Is Crypto Becoming Fintech? | Nick Almond

What It Covers

Nick Almond, head of governance at Jito Foundation, and host David Canales examine whether crypto is absorbing fintech or vice versa, analyzing where value accrues on-chain versus off-chain, how liquidity fragmentation grows as fintechs build proprietary chains, and why crypto's permissionless architecture remains its core differentiator.

Key Questions Answered

• •Value accrual as a classification framework: Determine whether a project is crypto-native or fintech by tracking where generated value flows. If fees and revenue exit to centralized shareholders — as pump.fun did for much of its lifecycle — the project functions as a fintech extractor. Genuinely crypto-native projects redistribute value back to validators, stakers, and the broader on-chain ecosystem.
• •Fintech liquidity funnels will remain largely separate: Stablecoin adoption through platforms like Stripe's Tempo will bring trillions in liquidity onto blockchains, but the user personas transacting through fintech rails will not meaningfully migrate into native DeFi. Only single-digit percentages of fintech-onboarded users need to cross over to produce a material impact on the crypto ecosystem.
• •Institutional crypto narratives lag by approximately four years: TradFi and fintech institutions excel at operationalizing proven processes but struggle at technology frontiers. Crypto-native teams retain a structural speed advantage in areas like AI-agent integration and novel economic design, where institutional inertia prevents rapid iteration and deployment of genuinely new financial primitives.
• •Liquidity fragmentation accelerates as fintechs build proprietary chains: Robinhood Chain and Stripe's Tempo represent a pattern where each major fintech creates its own ecosystem, capturing value internally. Bridges become critical infrastructure, but fintechs will likely build proprietary bridges too, compounding fragmentation. Venture capital is already funding startups that service fintechs entering on-chain environments, shifting funding away from crypto-native dApps.
• •Decentralized governance and permissionlessness are crypto's defensible differentiators: Tokens alone do not separate crypto from fintech — DAOs, decentralized protocol governance, and permissionless finance do. Jito's model, where protocol decisions are made through decentralized governance rather than unilateral corporate control, represents a structural feature no fintech can replicate without fundamentally changing its legal and organizational architecture.