. So people are looking at them now from this stablecoin lens. But, yeah, I think they're they're really exciting. The founders, Freddie and Orlando, are also really, really great founders. So we've been lucky to partner with them since **Host** (20:49) I'll I'll be the first one to say it. We had Freddie on, and I think Drew and I both, like, kind of kind kind of, like, under... We definitely were like, oh, like, this is, like, early stage team, and we saw this news. We're like, okay. We totally had this, like, categorized wrong in our head. **Charles Yoo-Naut** (21:05) So, yeah, we need to have we need to have Freddie Freddie back on to to These are Look at them. It's amazing. This is new. Yeah. They they keep updating it. But they're in a huge category. I think they have a very unique product, interesting capabilities around concierge and how they think about rewards. So, like, loyalty is really important to them. They're going after an ultra high net worth clientele, and they're also going through interesting go to market strategy where they're partnering with a lot of brokerages like Raymond James and and and the like to to offer this product. So, yeah, I think they're really What does that typically **Host** (21:39) look like? Like, there's a Raymond James branch, like, right down the street from me right here. Like, what would that look like if I walked in? Or how does does a product like this come to life in that context for brokerage? **Charles Yoo-Naut** (21:50) So they... If you have... Like, Amex also just does something similar with Charles Schwab and and Morgan Stanley. So they'll offer... Raymond James will offer their clients Carta... Card for for them to just be able to spend anywhere. So it's just another advantage you get with working with one of these brokerages. **Host** (22:07) Really interesting. I love how they're breaking into new categories here. **Charles Yoo-Naut** (22:11) Charles, I I like to pick favorites, but just something that's maybe quite different, which I'm glad that you're No. It's it's interesting. It's not a fave. **Host** (22:19) That Hey. Has a big distinction. Top of mind. Top of mind. Well, Charles, we'll let you go, man. One, thanks for making time today on on such a big day, and congrats on this announcement. If you have... I know we were we were trying to coordinate this side by side with Malcolm. So in the future, open invite. If you have great news like this, partners or clients, anything that you wanna dive into, we would love to even do this, like, side by side. I think it's kinda fun to talk about relationships like this in that form, but always a pleasure to catch up. Thanks for taking the time. Thank you, guys. Good to see you. Yeah. Good see Charles.