Fiat-backed stablecoin supply passed $273 billion in March 2026, MiCA has applied in full across the EU since the end of 2024 and its transitional period for service providers closed on 1 July 2026, and the US GENIUS Act is in its rulemaking phase. The regulatory and demand-side conditions the industry said it was waiting for are now largely in place.
The contributed piece below argues that the remaining obstacle is a design choice: crypto applications still expose networks, bridges and gas fees to their customers in a way that consumer fintech stopped doing more than a decade ago. It draws on the author’s time at Revolut and on a product his current company launched in August.
Declan Hannon is chief executive of Aurora Labs, the company behind Aurora Intents, a cross-chain execution layer built on NEAR Intents, and was previously global director of partnerships at Revolut. The article that follows sets out his opinion, and includes a description of an Aurora Labs product launch.
When I led global partnerships at Revolut, the surest sign that a launch had landed well was silence. Businesses sent money to Spain, paid for dinner in Warsaw, held eight currencies at once and expensed them all correctly. Almost nobody asked what happened underneath. Nobody wrote in hoping to understand correspondent banking or how an FX spread gets priced. They wanted the balance to update, payroll and expenses to just work and the employee cards to be used safely and without issue. Everything else was ours to worry about.
Crypto asks too much of its customers
Crypto has spent a decade asking for the opposite. Networks. Gas. Bridges. Wrapped assets. Confirmation windows. A vocabulary test before a newcomer has done anything, and every word on it carries a penalty for getting it wrong. The best phrase I used to hear was that crypto meant you could ‘be your own bank’, a frightening concept to anybody coming from that industry.
The result is that if a user sends funds on the wrong network then they are lost and nobody can reverse it. In card payments, the same mistake opens a chargeback and usually ends with an apology email and goodwill credit.
Every step a customer cannot undo comes back through support or posted online. Regulators have been pushing that risk off the customer since the 1970s, from the Fair Credit Billing Act through to PSD2. Crypto has been travelling the other way.
Friction with a price tag
The research on how this lands is not encouraging. In a 2025 study of 643 crypto holders, only 43 per cent could correctly identify an image of a seed phrase. Of those who could, 58 per cent thought they could choose and reset one the way you reset a password.
Cross-chain bridges have a costly record of their own. Roughly $2 billion left them through 13 separate exploits in 2022 alone, close to 69 per cent of everything stolen across crypto that year. Asking an unassisted newcomer to cross that terrain has always been an odd definition of empowerment in my mind.
Appetite for the underlying product has never been the thing holding this back. Fiat-backed stablecoin supply moved past around $273 billion in March 2026, and adjusted transfer volume climbed 91 per cent during 2025 to reach $10.9 trillion (quite the achievement when you consider the entirety of Visa’s annual payments sits only slightly ahead at $14.2 trillion). Millions of people want dollars that travel fast and cost little. Demand keeps arriving at the door and leaving again through the onboarding flow.
Regulators have already done their part. MiCA, the EU’s crypto-asset framework, has applied since the end of 2024, and the transitional window for service providers closed in July 2026. The GENIUS Act, the US stablecoin statute signed in July 2025, is now in its rulemaking phase. Regulatory ambiguity is not the reason ordinary customers stay away either.
Fintech settled this argument fifteen years ago
Card networks, sort codes, IBANs, settlement windows, interchange and batch cycles are all still there, behind a screen most customers never see. Revolut surpassed 70 million customers this year and added 16 million of those in 2025. Growth like that owed nothing to teaching anybody how SEPA works.
Fintech won for two simple reasons: it absorbed that difficulty, and it did so cheaper than what it was replacing.
Moving the machinery backstage
Crypto has a credible route to the same outcome. It already has a name: intents. State the result you want, such as funding an account with USDC, and a competitive network of solvers works out how to deliver it. Route discovery, liquidity sourcing, cross-chain execution, settlement. All of it happens offstage.
The closest analogy in payments is smart order routing: the way a card acquirer selects a route without troubling the merchant with the decision. Competing parties bid to fulfil an instruction, and the customer sees only the outcome.
In August, Aurora Intents went live inside COCA, a self-custodial banking app used by more than a million people across 75 countries. COCA’s card and banking infrastructure comes from Wirex and includes a Visa card and a euro IBAN. Customers of COCA can fund accounts from assets they already hold elsewhere through one persistent deposit address; USDT on Tron, USDC on Stellar, and so on.
A user copies an address and sends funds, an action anyone who has ever touched an exchange already knows by heart. Familiarity does more work here than any amount of onboarding copy. Routing happens entirely behind the interface, with orders settled through NEAR Intents, a solver network that has moved more than $25 billion across chains. Nothing on the deposit screen asks the customer to pick a network and hope they did not mess it up.
What caught me off guard in this industry was where the anxiety actually sat. Connecting a wallet holding real money to an unfamiliar bridging site alarms people far more than the number of taps involved. That is not a usability problem; it is a trust problem.
Abstraction does not cost anyone their keys
Time to head off the obvious objection because it deserves a straight answer: hiding complexity is not the same as seizing control. COCA remains self-custodial throughout. The customer keeps custody, full stop.
Nobody should have to earn access to their own money by studying the plumbing of the platform they use. Banking drew that line long ago. I have never heard anybody try to argue that a debit card weakens your claim to your salary, have you?
The numbers worth managing towards
There is a commercial argument here too, and for anyone building products it lands harder. Most applications lose users at the funding step, before a single feature gets its chance. Those users almost always hold assets already. The problem is those assets live on a chain the app does not happen to expect or directly support.
Every extra decision placed between that balance and a first useful action turns into churn a quarter later. Industry analysis has put onboarding churn for crypto wallets at over 70 per cent. Few consumer categories tolerate leakage on that scale for long.
Throughput and finality still matter to engineers, and they should. Commercially, though, I would trade a good figure on either for a higher funding completion rate. For a shorter path to a customer’s first useful action. I would trade both for a support queue that stops filling with people asking where their money went.
Fresh settlement layers are not the missing ingredient, and I say that as someone whose company builds infrastructure for a living. Chains are fast and cheap. There are more of them than anyone needs. The gap sits a layer up in the decision an application makes about how much of its own machinery to expose. Teams that hand that machinery to users will keep serving the same few million enthusiasts who enjoy the puzzle; and sure, that is still a real business, but it is a much smaller one than the market everybody claims to be chasing.
My old employer will almost certainly keep growing above and beyond its 100 million target by doing something quite unglamorous: making money movement forgettable. Crypto starts with better raw material than that. Faster settlement, programmable assets, genuine borderless friction and, most importantly, real ownership. So to go back to my starting sentiment, in 2026 I do believe that the best compliment a crypto app can earn from a mainstream customer is that they never thought about it at all.
The post Why Crypto’s Future Looks More like Revolut than MetaMask appeared first on The Fintech Times.
