Goodbye Fintech, Hello Finchain

Fintech has hit a wall. Five years ago, Angela Strange from the top-tier VC firm Andreessen Horowitz claimed that every company would be a fintech company. But right now, it doesn't feel that way. It seems like the once booming fintech industry has come to a stall which has been felt all the way from VCs and founders to consumers.

At the same time, it feels like a new fintech-ish industry is starting to grow exponentially, one led by startups building consumer financial products using stablecoins on blockchains, or as I like to call them: "finchains".

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Finchains = consumer finance companies that run on blockchain + stablecoin rails to deliver products old banking rails couldn’t (global, 24/7, programmable).

But what did fintech lack? Why do we need finchains and why are they taking off?

From 2010 to 2020, fintech boomed, consumers worldwide gained access to better financial products and fintech startups closed one funding round after the other. What drove fintech? Smartphones, mass API adoption, and a shift in consumer behavior caused by the 2008 crisis, which made people more willing to bank with startups. Suddenly, you could have your money on your phone. Developers got used to using APIs, and people began to trust startups with their money — something almost unthinkable a generation before.

Creative founders worldwide noticed that they could build an app for buying shares on a cellphone. Some others noticed that they could integrate into legacy banking services (BaaS), build an easy-to-use API on top of them, launch a payments product for developers, make a simple signup and make it 10x easier to accept credit cards for a business.

Stripe made it easy to receive payments by building an API and removing friction from the signup process. Square turned your phone into a credit card reader by coming up with a device that you could connect to it. Plaid enabled debit APIs by scraping bank websites. Alibaba & Venmo made it easier to send money. Neobanks, like Revolut & Nubank built banks as apps instead of physical branches. Robinhood allowed anyone to buy and sell equities without going through a sleazy broker.

It was a whirlwind of innovation. In Latam, it felt like fintech took over the region, the needs were so pressing and the space so large. Nubank grew to over 100 million customers on the appeal of app-based banking with decent service & low fees. I took part of it too, I started a payments company called Wompi, we connected to banks via VPNs and then built a slick API on top of it which we offered to startups.

But in 2024, it feels as though the traditional fintech landscape is saturated. Why? Because almost all the straightforward opportunities to improve financial services using mobile, APIs or customer experience have already been executed. If a fintech idea was possible, most probably a startup or bank already built it. The low-hanging fruit is gone. That’s why fintech feels dated. Apps and services churn on, but where’s the excitement?

The underlying rails driving fintech never really changed. At the end of the day, most of the money was still bank-money exposed via some API or web service, with a fintech layer on top. Innovation was limited to banking functionality and banking hours. You could accept payments much easier, as long as you only needed credit cards. International transfers on an app were easier, but in the backend they were still running on turtle-fast SWIFT. Most of the money worldwide is still siloed inside an IBM AS400, driven by spaghetti code written 30 years ago.

Fintech changed the customer experience, but it didn't really upgrade the financial infrastructure. It didn't lower costs by an order of magnitude, and it only worked on a subset of financial products. It did a good job in some areas  like basic banking, credit card payments and stock trading, but many financial products are still inefficient or out of reach for most. Money isn’t truly global yet. Try sending $5 to someone in Lesotho or Bangladesh through your bank — good luck. Local payments aren’t cheaper in many cases either. According to the World Bank, in the fourth quarter of 2023, the global average cost of sending $200 was 6.4% of the amount being sent, slightly up from 6.2%.

Sure, we got mobile wallets and contactless transactions, but under the hood it’s the same old systems. Those 16-digit card numbers and expiry dates  —  designed for plastic cards read by imprinters, yet here we are using them in the era of face scans and AI. The experience improved (wave your phone in the subway, wow!), but the plumbing didn’t change.

While fintech was taking over the world, in parallel, a group of technologists and outcasts were building decentralized networks (blockchains), communities and token standards, infrastructure to replace the world’s financial system with non-sovereign currencies. They were also inadvertently building technology that would end up being used as the new railways for the global dollar economy.

For all the hype in crypto, there has been some very real innovation over the last five years, the stack has matured, especially on some fronts like blockchains, wallets, compliance tools and stablecoins. Alongside the friendly regulation coming out like the GENIUS Act, these conditions have created the perfect storm for a wave of financial innovation.

Blockchains have improved orders of magnitude and are now able to process thousands of transactions per second, with some blockchains like Polygon and Solana having sub-second payment finality for cents — competing on par with established networks like ACH/ Card networks — and making them useful for moving money in real-world use cases. Wallet infrastructure has become significantly easier to access, with advances like multi-party computation lowering barriers for mainstream adoption by making it easier for developers to integrate out-of-the-box custody solutions. Providers like Fireblocks, BitGo and Privy have built solutions which make it easy to custody assets.

As an industry, crypto has also grown up and compliance has gone from being dreaded, to being at the core of the industry, with on-chain visibility making for healthier networks; and more advanced tooling being built by providers like Chainalysis and TRM Labs.

Stablecoins have taken the lion’s share of attention in 2025 for good reason. Stablecoins bring the stability of fiat currencies onto the blockchain. Thanks to Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC), stablecoins have become reliable and mainstream, making them a better alternative to cash and bank dollars in most of the world. With over 200 billion tokenized dollars, or equivalent of roughly 1% of outstanding circulating dollars…. some expect the remaining 20 trillion soon to follow.

The opportunities at the crossroads of blockchains and stablecoins didn't go unnoticed. Over the last two years, a new crop of founders discovered something cool: cutting-edge blockchains and reliable stablecoins allow you to build financial products previously impossible. Founders have found an opportunity to finish what fintech began and to go where fintechs couldn't. These new generation of companies are what I call finchains  —  financial consumer companies building products using blockchain and stablecoin rails.

So what are finchain companies building? The first finchain use cases have been mainly around building on-chain dollar banking for people in countries with high inflation and also creating new cross-border payment experiences. These are the obvious ones at this point. Why would we keep sending money using intermediary banks when we can just swap USDC (on-chain US dollars) for COPM (on-chain Colombian pesos) in under a second. Bank FX Desks are just whitelisted liquidity pools that operate from 8AM to 1PM, Monday thru Friday, and which run on legacy technology. This is why Stripe bought Bridge, a two-year-old stablecoin payments company, for a billion dollars last year.

Will this be a passing fad like PFP NFTs? No, dollar access and cross-border payments products were just the beginning for finchain. One clever entrepreneur who I know is out there figuring out cheap international loans by using local-currency-stablecoins paired to on-chain credit pools, and another one is working on on-chain derivatives for local currency stablecoins so that any small importer can mitigate currency risk when buying from an international provider. We will have streaming payroll, with salaries paid out per-hour worked and AI agents will be executing hundreds of micro-transactions on our behalf, paying per request or kilobyte. These new finchain-enabled dynamics will become the norm.

Finchain collapses the exclusivity moat around financial services. It turns products once limited to private banks, hedge funds, or corporates into retail-accessible, on-chain, programmable financial services, usable by anyone. Finchain redefines concepts and reorganizes product categories. Finchain is already blurring the lines between local and global payments. Remember when we had “local-calls” and “long-distance” calls? Now we just “call”.

The transition to finchain will be especially fast in emerging markets where financial consumers have been heavily underserved. Like with cellphones, which most Latin Americans got to own without ever having had a landline; consumers in emerging markets will end up having a loan made out in stablecoins, without ever having had a bank account. Over the next decade, we will see finchains boom and stablecoins will be the dominant form of money in emerging markets.

We are living the internet-moment for money, when it truly becomes global, accessible anywhere and programmable.

Author Note: I am the Co-Founder & Co-CEO at Minteo, a stablecoin issuer where we are super-powering Latin American currencies by putting them on-chain.