When Circle published its 2024 attestation report, it revealed that USDC, the company’s dollar-backed stablecoin, had processed over $12 trillion in cumulative on-chain transaction volume since launch. That single number captures a broader reality about fintech: blockchain is no longer an experimental layer sitting alongside the core product. For a growing number of fintech companies, it is the core product. The global blockchain market reached an estimated $31.18 billion in 2025, according to Fortune Business Insights, with the banking, financial services, and insurance sector accounting for 23.52% of total revenue.
How Fintech Companies Adopted Blockchain Differently Than Banks
Traditional banks approached blockchain cautiously, running pilot programmes and forming consortia before committing production workloads. Fintech companies moved faster. They had fewer legacy systems to protect, smaller compliance teams to satisfy, and business models built on speed rather than stability.
Ripple is the clearest example. Founded in 2012, the company built its entire cross-border payments product on the XRP Ledger, a blockchain designed specifically for financial settlement. By 2024, RippleNet connected over 300 financial institutions across 55 countries. The network processes payments in three to five seconds, compared to the three-to-five-day timeline of traditional correspondent banking.
Data from Chainalysis’s 2024 Global Crypto Adoption Index shows that emerging markets in South and Southeast Asia continue to lead grassroots cryptocurrency adoption, driven by remittance use cases and limited access to traditional banking services.
According to CoinGecko’s 2024 annual crypto report, total cryptocurrency market capitalisation exceeded $3.5 trillion by the end of 2024, reflecting renewed institutional interest following spot ETF approvals in the United States.
Stripe followed a different path. In 2022, the company re-enabled cryptocurrency payments after a four-year pause, integrating USDC on multiple blockchains. In October 2024, Stripe acquired Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure company, for $1.1 billion. The acquisition signalled that Stripe views blockchain-based payments not as a niche feature but as a core part of its payments infrastructure.
These are not isolated decisions. 83% of financial institutions are either exploring or actively deploying blockchain solutions, according to Coinlaw. Among fintech companies specifically, adoption rates are higher because the integration cost is lower. A five-year-old payments startup can rebuild its settlement layer on a blockchain in months. A 150-year-old bank cannot.
Stablecoins as Fintech Infrastructure
Stablecoins have become the primary bridge between blockchain technology and everyday financial services. Unlike volatile cryptocurrencies, stablecoins maintain a fixed value (typically pegged to the US dollar) by holding equivalent reserves in cash and short-term treasuries.
Circle’s USDC and Tether’s USDT together account for over $150 billion in market capitalisation as of early 2025. But the more telling metric is velocity: how often each token changes hands. Stablecoins are used for payroll processing, cross-border remittances, B2B vendor payments, and as settlement currency on decentralised exchanges. PayPal launched its own stablecoin, PYUSD, in August 2023, making it the first major payments company to issue a dollar-pegged token.
For fintech companies operating in emerging markets, stablecoins solve a specific problem: dollar access. A freelancer in Nigeria paid through a platform like Deel or Remote can receive USDC and convert it to naira at a market rate, bypassing the delays and fees of traditional wire transfers. This use case has driven rapid stablecoin adoption across Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.
The payments application segment represents 25.45% of the global blockchain market, per Fortune Business Insights. Stablecoins are a large and growing share of that segment.
Blockchain-Based Lending and Credit
Decentralised lending protocols introduced a model where borrowers post collateral on a blockchain and receive loans without a bank acting as intermediary. Aave, the largest such protocol, held over $12 billion in total value locked by late 2024. Compound, another major protocol, held approximately $3 billion.
Fintech companies are building on top of these protocols rather than competing with them. Goldfinch, a decentralised credit protocol, extends blockchain-based loans to real-world borrowers in emerging markets, including businesses in Kenya, Mexico, and the Philippines. The loans are funded by on-chain capital pools, with credit assessments performed by local underwriters called “auditors.” By late 2024, Goldfinch had originated over $100 million in loans.
Centrifuge takes a similar approach for asset-backed lending. The protocol allows companies to tokenise real-world assets (invoices, real estate, trade receivables) and use them as collateral for on-chain borrowing. MakerDAO, which manages the DAI stablecoin, allocated over $1 billion to real-world asset vaults by 2024, with Centrifuge as a primary originator.
These models matter for fintech because they reduce the capital requirements of lending. A fintech company using blockchain-based credit infrastructure does not need to hold deposits or secure a banking licence. It connects borrowers to on-chain liquidity pools, earning fees on origination and servicing.
Compliance and Identity on the Blockchain
Regulatory compliance is the area where blockchain adoption in fintech faces the most friction, and also the most opportunity. Know-your-customer (KYC) verification costs the global financial industry an estimated $6 billion annually. Each institution performs its own checks, creating redundant processes that slow onboarding and increase costs.
Blockchain-based identity solutions aim to fix this by creating portable, verifiable credentials. A customer verified by one institution can share that verification with another through an on-chain attestation, eliminating the need for repeated document checks. The Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) launched in 2023 and has been adopted by several fintech platforms for on-chain identity verification.
Polygon ID, built on zero-knowledge proofs, takes a more privacy-focused approach. Users can prove specific attributes (age over 18, accredited investor status, KYC-cleared) without revealing the underlying personal data. This addresses a core tension in financial compliance: the need to verify identity without creating centralised databases of sensitive information.
For fintech companies, blockchain-based compliance tools reduce onboarding time and cost. A neobank using portable KYC can approve new customers in minutes rather than days, gaining a competitive advantage over traditional banks with slower verification processes.
What Limits Fintech Blockchain Adoption
Regulatory fragmentation is the primary constraint. The European Union’s MiCA regulation provides a unified framework for digital assets across member states, but the United States still operates under a patchwork of state and federal rules. A US-based fintech company offering stablecoin payments must navigate SEC, CFTC, FinCEN, and state money transmitter requirements simultaneously.
Technical complexity also limits adoption. Integrating blockchain into a fintech product requires specialised engineering talent. Smart contract auditing, a necessary step before deploying any on-chain financial logic, costs between $50,000 and $500,000 depending on complexity. Blockchain-as-a-Service platforms (which account for 51.72% of market revenue, per Fortune Business Insights) reduce this barrier, but do not eliminate it.
User experience remains a gap. Most consumers do not know or care whether a payment settles on a blockchain or through ACH. The fintech companies gaining traction with blockchain are those that abstract the technology entirely, presenting a familiar interface while running blockchain settlement underneath. Stripe’s stablecoin integration works this way. So does PayPal’s PYUSD. The blockchain is invisible to the end user.
Blockchain-based cross-border payments already handle approximately $3 trillion per year, with volume growing at 45% annually, according to Coinlaw. The fintech companies that will capture the most value from this growth are not those building blockchain products. They are the ones building financial products that happen to run on blockchains.
