A new category of financial players is building consumer banks where dollars and euros move as stablecoins under the hood. Stablecoin neobanks are a hybrid of fintech and crypto, with 24/7, cheaper cross-border payments as their edge.
The GENIUS Act, passed last year, gave the sector regulatory footing in the United States. One of the new players, RedotPay, has already passed five million customers, while MoneyGram has switched to stablecoin-based settlement.
The global financial system is moving toward a convergence of traditional fintech and the blockchain economy. Modern banking apps have polished interfaces but rest on settlement infrastructure that is slow, expensive and tied to banking hours. Stablecoin neobanks position themselves in this gap: they offer customers something that looks and feels like an ordinary digital bank, while in the background the money moves as digital dollars or euros on a blockchain. This is not a marginal technical variation. It is an attempt to rebuild the settlement layer of consumer banking itself — and capital, customers and the regulatory framework have started falling into place.
A stablecoin neobank is a hybrid financial platform that offers an account resembling an ordinary bank account, but operating largely on blockchain networks. Unlike a non-custodial crypto wallet, where the user has to manage private keys, most stablecoin neobanks are custodial. Customers deposit ordinary money or stablecoins, hold a balance and pay through an interface that looks like any modern banking app.
The difference lies in what happens under the hood. Deposits are often converted to, or settled as, stablecoins like USDC, USDT or euro-denominated digital values. The result is that the customer effectively holds a digital dollar or euro claim that can move 24/7 on a blockchain, but is presented as an ordinary balance in the app. When the card is swiped at a merchant, the balance is converted to local currency in real time — invisibly to both the customer and the payment terminal.
The clearest example is Hong Kong-based RedotPay, founded in 2023. The company reports more than five million customers in over 100 countries and an annual transaction volume of around ten billion dollars. In September 2025, RedotPay raised 47 million dollars in a strategic round with Coinbase Ventures, Galaxy Ventures and Vertex Ventures among the investors, reaching unicorn status. Seen from outside, the model is simple: customers deposit bitcoin, ether, USDT or USDC, receive a virtual or physical Visa card, and can spend the balance at around 130 million merchant locations worldwide.
Plasma One specifically targets markets where dollar demand is strongest — the company highlights Istanbul, Buenos Aires and Dubai. Its platform offers a Visa-licensed payment card in over 150 countries, yield on stablecoin balances and fee-free USDT transfers in-app. Gnosis Pay takes a different route and offers a Visa-certified debit card linked directly to the customer's own crypto wallet — it is the customer, not the platform, that custodies the funds.
The operational architecture acts as a bridge between the fiat economy off-chain and value transfer on-chain. Three building blocks carry the model: on- and off-ramps to ordinary currency, custody, and settlement on blockchain. When a customer deposits via bank transfer or card, the neobank or a regulated partner converts the amount to a corresponding stablecoin. The digital value is then held either in a pooled custodial wallet or at an individual smart contract address.
The innovation lies in settlement itself. A traditional cross-border payment moves through a chain of correspondent banks that exchange messages, with each leg adding a fee and a delay. On a stablecoin neobank, settlement happens directly on a public or private blockchain. That enables settlement where the transfer of value occurs at the same moment the transaction is confirmed. The result is settlement in seconds or minutes, regardless of time zone or holidays.
Behind the new consumer banks, a separate infrastructure layer has emerged that delivers "stablecoin banking" as a service to other companies. Crossmint is one example. The firm provides programmable smart contract wallets, AML screening through Elliptic, FATF travel rule compliance via NotaBene, and on- and off-ramp functionality across hundreds of thousands of locations globally. Its customer list includes MoneyGram, which according to Crossmint went from concept to launch of stablecoin-based international remittances in about two months.
For established fintechs and payment companies, this layer means they can offer stablecoin features without building settlement technology, licence portfolios and blockchain integration in-house. For new entrants, it lowers the barrier to entry significantly. The parallel is how Stripe once lifted card payments from a banking project to an API call.
In Europe, the category is younger but not absent. France's Deblock, founded by former Revolut and Ledger people, combines a French IBAN, a debit card and a non-custodial crypto wallet where the customer holds the keys. The platform has both an electronic money institution licence and what it describes as France's first MiCA licence, and offers up to six percent annual yield in euros by converting deposits to stablecoins and deploying them into DeFi protocols. Brighty, an EU-regulated app aimed at freelancers and digital nomads, combines IBAN, card and crypto wallet in a single interface with yield-generating stablecoin vaults. Switzerland's Fiat24 goes further still and runs a fully on-chain consumer bank.
The difference between European and global players is largely about regulation. Since December 2024, the EU has had MiCA fully operational, with separate categories for e-money tokens and asset-referenced tokens, and the framework gives licensed firms passporting rights across the entire union.
The Nordic picture is clear: no pure stablecoin neobank has yet established itself in Norway, Sweden, Denmark or Finland. The region's established digital banks — Lunar, P.F.C., Northmill, Klarna, Bank Norwegian — are built on traditional payment infrastructure and have not moved to stablecoin settlement. In practice, that means a Nordic consumer wanting a digital dollar account with a card and 24/7 transfers has to turn to non-Nordic players like RedotPay, Deblock or Brighty.
The Baltics, by contrast, have become a regulatory hub. Lithuania has implemented MiCA at high speed and has issued Robinhood Europe its first CASP licence in the country, while companies like Ambr Payments are registered as e-money token issuers. That means the licences and frameworks for building stablecoin services for a European market are already sitting in Vilnius and Tallinn. Lack of visibility is not the same as lack of infrastructure. The question for the Nordic and Baltic market is rather how long it takes before someone chooses to build a consumer-facing stablecoin neobank on the back of this licence portfolio.
Sources: Chainlink, Crossmint, Neobanque.ch, PANews, Bank of Lithuania
