The Real Shift: Crypto-Native Companies Are Becoming the New Fintechs

What I Got Right About the Future of Finance

In 2022, I wrote that every finance company would become a crypto company.

At the time, that felt like a bold claim. But the signs were already there—crypto was gaining real traction, not just as an asset class, but as an emerging payment and infrastructure layer.

Fast forward to today, and that prediction is playing out. Major fintech players like Stripe, PayPal, and Robinhood now offer crypto access to millions of users. But an even more powerful trend has emerged: instead of fintechs merely adopting crypto, crypto-native companies are building better versions of fintech.

TradFi has long struggled with high costs, delayed settlement, limited market hours, and manual operations. Crypto-native companies are solving these pain points at the infrastructure level—and they’re doing it in ways that make legacy finance look slow and outdated.

Here are just a few examples of the shift:

• Kraken acquired NinjaTrader for $1.5B to bring professional-grade futures trading into its crypto-native stack.
• Ondo is rebuilding global financial markets onchain, offering 24/7/365 access and composable assets—something TradFi simply can’t match.
• Coinbase is launching the first-ever 24/7 Bitcoin and Ethereum futures contracts for U.S. traders, unlocking round-the-clock risk management.
• Dinari is tokenizing traditional securities like stocks and bonds, using smart contracts to automate trading and settlement.

The narrative has flipped. Fintechs once disrupted banks. Now, they’re being disrupted by crypto-native builders who abstract away the inefficiencies of legacy finance with better tech, faster rails, and always-on infrastructure.

As I said in 2022:

“If fintechs don’t add crypto to their roadmap, crypto-native companies will continue flooding the bottom of the market—until they relentlessly move up and displace the incumbents.”

Crypto isn’t just a new asset class—it’s a new operating system for finance. And the separation between fintech and crypto? That wall is quickly coming down.