Crypto feels like it’s coming full circle.

Not philosophically. Financially.

Bitcoin began as peer-to-peer cash.
We then spent years treating the space as digital gold, leverage, and speculation.

What’s changed is the infrastructure quietly forming in 2025–26.

Stablecoins brought back something very familiar: a reliable dollar balance on digital rails. And once you have that, the rest follows almost automatically — payments, balances, credit, yield.

That’s how financial systems evolve.

We’ve seen this pattern before.

Mid-2010s fintech followed the same arc.

Payments first.
Then lending to activate liquidity.
Then yield to retain it.

I saw this pattern up close the first time around.

I started my fintech career in 2015 at Citrus Pay (acquired by Naspers), when payments were still the wedge product and everything else was expected to come later.

Builders like Amrish Rau and Jitendra Gupta were designing for scale back then — knowing that once money moves easily, credit and yield inevitably follow.

Watching crypto retrace that same path on open rails feels less like innovation theatre and more like history repeating itself.

“Once money moves easily, credit and yield always follow.”

Where the real work is happening now.

That’s why the most interesting work today isn’t happening at the checkout.

It’s happening in the layer that turns stablecoin balances into productive capital.

This is where the shift from “DeFi products” to credit infrastructure becomes visible.

Early DeFi pooled risk into monolithic protocols. Useful — but blunt.

What’s emerging now looks closer to segmented, auditable credit markets that other institutions can embed rather than reinvent.

This is why Morpho is interesting — not as a “crypto bank”, but as lending infrastructure: non-custodial, modular, and explicit about risk.

Who’s leaning in — and why.

You can see the shift in who’s engaging.

A regulated institution like Anchorage Digital integrating on-chain lending infrastructure.

An asset manager like Apollo Global Management exploring how real-world assets fit into transparent, programmable credit markets.

Risk being carved up and curated by firms such as Gauntlet and Steakhouse Financial, rather than smeared across a single undifferentiated pool.

This isn’t isolated.

You see similar moves across:

The common thread is simple.

Credit is the bridge, not the end state.

Bankers understand credit.
They understand yield.
They’ve never been comfortable with opacity.

Auditable, non-custodial infrastructure meets them where they already are.

Web2 fintech didn’t stop at payments. It matured once credit and yield moved into the stack.

Web3 is doing the same thing now.

As I wrote recently about how stablecoins quietly upgrade the dollar and why settlement, not checkout, is the real battleground, the shift isn’t about novelty anymore. It’s about building systems institutions can actually rely on.

“The open question isn’t whether it works anymore. It’s who builds the rails.”

The rails that the rest of the world eventually ends up standing on.