Utopia Labs
Its product was switched off a year before Coinbase hired the team
Payroll, payments and bookkeeping software for DAOs from a San Francisco and Vancouver startup, later refocused on stablecoin payments and on- and off-ramps.
- Capital raised (announced)
Recorded announced backing; this is separate from cash received, customer deposits and money recovered.
- DAOs served, by the company's count
- Estimated
Company-reported organizations served at the June 2022 raise; member-run organizations, rather than individual users.
Funding
| Round | Date | Announced | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Series A | 2022 |
Announced is what was said at the time. Cash actually received is rarely disclosed and is not assumed to match.
People
| Name | Role | Period | Now | Last checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kaito Cunningham | — | UnknownNext: Coinbase (joined with the team, as reported in November 2024) | — | |
| Alexander Wu | — | UnknownNext: Coinbase (joined with the team, as reported in November 2024) | — | |
| Jason Chong | — | UnknownNext: Coinbase (joined with the team, as reported in November 2024) | — | |
| Anthony Tat | — | UnknownNext: Coinbase (joined with the team, as reported in November 2024) | — |
Timeline
June 2022
The company planned bookkeeping, treasury and token management, fiat on- and off-ramps and developer tools.
July 2023
Utopia Labs released payment infrastructure for sending the USDC stablecoin to bank accounts in the United States.
2 October 2023
Layoffs were confirmed the same week.
6 November 2023
How it ended
Pivoted away
Utopia Labs wound down its product in the autumn of 2023, turning off gasless transactions at once, stopping bug fixes, and giving users a month to export their payment and bookkeeping data before every service went offline. Its chief executive wrote that the company was not shutting down but moving away from its existing product and direction, and he confirmed a round of layoffs the same week.
What happened next
- Acquisition13 November 2024
Coinbase announced it was taking on the Utopia Labs team to work on payments in Coinbase Wallet, within its Base network group. One report said four team members were joining and that the company and its product were expected to cease operations after the sale. No price was reported.
Still alive
Open spot
Utopia Labs is gone. Is your payroll tool still running?
Spotlight your project here.
Sources
8 sources behind this page.
- 1Utopia Labs Raises $23m in Series A Led by Paradigm Capital · Blockchain.News · Jun 2022
- 2Yield Protocol and Utopia Labs Announce Wind-Down · Blockchain.News · Oct 2023
- 3Coinbase acquires on-chain payments platform Utopia · Cointelegraph · Nov 2024
- 4Coinbase Acquires Utopia Labs Team to Expand Stablecoin Payments in Wallet · Finance Magnates
- 5Coinbase acquires stablecoin payment processor Utopia Labs · The Block · Nov 2024
- 6Crypto Infrastructure Provider Utopia Labs is Turning Off All Services · Unchained (Laura Shin Media) · Oct 2023
- 7Utopia: The Future of Coordination. Announcing our $23M Series A led by Paradigm · Utopia Labs (company blog on Paragraph, retrieved after the product was shut down)
- 8Utopia's Product is Winding Down on November 6th · Utopia Labs (company newsletter on beehiiv, retrieved after the product was shut down) · Oct 2023
Every figure above is clickable and opens the sources behind it. Copies were stored when each source was read, so a citation still resolves after the page it came from is gone.