Mike Hale Credible Finance closed the first ICO ever routed through the Colosseum STAMP, drawing $32,775,016 in commitments from 790 contributors against a $2 million minimum before the team accepted roughly $4 million and refunded the rest. The raise ran July 13 to 17, 2026 as a curated launch on MetaDAO.
The STAMP, short for Simple Token Agreement, Market Protected, is an investment contract Colosseum introduced on December 16, 2025 and drafted with the tech law firm Orrick. It gives startups a standard way to raise private capital before launching a token on MetaDAO, with the token as the only economic claim on the business.
Colosseum published it as an open standard. Any founder, fund, angel, or syndicate can download the document, adapt it to their jurisdiction, and use it.
"Opening ownership comes with responsibility. That's something we've discussed internally a lot over the last few months. We wanted one set of terms for everyone."
— Shri, Co-founder and CEO, Credible
The SAFE plus token warrant problem
Crypto fundraising still runs on two separate contracts. A SAFE covers the equity, and a token warrant covers the token. Neither instrument was designed for a business where the token is the product, so founders end up stapling them together and hoping the seams hold.
Tokenholders can't tell whether revenue, intellectual property, or acquisition proceeds accrue to them or to the equity layer sitting above them. When a project gets acquired or starts generating real cash, the equity holders and the tokenholders are looking at the same business through two different contracts, and only one of those contracts has enforcement teeth.
"Deep incentive misalignment between private capital formation and public token launches has plagued crypto since the ICO boom. I genuinely believe MetaDAO is moving the market toward the right solution, and we're open sourcing the STAMP as a complement to this effort"
— Clay Robbins, Co-founder, Colosseum
The STAMP resolves it by deleting the equity layer. Investors fund a legal entity created through the MetaDAO interface, a Cayman SPC/SP structure, and receive an enforceable claim on a fixed share of future token supply. There is no equity to compete with the token later. For founders who already raised on a SAFE or a convertible note, those instruments terminate and convert into the STAMP's token framework rather than sitting alongside it.
How does a STAMP round work?
A STAMP round moves capital from private investors to a startup under fixed terms, then hands the remaining capital and the project's IP to a DAO-controlled treasury at ICO. The mechanics, per MetaDAO's documentation:
Investor allocation is capped at 20% of total token supply. Each investor's share is fixed at signing, which removes post-ICO renegotiation.
Team allocation runs 10% to 40% of supply, granted against milestones, leaving the remainder for ICO participants.
Capital use is restricted. Investor funds, typically stablecoins, land in the startup's wallet and can only cover product development and operating expenses.
Tokens unlock linearly over 24 months once an investor submits a Delivery Notice at ICO.
At the ICO, remaining funds and IP transfer to the DAO-controlled treasury, governed through MetaDAO's decision markets.
That last point is where the market protected half of the name comes from. Tokenholders get governance over the treasury and the IP through onchain decision markets, which is what makes capital return possible if a project stalls out.
The terms also work as a filter. Investors who sign are accepting caps, a two-year unlock, and governance shared with public tokenholders who bought at the same price. Founders, in exchange, get certainty that no equity layer can later out-rank the token. Colosseum's stated goal is to replicate what made the SAFE win: a free, standardized document that spares everyone a deal-by-deal negotiation.
What Credible's raise showed
Credible Finance sells what it calls the Open Payment Stack: local collections, global payouts, payment orchestration, stablecoin settlement, AI underwriting, and permissionless liquidity in one infrastructure layer. It covers more than 40 markets, 37 currencies, and 86 payment methods, including cards, UPI, Pix, SEPA, and ACH, aimed at businesses Stripe and its peers won't onboard. Per Aleare Research, the blended take rate runs around 0.2%, and 95% of customers are US companies operating internationally.
The private leg came first. Credible raised $2.3 million in soft commitments from institutional investors through the STAMP, at the same price and the same unlock terms the public ICO participants got. Shri, Credible's co-founder and CEO, told the Ownership podcast that there are liquid pre-allocations and a whitelist, but "everyone enters at the same valuation, including the funds, the VCs, as well as retail."
Then the public leg. Commitments hit $6 million from 82 contributors inside the first two minutes, passed $8 million at the ten-minute mark, and reached 3.35x oversubscription within twenty minutes. The raise cleared $20 million before day one was out and finished at $32.78 million across four days. The team took about $4 million. MetaDAO distributed CRED tokens and returned roughly $28.7 million in USDC refunds automatically at the token generation event, with no manual claim step.
Team tokens unlock over a minimum of 18 months, tied to price milestones ranging from 2x to 32x the launch price.
You can also audit the business onchain. Merchant settlements happen in stablecoins, even when the merchant ultimately wants dollars, so anyone can track payment volume independently rather than waiting for a quarterly update. Credible reported passing $843 million in processed volume, up from $784.7 million on July 4.
The token has held up since. CRED bottomed at $0.389 on launch day, July 17, and set an all-time high of $1.04 on July 27, per CoinGecko. Credible entered the raise window quoting a $3.5 million revenue run rate.
Does STAMP fix MetaDAO's adverse selection problem?
The most persistent criticism of MetaDAO is adverse selection, the argument that only weaker projects, the ones VCs passed on, would choose to launch there. The STAMP undercuts that by making private capital and a MetaDAO launch complementary rather than mutually exclusive, and Credible is the proof of concept with institutional money in the private round, a public raise at the same terms, a real revenue business on the other side.
Colosseum runs Solana's hackathon program and an accelerator with a roughly 0.67% acceptance rate, which puts it in front of thousands of early-stage Solana teams a year. Credible won Colosseum's Cypherpunk Hackathon and went on into the accelerator. STAMP turns that funnel into a path from hackathon and accelerator, to a private round on a standard contract, to a MetaDAO ICO.
Credible says more than 20 customers are queued to onboard over the next six months across fintech, stablecoin businesses, creator platforms, trading apps, marketplaces, and gaming. The company is expanding fiat and payment method coverage, standing up an ecosystem team to support founders building on the Open Payment Stack, and planning to raise debt to grow its settlement float so instant settlement reaches more merchants. The stated target is $10 billion in annual payment volume.
Read More: A New Chapter for Credible