Darshan

I spent the last few months writing a 4000 word thesis on "crypto neobanks" - looking at neobank history, market landscape, revenue models, and gaps for builders. Here's a TLDR: - The first wave of fintech neobanks (SoFi, Chime, Revolut, Wise) happened in the mobile era. They replaced the frontend of banking from a physical branch to a mobile app. Crypto neobanks are replacing the backend of banking - from traditional rails to permissionless ones. - Crypto neobanks - like their fintech predecessors - address 4 fundamental interactions with money: Store, Spend, Grow, and Borrow. Incumbents at every layer (Phantom/EtherFi/Binance/Morpho) are racing to consolidate these features into a single "superapp" experience to increase user stickiness. - The core goal of a crypto neobank is to make money move around faster, using blockchain rails. Some verticals accelerate money more than others, and each has a different monetization model. There's a velocity of money pyramid: Grow > Borrow > Spend > Store. - Opportunities for builders: (1) Privacy and compliance parity with existing banks/fintechs (2) Real world composability (merchant systems, SWIFT, local rails like ACH/Pix) (3) Leveraging permissionlessness nature of blockchain rails to speed up how money is transferred in the economy, for rich, poor, human, and AIs, (4) Localization vs. globalization - crypto neobanks can pursue both paths, either with a local-first (Nubank style) model or a global-first model. The former wins through local trust and distribution, the latter through scale and composability. (5) Undercollateralized lending and consumer credit - this is perhaps the “holy grail” of crypto neobanks, combining compliance/KYC, bridging offchain credit records with onchain ones, and navigating regional differences.

Prediction: Monad and Berachain will be instant flops