Remember the last time you tried to send a decent amount of money overseas and felt like you were being robbed in broad daylight?
Three days to clear. A fee that makes your eyes water. And the constant dread that something, somewhere, will go wrong. I’ve been there, and apparently so have two former Citadel quant traders who just decided enough is enough.
They’ve raised a cool $17 million to build something that might actually fix this mess.
The Big Bet on Simple, Fast, Global Money
Picture this: you’re closing a deal with someone halfway across the planet. Maybe you’re buying a watch from a dealer in Dubai, or your company needs to pay a supplier in Singapore. Right now, you’re looking at SWIFT wires, Western Union, or praying your bank doesn’t hold the funds for a week.
Two guys who used to build trading algorithms at one of the most sophisticated hedge funds on Earth looked at this system and thought: this is embarrassingly broken.
Their answer? An app called Fin.
Not another crypto wallet for degens. Not a DeFi protocol that requires three PhDs to navigate. Just a clean, beautiful payments app that happens to run on stablecoin rails under the hood.
From Reddit Side Projects to Wall Street Backing
The origin story is actually kind of perfect.
While still at Citadel, the founders built a Reddit-like platform as a side project. When they wanted to pay users who hit the front page, they ran straight into the nightmare of international payments. The kind of friction that makes you want to scream.
That pain became the seed. Fast forward a bit, and they’ve now convinced some of the sharpest money in tech to back them.
“We’re building the payments app of the future that leverages all the benefits of stablecoins without any of the complexity. It just works, anywhere in the world.”
– One of the founders, in a recent demo
Pantera led the round. Sequoia wrote a check. Samsung Next jumped in. When you see that combination, you pay attention.
What Actually Makes This Different
Everyone says they’re “reinventing payments.” Most are lying. But here’s what caught my eye about Fin:
- They’re targeting large-value transfers first – think five and six figures, not $50 between friends
- It works between Fin users, traditional bank accounts, and crypto wallets
- Near-instant settlement using stablecoin infrastructure
- Fees that make traditional wires look like highway robbery
- A deliberate focus on being boringly easy to use
This last point matters more than people realize. The crypto industry has produced plenty of technically brilliant solutions that nobody uses because they’re too complicated for normal humans.
Fin’s demo (which someone showed to reporters recently) apparently looks more like Cash App than MetaMask. No seed phrases. No gas fees. No “connect wallet” dance. Just money in, money out, done.
The Revenue Model Makes Sense Too
They’re not trying to be the next charity. The plan is straightforward:
- Take a small cut on transactions (still way less than banks)
- Earn interest on stablecoins sitting in user wallets
- Eventually offer premium features for businesses
It’s the same model that made Wise (formerly TransferWise) a multi-billion dollar company, but supercharged with blockchain settlement.
They’re starting with import-export businesses next month in a pilot program. These are exactly the companies getting absolutely crushed by current cross-border payment costs. If Fin can save them real money while making their lives easier, adoption could spread like wildfire.
They’re Not Fighting Crypto Companies – They’re Fighting Banks
This is perhaps the most interesting positioning I’ve seen in a while.
Most crypto payment companies position themselves against other crypto companies. Fin’s founders are explicitly going after the big commercial banks.
“The big banks built payments wrong, and they’re going to have an incredibly hard time migrating their legacy systems onto stablecoin rails. We don’t have that baggage.”
They’re not wrong. Banks have decades of technical debt. Moving to blockchain settlement means ripping out and replacing core systems that process trillions of dollars. The incentives are misaligned. The politics are brutal.
Startups? They get to build from scratch with the right architecture from day one.
The Timing Couldn’t Be Better
Look around right now. The stars are aligning for stablecoin payments in a way they never have before.
- Major institutions are launching their own stablecoins
- European banks are building euro stablecoin infrastructure
- Asian banks are experimenting with USD tokens on blockchain
- Regulators are finally writing clear rules instead of just threatening everyone
- The technology actually works reliably now
We’ve moved past the “is crypto real?” phase into the “how do we actually use this?” phase. Fin is showing up exactly when the market is ready for solutions that just work.
I’ve been watching this space for years, and honestly? This feels different. The team has the technical chops from Citadel, the funding from top-tier VCs, and they’re attacking a problem literally everyone hates dealing with.
What Success Looks Like
The founders are thinking big. Like, “next largest payments app in the world” big.
That sounds insane until you remember that Wise went from nothing to moving hundreds of billions annually in about a decade. And they were doing it with the old, slow, expensive banking rails.
Give someone the same value proposition but make it instant and 10x cheaper? The growth could be explosive.
The pilot with import-export companies will tell us a lot. If those businesses start routing significant volume through Fin and telling their friends, we could be looking at one of those rare moments where a new payments rail actually takes off.
Or it could be another crypto project that promises the world and delivers complexity and disappointment.
But something about this one feels different. The team understands both the technology and the real-world pain. They’re not trying to boil the ocean. They’re starting with a specific, painful, expensive problem and solving it elegantly.
In a world where sending money across borders still feels like it did in the 1990s, that might just be enough.
The next few months will be fascinating to watch. If Fin can deliver on even half of what they’re promising, we might be looking at the first real crack in the traditional banking monopoly on international payments.
And if that happens? Well, $17 million will look like the cheapest money Pantera and Sequoia ever invested.
