Utopia Labs

Utopia Labs was a San Francisco-based software company founded in 2021 that built onchain payments, payroll, expense and treasury management infrastructure for DAOs and crypto-native organizations. Its platform integrated with Gnosis Safe multisig wallets so that payment requests, approvals, contributor payroll (in fiat or cryptocurrency), expense tracking and financial reporting could be handled in a single dashboard, replacing manual block-explorer-based accounting.

The product set later expanded beyond DAO tooling into three offerings: a payments app and digital wallet, a USDC stablecoin bank transfer service for business use cases, and a crypto offramp that moved funds directly into bank accounts. These addressed the friction between web3 companies and traditional banks, supporting use cases such as digital-asset business payroll and crypto venture funding flows.

In October 2023 the company announced it would wind down its existing services (by 2023-11-06) to pivot away from that business model, with management stating the company was not shutting down. In November 2024 Coinbase acquired Utopia Labs, described as a stablecoin payment processor, with the team joining Coinbase's Base group to work on onchain payments in Coinbase Wallet and Base.

Founding story

Sources describe four young co-founders — Kaito Cunningham (CEO), Jason Chong (CTO), Alexander Wu (CPO) and Pryce Adade-Yebesi (COO) — who connected via Discord and Twitter around a shared interest in DAOs and founded the company in 2021. Prior experience cited includes crypto firm M31 and On Deck Catalyst, plus Facebook, Microsoft and LunchClub. The idea came from observing that token-based, globally distributed DAOs lacked payments, payroll, expense and HR tooling beyond smart contracts. Note: one source (a directory listing) attributes the founding team to Coinbase executives, which conflicts with all other sources.

Business model

Utopia operated a SaaS/transactional model for crypto financial operations, charging a 0.3% transaction fee on transfers processed through its platform.

Transaction-fee based: 0.3% on transfers, according to reporting on its business model.

Traction

Reported work with hundreds of organizations, including Friends with Benefits and PleasrDAO; at the time of the 2022 Series A the company said it had supported over 100 platforms such as OlympusDAO, Lido, Yield Guild Games, Badger DAO, Illuvium DAO, Fingerprints DAO, SushiSwap and Tracer DAO, facilitating millions in contributor payments and operating expenses.

Latest developments

Coinbase acquired Utopia Labs on 2024-11-13, with the team joining Base to accelerate onchain payments in Coinbase Wallet; subsequent Base products such as Base Pay and the Base App are cited as building on that payments surface. Co-founder Pryce Adade-Yebesi is reported to have launched Open Ledger after the acquisition.