Subscription payments are the backbone of the modern internet economy. Netflix, Spotify, Patreon — the entire recurring revenue model rests on infrastructure that Web2 built over decades. In Web3, that infrastructure does not exist.
Collecting recurring payments from thousands of wallets on-chain remains expensive, manual, and technically fragmented. Every subscriber is a separate transaction. Every transaction is a separate gas fee. At scale, the economics collapse entirely.
I sat down with Sergey Kravtsov, Co-founder and CEO of fintech startup Papaya Finance, to understand what is broken in Web3 payments today, what the industry keeps getting wrong, and whether infinite-scaling on-chain subscriptions are actually possible.
Let’s dive in!
Papaya Finance addresses one of the long-standing challenges in Web3 — recurring payments. Why has this problem remained unsolved for so long, and how does your approach differ from existing solutions?
Sergey Kravtsov: “The reason it stayed unsolved is architectural. Blockchains were designed for one-time transfers — send value from A to B, confirm, done. But subscriptions are fundamentally different. You need to charge thousands or millions of wallets on a recurring basis. And on most chains, every charge is a separate transaction with its own gas fee. At 10 subscribers, that is fine. At 10,000, it is expensive. At a million, the economics completely break down.
Most teams that tried to solve this simply copied the Web2 model — cron-job-style billing, where you trigger a transaction per subscriber per cycle. That scales linearly, and linear does not work onchain.
We took a different approach. We built a patent-pending aggregation architecture where settlement happens in constant time — O(1). Whether you have 100 subscribers or 100 million, the cost of settling is the same. That is what makes infinite-scale onchain subscriptions actually possible. What we are building is native onchain infrastructure — non-custodial, programmable, composable.”
By reducing the cost of processing large-scale payments to near zero, Papaya aims to unlock new use cases such as subscriptions, payroll, and grants on-chain. How do you see this type of infrastructure changing the economics of digital platforms and enabling new business models in Web3?
Sergey Kravtsov: “Once costs drop to near zero and subscriptions become continuous streams rather than discrete monthly charges, both the economics and the product design space expand significantly. Today, there are over 700 million active crypto wallets globally, yet most users still pay for services like Netflix or Spotify with cards — not by preference, but because reliable on-chain subscription infrastructure does not exist.
Removing that barrier unlocks two major shifts. First, crypto-native platforms can finally monetize through recurring revenue — from content and DAOs to APIs. Second, entirely new models emerge that traditional rails cannot support, such as hourly DCA investing, pay-per-minute compute, streaming salaries, or AI agents autonomously paying for services.
There is also a structural cost advantage. Subscription platforms today absorb significant fees across transactions, chargebacks, and currency conversions. With aggregated on-chain settlement, these costs can be reduced by up to 70%, fundamentally changing unit economics. On-chain subscriptions are not just a new payment method — they are programmable, global, and enable business models that simply cannot exist in the card-based system.”
Technologies like ERC-4337 are often seen as a major step toward improving user experience in Web3. How do you see the relationship between wallet-level improvements and protocol-level infrastructure like Papaya?
Sergey Kravtsov: “Account abstraction solves real UX problems — gasless transactions, social recovery, batched operations. These are meaningful improvements for onchain experience.
But here is the gap: account abstraction makes individual transactions smoother. It does not create a recurring payment infrastructure. You still need a protocol layer that manages subscription state, handles continuous streaming, processes settlements at scale, and does solvency checks — all without scaling gas costs linearly with user count.
Think of it this way: ERC-4337 improves the wallet. Papaya improves the rails. You need both. A smart account can authorize a subscription with better UX, but you still need a protocol underneath that actually executes millions of subscriptions efficiently. We are that protocol. And we work with any wallet — smart accounts, EOAs, whatever your users have.”
Papaya started as a creator-focused platform with Papaya.land and has since evolved into a money streams protocol with Papaya.finance. What drove this pivot, and what key insights led you to expand beyond the creator economy?
Sergey Kravtsov: “We started with creators because the pain was obvious. Platform fees can eat up to 60% of a creator’s earnings. Payouts take days or weeks. Accounts get frozen or blocked with no warning. In some regions, creators cannot withdraw their money at all. That felt like a problem worth solving.
So we started building a platform to fix that. But very quickly, we hit a core technical challenge: how do you collect subscriptions from thousands or millions of wallets onchain without gas costs scaling linearly? Every subscriber is a separate transaction, and at scale, the economics just collapse.
We spent a long time on that problem. And when we finally cracked it — an architecture that settles any number of subscriptions in a single transaction with O(1) complexity — we realized we had built something much bigger than a creator platform. We had built infrastructure.
That was the moment the pivot became obvious. The protocol we designed for creators works just as well for SaaS billing, for automated investing, for AI agent payments — for any fintech or DeFi use case where you need scalable, non-custodial, recurring onchain settlement. Limiting it to one vertical would have been leaving 99% of the opportunity on the table.
So we made the decision to shift from Papaya.land, the creator app, to Papaya.finance, the protocol. The creator use case is still there, but now it is one application on top of a much more powerful layer.”
You’ve launched 11 businesses prior to the fintech startup Papaya. What differentiates this one from your previous companies — and what long-term outcome or market shift are you ultimately building toward?
Sergey Kravtsov: “I have built companies across very different industries, from mobile apps to services to operations-heavy businesses. Every one of them taught me something about product, distribution, and how real businesses actually make money. But Papaya is the first time I feel like I am building something that can become foundational infrastructure.
The difference is the size of the problem and the timing. Stablecoins are becoming the default way value moves on the internet. Regulation is catching up. Adoption is accelerating. But the recurring layer — the thing that powers every subscription, every automated payment, every predictable revenue stream — does not exist yet onchain. That is not a feature gap. That is a missing piece of financial infrastructure.
What keeps me going is that we did not just identify the problem — we solved the hardest part of it. We built a protocol that settles any number of recurring payments in constant time, filed a patent on the architecture, passed a security audit, and deployed on nine blockchains. That is not a pitch deck. That is the working infrastructure.
The endgame is simple: every recurring payment in the stablecoin economy should flow through Papaya. Subscriptions, DCA, AI agent payments — any use case where value needs to move automatically, repeatedly, and at scale. We want to be the layer that people do not even think about, the way nobody thinks about what powers their Netflix billing today. It just works.”
Looking ahead, what will success look like for Papaya in practical terms — in terms of adoption, integrations, and real-world usage at scale?
Sergey Kravtsov: “For me, success is not about vanity metrics. It is about whether real money is flowing through the protocol on a recurring basis — every day, automatically, without anyone thinking about it.
In practical terms, the first milestone is creator and SaaS adoption. If platforms start collecting subscriptions through Papaya instead of traditional payment processors — and their costs drop dramatically while their reach becomes global — that is the proof point. One integration that processes thousands of recurring payments onchain will demonstrate more than any pitch deck.
The second layer is wallet integrations. We do not want to be a standalone app that people have to find. We want Papaya to be embedded inside the wallets and platforms where hundreds of millions of users already are. When a wallet offers a “subscribe” button and it runs on our protocol underneath — that is real distribution.
And the third thing I am watching is new use cases that we did not design for but that our architecture enables. That is how you know you have built infrastructure and not just a product. When developers start building things on top of Papaya that we never imagined — streaming payments for IoT, automated grant distributions, machine-to-machine billing — that is when you know the protocol is working as intended.
The endgame is simple: recurring payments onchain should be as invisible and reliable as they are in Web2 today. Nobody thinks about how their Netflix subscription gets processed. That is the standard we are building toward.”
