Stablecoins Are the Killer App — And the Best Teams Are Building Like Fintechs

In crypto, we love to say stablecoins are the killer use case. And we’re right.

They’ve quietly become the one of the largest source of real economic utility on-chain — powering trading, remittances, on-ramps, FX, savings, and more. They’re dollar rails for a programmable internet economy — as we all know.

But here’s what we don’t talk about enough: asset turnover.

What do I mean?

I’m talking about how many times a dollar moves, settles, and gets reused. Because the unlock of stablecoins isn’t just holding digital dollars — that by itself isn’t particularly compelling. The real value is in high-velocity capital systems that compress working capital cycles and eliminate the drag of legacy finance.

Velocity of money is a core macro concept. It measures how often a unit of currency is used in transactions over a given period — usually a year. It’s the rate at which money circulates through the economy.

We can apply the same lens to crypto

Ethereum today looks a lot like the legacy financial system — dominant, but slow, expensive, and low-velocity. Capital sits in protocols but doesn’t move much. Solana, on the other hand, is high-velocity. Capital flows constantly — across trading, payments, memecoins, and apps — because the infrastructure supports it.

Same in payments

The old system — SWIFT, correspondent banking, Western Union — is low-velocity by design. Funds are trapped in prefunded accounts. Settlement takes days. Capital gets stuck. But now we’re seeing fintechs and crypto-native infra teams build for speed, reuse, and throughput.

Velocity will become a competitive advantage

They’re using USDC to replace the $4T prefunding problem in cross-border payments with real-time, just-in-time liquidity. The result? 50x annual capital turnover. Every dollar deployed supports $50 in transaction volume per year.

Western Union can’t do that. Their float sits idle while Arf recycles quickly.

More importantly: we’re starting to see crypto-native teams build like fintech operators. They’re thinking about risk, balance sheets, customer acquisition, and compliance. These are no longer whitepaper projects. These are businesses that now look like they were backed by Nigel Morris at QED or Third Prime. Think Nubank, Remitly, Klarna — but stablecoin-native and composable from day one.

Huma (@humafinance) fits that mold, too

Their “PayFi” thesis reframes payments as a source of credit. Payment flows become on-chain collateral. Real income becomes a yield-bearing asset. It’s not about replacing banks — it’s about building programmable rails that move faster, reuse capital, and actually scale.

Some of these crypto-native teams are just really high-caliber fintech teams that happen to lean into crypto.

This is an underappreciated tailwind — especially for protocols focused on remittances and cross-border payments, which have been largely ignored over the last few years. But the TAM is still massive, and the pain points haven’t gone away.

Whether you like XRP or not, it’s still mainstream. And as the cross-border payments narrative picks back up — and fintech funds start leaning back into crypto — some of these teams/products are going to stand out.

They’ll look and feel like any other high-performing fintech: strong revenue, real usage, clear CAC/LTV, and high ARR potential. Another huge advantage to these teams is that the fintech funds won’t need to relearn valuation models or decode DeFi jargon — they’ll just recognize a good business that just happens to use crypto rails.

Crypto isn’t the product anymore. It’s the wedge.

And the best companies in the space are starting to look more like fintechs than crypto experiments.

by Christian Kaz