TLDR Tech / Crypto
Who Will Win When Everyone Wants to Be Your Neobank?
Monthly crypto card volume grew from $100M in early 2023 to over $1.5B by late 2025 (106% CAGR), with the market now exceeding $18B annualized and stablecoin-linked card spending hitting $4.5B in 2025 (+673% YoY). However, 60% of onchain card volume is concentrated in a single custodial platform, RedotPay, which commands roughly 4x the volume of its next 13 competitors combined. Meanwhile, 11 companies, including Circle, Ripple, BitGo, Paxos, Fidelity, and Morgan Stanley, filed for OCC trust bank charters in 83 days, and Coinbase, Kraken, Nubank, PayPal, and Revolut are all pushing toward full banking. The core tension: 76% of traditional neobanks are unprofitable, stablecoins compress FX margins toward zero, and the winning economics in banking (Nubank's 85% interest income share, SoFi's charter-driven NIM expansion) come from lending books, not card interchange. Infrastructure concentration is the systemic risk as Visa captures over 90% of onchain card volume, and Rain powers multiple major platforms, creating Synapse-style single points of failure.
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