Editor's Note: Ten years ago, fintech-based new banks improved the user experience of banking through mobile applications, but they did not change the underlying system of fund flow. Today, encryption technology is attempting to touch upon a deeper level of change, reconstructing "how money flows."
This article examines the development path and competitive landscape of new crypto banks from four dimensions: "savings, spending, growth, and borrowing," from self-custodied wallets and stablecoin payments to on-chain transactions, lending, and yield mechanisms. Author Jay Yu (a member of the research and investment team at Pantera Capital) suggests that, based on the speed of fund turnover, the breakthrough for new crypto banks may first appear in high-frequency, high-turnover value-added and lending scenarios, gradually extending to payments and storage.
Before privacy, compliance, real-world connectivity, and credit systems are fully resolved, crypto-banks are still in the early stages of exploration. However, what is certain is that they are not merely new financial applications, but rather attempts to establish a completely new framework for the flow of funds.
The following is the original text:
introduction
No matter which bank or fintech app you open today—whether it's Bank of America, Revolut, Chase, or SoFi—you'll feel a sense of déjà vu as you swipe down the screen: Accounts, Pay & Transfer, Earn Yield. These interfaces are almost interchangeable.
This striking similarity in design reveals the commonality in the underlying logic of banking: banks are essentially a graphical representation of the four core relationships we establish with "money":
- Store: A place for storing and holding assets.
- Spend: A mechanism used for daily expenses and money transfers.
- Grow: A set of tools for passive or active wealth management
- Borrowing: A channel for obtaining external funds and leveraging them.
Over the past decade, the widespread adoption of mobile technology has fueled the rise of "neobank" applications such as SoFi, Revolut, and Wise. These applications have made financial services more inclusive and redefined the meaning of "going bankless"—replacing physical branches with intuitive, always-online digital interfaces.
Today, as cryptography enters its second decade, a new paradigm is emerging. From self-custodied wallets and stablecoins to on-chain lending and yield mechanisms, the permissionless and programmable nature of blockchain enables banking experiences to be globalized, instantaneous, and composable.
If the mobile internet gave rise to a new type of bank, then encryption technology is giving birth to a new type of permissionless neobank: a unified, interoperable, self-custodial interface that allows users to store, pay, increase, and lend funds in the on-chain economy.
The History of Fintech Neobanks
Similar to the crypto industry, the rise of new types of banks also occurred after the 2008 financial crisis. Unlike traditional banks that replicate physical branch networks, these new banks are more like technology platforms, providing banking services to users through mobile interfaces.
Most new banks collaborate with traditional banks in the back office, with the latter providing deposit insurance and compliance infrastructure, while the new banks themselves control the front-end customer relationships. With their fast account opening processes, transparent fee structures, and digital experience-centric designs, many new banks are gradually becoming the preferred gateway for users to save, spend, and manage their wealth.
Looking back at the growth paths of these new banking startups with market capitalizations reaching billions of dollars, we can find that they have something in common: they acquire user relationships through unique digital product forms, whether it is refinancing services, early salary payments, transparent foreign exchange rates, or other differentiated functions. They first start a flywheel of transaction volume centered on users, and then gradually expand their product matrix to add value and monetize existing users.
In short, the victory of fintech-based new banks lies in their control of the "entry point of money": by reshaping the medium through which users save, spend, manage, and borrow money, they have firmly occupied the interface layer of fund interaction.
Today, the crypto industry is at a juncture similar to that of new banks 5–10 years ago. Over the past decade, crypto has spawned a series of its own "wedge products":
- Censor-resistant asset storage via self-custodied wallets
- Low-barrier digital dollar offered by stablecoins
- The permissionless credit market, represented by protocols such as Aave
- And the 24/7 global capital market can even transform internet memes into wealth vehicles.
Just as mobile internet infrastructure ushered in a new era of banking, programmable blockchain is providing a permissionless underlying financial architecture.
The logical next step is to combine these permissionless backend capabilities with the user-friendly frontend of new-generation banks. What the first generation of new-generation banks did was move the bank's frontend from physical branches to mobile interfaces while retaining the traditional banking system as the backend; today's crypto-banks are doing the opposite—they retain the convenient mobile experience but are beginning to change the underlying path of fund flows: from the traditional banking track to stablecoins and public blockchains.
In other words, if new banks are rebuilding the front end of banking on top of the mobile internet, then encryption technology is offering an opportunity to rebuild the back end of banking on a permissionless track.
Crypto Neobanks' footprint
The landscape of new crypto-banks
Today, an increasing number of projects are converging on the vision of a "crypto neobank." We have already seen the foundational capabilities surrounding the four financial relationships of saving, spending, increasing, and borrowing on a permissionless, crypto-based track.
The force is gradually taking shape:
- Self-custodied asset storage via hardware wallets such as Ledger
- Make everyday payments using EtherFi cards or Bitget QR codes.
- Trade on platforms like Hyperliquid to increase asset value.
- Obtain on-chain lending through protocols such as Morpho
At the same time, a large number of supporting participants are supporting the underlying infrastructure, including: Wallet-as-a-Service, stablecoin clearing system, compliance license services, localized deposit and withdrawal channel partners, and cross-protocol orchestration routers, etc.
Furthermore, in some cases, crypto exchage themselves, such as Binance and Coinbase, are already moving closer to becoming new fintech banks, attempting to further control the core relationship between users and their assets.
For example, Binance Pay supports payments for more than 20 million merchants worldwide; while Coinbase allows users to automatically earn up to 4% in rewards simply by holding USDC on the platform.
In such a complex and multi-layered new crypto banking ecosystem, it is necessary to systematically analyze this landscape: How are different crypto platforms competing to become the user's "primary financial relationship interface"? And which aspects of users' lives—saving, spending, wealth management, and borrowing—are they each targeting?
Deposit money in encrypted form
To truly achieve self-custody of crypto assets and interaction with the blockchain, users must first possess some form of crypto wallet. Roughly speaking, the crypto wallet ecosystem can be divided along two dimensions: one is the axis of security ↔ usability, and the other is the axis of consumer-grade applications ↔ enterprise-grade infrastructure.
Differentiated winners with strong distribution capabilities have emerged in different quadrants:
- Ledger stands for secure, consumer-facing hardware wallet;
- Fireblocks and Anchorage provide secure, enterprise-grade wallet infrastructure;
- MetaMask, Phantom, and Privy are consumer-oriented wallets that focus on improving usability and user experience.
Turnkey and Coinbase Prime occupy more of the "high accessibility + enterprise-grade" infrastructure position.
Building a new type of bank by using wallet applications as a beachhead has a core advantage: the wallet front-end—such as MetaMask and Phantom—often controls the entry layer for users to interact with crypto assets. The so-called "fat wallet thesis" argues that the wallet layer captures the vast majority of consumer-facing distribution capabilities and order flows, while for end users, the cost of switching wallets is extremely high.
Indeed: currently, about 35% of Solana's transaction volume is completed through the Phantom wallet. This moat, built upon an excellent mobile experience and high user engagement, is extremely impressive.
Furthermore, since consumers (especially retail investors) tend to value convenience over price, wallets like Phantom and MetaMask can charge up to 0.85% commission; in contrast, exchange protocols like Uniswap may charge only 0.3% per token swap.
On the other hand, building a complete and profitable new type of bank based solely on a single wallet platform is surprisingly difficult. This is because, to achieve scalable profitability, users not only need to "store" tokens, but also must frequently use these tokens within their wallets.
Phantom, MetaMask, and Ledger may already have household brand recognition, but if users simply treat crypto wallets as "cash shoeboxes under the bed," they will be virtually unable to monetize. In other words, wallets must transform into active trading and payment platforms to convert their distribution advantages into revenue.
MetaMask and Phantom are clearly moving in this direction.
For example, MetaMask recently launched the MetaMask Card, attempting to add value and monetize its existing crypto-native user base, becoming the default solution for "spending with cryptocurrency." Phantom followed suit with the launch of Phantom Cash, further entering the "grow money" field—by integrating Hyperliquid's builder codes to provide perpetual contract trading functionality within the app.
As Blockworks put it, "While Drift or Jupiter may be Solana's homegrown favorites, the real money has flowed to Hyperliquid."
This is a universally applicable lesson for the entire wallet industry: you not only need to understand the user's wallet itself, but also the scale of funds flowing inside and outside the wallet through behaviors such as "spending, adding, and borrowing".
Pay money in encrypted form
The second type of competitor to new crypto banks are those platforms that allow users to make payments using cryptocurrency.
Similar to "saving money in crypto", we can also divide the application of "spending money in crypto" along two dimensions: one is from on-chain transfers to off-chain consumption (such as buying a cup of coffee); the other is from applications for retail consumers to infrastructure for enterprises.
Interestingly, many of the "new bank" projects that have garnered market attention in the past few months—such as Kast, Tria, Tempo, and Stable—have almost all targeted the "crypto payment" market. Market interest is particularly concentrated in two main areas:
Applications targeting retail consumers and integrating stablecoin cards, such as Avici, Tria, Redotpay, and EtherFi;
Stablecoin public chains or stablecoin infrastructures for enterprise scenarios, such as Stable, Plasma, and Tempo.
Retail: Making crypto apps more like banks
The first type of "payment application" aimed at retail users is essentially about making encrypted applications increasingly similar to traditional banks or new fintech banks in terms of user experience: familiar interface labels such as "Home", "Banking", "Card", and "Invest" are all available.
With the maturation of crypto card issuers like Rain and Reap, and the expansion of stablecoin support by Visa and Mastercard, crypto cards themselves have gradually become commoditized. The real differentiation lies not in simply "issuing a card," but in the ability to continuously drive and retain transaction volume—whether through innovative cashback mechanisms, localized promotional capabilities, or attracting non-crypto native users to the platform.
This trajectory is strikingly similar to the rise of new fintech banks: success is never just about "issuing cards" or "making an app," but about capturing a specific user group, from students (SoFi) to low-income families (Chime) to international travelers (Wise and Revolut), and building trust, loyalty, and scaled transaction volume on that foundation.
If the path is right, these new “payment-first” crypto banks could become a key entry point for driving the large-scale adoption of blockchain infrastructure.
Furthermore, the new type of encrypted bank may also guide users towards a new generation of payment systems that transcend the traditional bank card system.
Card-based spending may just be a transitional phase—it still relies on the clearing networks of Visa and Mastercard and inherits their centralized constraints. New signals are emerging: for example, Bitget Wallet has launched QR code-based stablecoin payment pilots in Indonesia, Brazil, and Vietnam. This points to a potential future: crypto-native settlement systems could completely bypass traditional card issuers.
Enterprise-level: Stablecoin infrastructure and "stablecoin chains"
The second type of recently emerging "new banking" application is stablecoin infrastructure projects built for enterprises, including Stable, Plasma, Tempo, Arc, etc., which are often referred to as "stablecoin chains".
A key factor driving its rise is the increasing demand from institutional players—traditional banks, fintech companies like Stripe, and existing payment networks—for more efficient money transfer channels.
These "stablecoin chains" often share similar characteristics:
- Using stablecoins as gas tokens avoids the instability in fees caused by price fluctuations of custom gas tokens.
- Streamline the consensus mechanism to accelerate high-frequency, large-value payments from A to B.
- Enhance transfer privacy through a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE)
- Customize data fields to comply with international payment standards such as ISO 20022.
However, technological improvements alone cannot guarantee adoption.
For payment-oriented public blockchains, the real competitive advantage lies in merchants. The key question is how many merchants and businesses are willing to migrate their operations to a specific blockchain.
For example, Tempo is trying to leverage Stripe’s large merchant base and payment network to drive transaction volume and adoption[12], bringing a whole new group of merchants into the crypto space. Other chains, such as Plasma and Stable, are trying to become “first-class citizens” of Tether USDT, strengthening the role of stablecoins in inter-institutional transactions.
The most inspiring example in this field is Tron. It handles approximately 25–30% of global stablecoin transactions.
Tron's rise is largely attributed to its strengths in emerging markets such as Nigeria, Argentina, Brazil, and Southeast Asia. With its low fees, fast confirmation, and global reach, Tron has become a common settlement layer for merchant payments, cross-border remittances, and USD-denominated savings accounts.
For all emerging payment-oriented public blockchains, Tron is an existing competitor that must be faced. To challenge it, a 10x improvement is needed on an already "cheap, fast, and global" foundation—which often means focusing on merchant expansion and network scaling rather than marginal technical optimization.
Using encryption to increase asset value
The third relationship established between "new crypto banks" and users is helping them grow their money. This is one of the most innovative sectors in the crypto space, giving rise to various financial primitives from scratch—from staking vaults and perpetual contract trading to token issuance platforms and prediction markets. Similar to the previous points, we can also categorize "grow money" applications along two dimensions: from passive income to active trading, and from front-end interfaces to back-end liquidity.
A classic example of a "capital appreciation" application evolving into a fully-featured new type of bank comes from centralized crypto exchage(CEXs), such as Binance or Coinbase. Initially, exchanges offered a simple yet effective value proposition—"This is where you grow your wealth by trading crypto assets." As trading volume continued to climb, exchanges gradually became core venues not only for wealth appreciation but also for storing and managing assets.
Both Coinbase and Binance have launched their own blockchains, wallets, institutional-grade products, and crypto cards, leveraging new products and network effects to monetize their core user base. For example, Binance Pay adoption continues to rise, with more and more merchants using it to accept crypto payments for everyday goods.
This same path has been validated in DeFi projects. Take EtherFi as an example: it initially started as an Ethereum liquid staking protocol, providing passive returns for users who re-stake ETH on EigenLayer. Subsequently, EtherFi launched a DeFi strategy vault called "Liquid," allocating user funds within the DeFi ecosystem to pursue higher returns under controlled risk. Then, the project expanded to EtherFi Cash—a groundbreaking credit card product that allows users to directly spend their EtherFi balance in the real world.
This expansion path is highly similar to that of new fintech banks: establishing a foothold through unique product entry (passive pledging and returns), forming the "best solution" in a niche market to gain scale, and then horizontally expanding the product matrix to monetize existing users (such as EtherFi cards).
To date, the crypto space has witnessed numerous 0→1 innovations that support users' "fund growth": for example, perpetual contract platforms like Hyperliquid have grown into one of the most profitable crypto companies; prediction markets like Polymarket are also gradually entering the mainstream. It is highly likely that the next step for these platforms will also be to monetize through new product forms—allowing users to save and spend more on the platform, leveraging the network's scale effect.
Starting with "capital appreciation platforms," especially active trading platforms, offers a significant advantage: high trading frequency and large transaction volume. For example, Hyperliquid has processed $3 trillion in transactions over the past 18 months. Compared to "savings platforms" and "payment platforms," "capital appreciation platforms" possess a stronger user flywheel and stickiness, meaning they have a larger "captured user pool" that can be converted and added value in subsequent expansions.
However, these platforms are also highly dependent on market cycles and are often labeled as "financial casinos." This reputation may limit their reach to a truly global mass user base—after all, people's psychological expectations of "banks" and "casinos" are ultimately quite different.
Borrow money using encrypted methods
Just as in traditional economic systems, lending capacity is a crucial engine driving on-chain economic growth. For new crypto banks, lending is also one of the most critical and sustainable sources of revenue. In traditional financial systems, lending is a highly permissioned activity, requiring multiple checks such as KYC, credit scoring, and lending history. In the crypto world, however, the lending system exists in both permissioned and permissionless models, each with different collateral capital requirements.
The current mainstream model in the crypto space is a permissionless, on-chain lending system that requires over-collateralization. DeFi giants like Aave, Morpho, and Sky (formerly MakerDAO) embody the core spirit of crypto "code is law": because blockchains cannot inherently access users' FICO credit scores or social reputation information, they can only ensure solvency through over-collateralization, sacrificing capital efficiency in exchange for broader accessibility and security against default risk.
Morpho is considered the next generation of this model. It improves capital efficiency while maintaining security by introducing a more modular, permissionless system design and employing a more sophisticated risk pricing mechanism.
At the other end of the spectrum is permissioned lending. This model is gaining adoption as more institutional capital allocators enter DeFi through market making and other methods. Protocols like Maple Finance, Goldfinch, and Clearpool, primarily targeting institutional users, essentially build "traditional lending counters" on-chain. Through rigorous KYC and off-chain legal agreements, they enable institutional borrowers to obtain non-overcollateralized loans.
The competitive advantage of these protocols stems not only from liquidity (such as permissionless lending pools) but also from their compliance framework and B2B business development capabilities. Furthermore, some projects in the permissioned lending space—such as Figure Markets, Nexo, and Coinbase's lending products—primarily target retail borrowers and prioritize compliance. They require borrowers to complete KYC and over-collateralize assets, and in some cases, they are "packaged" as upper-layer products on protocols like Morpho, as Coinbase Lending does. In these scenarios, their core appeal often lies in the faster settlement speed and greater availability of funds compared to traditional bank loans.
However, the true "holy grail" of crypto lending lies in uncollateralized consumer credit—precisely the breakthrough point that a generation of fintech products like SoFi and Chime excelled at, enabling them to reach the "unbanked population." To date, the crypto industry has yet to achieve a substantial breakthrough in this area, failing to replicate the "consumer credit flywheel" built by fintech-based new banks.
The root cause lies in the fact that the crypto world lacks a robust identity system resistant to Sybil attacks, and also lacks sufficiently strong real-world constraints on default behavior. The only exception is "flash loan"—an instantaneous form of unsecured lending entirely driven by the characteristics of blockchain mechanisms, but they primarily serve arbitrage bots and complex DeFi strategies, rather than everyday consumers.
For the next generation of crypto banks, the key to competition may lie in moving into the "middle ground" of this landscape: retaining the speed and transparency of permissionless DeFi while introducing the capital efficiency of traditional lending. The ultimate winner will likely be a platform that can solve the problem of decentralized identity or commoditize it, thereby unlocking consumer credit and allowing crypto to truly rebuild the "credit card" financial mechanism. Until then, crypto banks will likely continue to rely primarily on overcollateralized lending as the core means of supporting DeFi yields.
Make funds flow faster
Fundamentally, the core value proposition of crypto-based new banks lies in enabling faster money flow—as demonstrated by fintech banks like SoFi and Chime through mobile applications over the past decade. The blockchain essentially "flattens" the distance between any two accounts: value transfers can be completed in a single transaction, eliminating the need for multiple layers of intermediaries such as international banks, the SWIFT system, and countless complex and outdated middlemen.
Although the four types of financial relationships—"saving money, spending money, increasing value, and borrowing money"—utilize the "flattening effect" brought about by blockchain in different ways and correspond to different trade-offs and monetization models, I believe they can ultimately be understood as a pyramid structure defined by the **velocity of money**.
At the top of the pyramid is growing money, which has the highest turnover rate (e.g., Hyperliquid's transaction fees); next is lending (monetizing through interest); then payments (monetizing through transaction fees and foreign exchange rate differences); and at the bottom is storage (monetizing mainly through deposit and withdrawal fees and B2B integration).
From this perspective, the easiest path to building a new type of crypto bank might be to start with the capital appreciation and lending layers—because these layers have the highest capital flow rate and user engagement. Protocols that are the first to capture "value in circulation" can often extend downwards along the pyramid, gradually converting existing users into full-stack financial users.
Opportunities for New Types of Banks
So, what might be the next step for new crypto banks? Where exactly are the opportunities to build the next generation of permissionless banks?
I believe there are still several (interrelated) directions worth exploring further:
1) The equivalence between privacy and compliance
2) Combinability in the real world
3) Full utilization of "license-free" features
4) Localization vs. Globalization
5) Uncollateralized lending and consumer credit
1. The equivalence between privacy and compliance
Stablecoins and crypto-orbits offer significant advantages in speed and ease of use compared to traditional financial systems. However, to truly compete head-on with fintech-based new banks and the existing banking system, crypto-based new banks must achieve functional parity in two key dimensions: privacy and compliance.
While privacy isn't universally considered a necessity in retail consumer scenarios, and stablecoins have achieved widespread adoption despite lacking strong privacy guarantees, privacy becomes crucial as more enterprise applications—such as payroll, supply chain financing, and cross-border clearing—migrate on-chain. This is because the public visibility of B2B transfers can potentially leak trade secrets and sensitive information. I believe this is one of the key reasons why many recently launched stablecoin chains place such emphasis on privacy capabilities in their roadmaps.
Conversely, new crypto banks also need to consider how to achieve compliance parity with their predecessors. This includes gradually building a global regulatory moat and licensing system, and proving to consumers and merchants that crypto solutions are no less compliant than traditional finance—perhaps through new technological approaches such as zero-knowledge proofs. Only by simultaneously addressing the two major issues of enterprise-level privacy and compliance credibility can new crypto banks truly achieve scalability that surpasses their fintech predecessors.
2. Combinability in the real world
"Composability" is often regarded as a core advantage of the crypto track—based on unified standards, frameworks, and smart contracts. However, in reality, this composability is often limited to within the crypto world: between DeFi primitives, between yield protocols, and between (mainly EVM) blockchains.
The real challenge of composability lies in integrating blockchain standards with existing real-world standards: such as international banking systems like SWIFT, merchant POS systems and standards like ISO 20022, and local payment networks like ACH and Pix. With the increasing prevalence of crypto cards and the growing use of stablecoins in cross-border payments, this direction has seen positive progress.
Furthermore, most current crypto card products primarily serve native crypto users, essentially acting as withdrawal tools for "crypto whales." However, the real challenge for emerging crypto banks lies in breaking through the native crypto user base and introducing a completely new user group through real-world composability and truly innovative financial primitives. Platforms that solve the composability problem will have a significant advantage in deposit and withdrawal experiences, thus more efficiently supporting a larger user base.
3. Make full use of "license-free" features
Fundamentally, the goal of new crypto banks is to reshape a more efficient monetary standard: instant settlement, global liquidity, unlimited programmability, and free from bottlenecks imposed by a single entity or government.
Today, anyone with a crypto wallet can transact, transfer funds, or earn rewards without the intermediaries of the fiat currency system. New crypto banks should fully leverage this permissionless nature to accelerate the flow of funds and build a more efficient financial system.
On the crypto track, global capital flows at internet speed, and its coordination mechanism is no longer administrative order, but incentives and games. The next generation of new banks will leverage the permissionless nature of blockchain to enable new primitives such as perpetual contracts, prediction markets, staking, and token issuance to be rapidly integrated with existing financial tracks.
In economies with high stablecoin penetration, there is even an opportunity to build a permissionless bank card network—a system similar to Visa or Mastercard, but in the opposite direction: instead of exchanging stablecoins for fiat currency at the consumer end, settlement is done on-chain by default; and to be compatible with traditional payment methods, fiat currency is then "on-chain" as stablecoins.
Furthermore, "permissionlessness" applies not only to human users but may also give rise to an agency economy. For AI agents, acquiring a crypto wallet is far easier than opening a bank account; with the help of stablecoins, AI agents can autonomously initiate on-chain transactions with user authorization or pre-defined rules. This new type of permissionless bank forms the underlying foundation and interface of this "human-agent economy."
4. Localization vs. Globalization
The new type of crypto-bank also faces a strategic choice: depth vs. breadth.
Some may choose a path similar to Nubank, establishing a dominant position in a single region through deep localization, cultural fit, and regulatory understanding, before expanding outwards; others may adopt a global-first strategy, launching license-free products globally and increasing investment in regions with the strongest network effects.
Both paths are valid: the former relies on local trust and distribution, while the latter relies on scale and composability. Stablecoins may be the "highway" for international payments, but new crypto banks still need a "local exit"—deep integration with regional systems such as Pix, UPI, Alipay, and VietQR—to achieve true local availability.
In particular, new crypto banks have a unique opportunity to serve the unbanked population, providing dollar- or crypto-denominated capital access to regions with weak financial infrastructure or unstable currencies. In the future, regional "super apps" and globally composable new banks may coexist for a long time.
5. Uncollateralized lending and consumer credit
Finally, uncollateralized lending and consumer credit may be the true "holy grail" of new crypto banks.
This issue presents a confluence of challenges: it requires a robust, Sybil-resistant identity system; it needs to bridge off-chain credit records with on-chain accounts; it needs to address the differences in credit models across regions and maintain compatibility with traditional systems. For this reason, non-overcollateralized lending in DeFi is currently primarily concentrated in institutional private lending rather than consumer lending—although the latter is much larger in scale in traditional finance.
Part of the answer may lie in innovative mechanism design. Flash loan are a native form of unsecured lending born from the characteristics of blockchain. Similarly, smart revolving credit lines built around stablecoins and interest-bearing assets, real-time LTV management, automatic liquidation buffers, and automatic repayment of returns may gradually reduce collateral requirements.
If successful, on-chain consumer credit will significantly increase the velocity of funds, provide a strong incentive for the unbanked population to go on-chain, and drive overall economic growth, much like credit expansion in the real world.
Conclusion
Just as the rise of fintech banks reshaped the banking industry a decade ago, crypto banks are similarly attempting to redefine how we save, spend, grow, and borrow money in the digital age. However, the difference lies in the approach: fintech banks primarily innovate the front-end interface, while crypto banks aim to update the back-end of the banking system itself—building a global, composable, and censorship-resistant value transfer mechanism through stablecoins and public blockchains.
Therefore, the new type of encrypted bank is not just an application interface, but may be an entry point to a programmable financial system.
Of course, this is just the beginning. Building a true "full-stack crypto-based new bank" is far more than just launching a crypto card or a wallet protocol with a UI. It requires a clear target audience, rapid expansion along a product matrix, and establishing an early advantage in high-flow-rate areas.
If new crypto banks can make breakthroughs in areas such as privacy and compliance, real-world composability, permissionlessness, local and global strategies, and consumer credit, they have the potential to evolve from the edge of digital assets into the default operating system of the global economy.
Just as the first generation of new banks changed the "interface" of banks with the mobile internet, this generation may use encryption technology to rewrite the underlying logic of currency itself.
