John Pastre hired a software developer in Kazakhstan to help build an app. Everything was great… until he found out how hard it was to pay him. Pastre had paid freelancers abroad before, but this transfer seemed to take forever. The eventual solution? Sending dollars to a U.S. bank account and paying his team in stablecoins, a type of digital currency that can track the value of the dollar.

That workaround became the basis for SwiftFi, the Miami startup Pastre built with Juan Terra. The two met at the University of Virginia, though they came to crypto for different reasons. Pastre wanted to pay his team. Terra started building computers in his mom’s basement to mine Bitcoin around 2013. His parents were from Latin America,…