“When we reached out to like 10 banks or payment companies asking if we can do crypto debit cards, all of them said no, you cannot. It’s not possible,” Pavel Matveev said on the On The Margin podcast, recalling 2015. “And crypto is only for buying drugs and weapons.”
“A lot of companies, a lot of founders, maybe they gave up a bit too early,” Matveev said. “And we just kept going and kept trying.” One company eventually said yes, and in 2015 Wirex shipped one of the first crypto debit cards, a prepaid card you could load with Bitcoin and spend like cash. Eleven years later, the company he co-founded has quietly stopped competing for those cardholders. Instead it sells the machinery underneath them.
“What we built over eight years, we packaged and now we offer it as stablecoin card or stablecoin bank infrastructure to our builders,” Matveev said. For most of its life Wirex was a retail app for people who wanted to spend crypto: card, bank accounts, yield, cashback. Two years ago it made a choice, to stop fighting the new wave of stablecoin banks for customers and start supplying them. “Let’s use this opportunity to serve them instead of competing with them head to head on the B2C front,” he said. “Let’s actually work with them.”
‘There is no middleman’
“Wirex also is a principal member of Visa and Mastercard,” Matveev said. “For crypto companies or stablecoin companies, it’s quite unique.” The status, which Wirex secured in 2020, means it issues cards directly, with no sponsor bank sitting between it and the networks.
“The principal membership means that we have a direct relationship with the schemes,” he said. “We have more flexibility when it comes to the product, more flexibility when it comes to geographical distribution, types of cards we can issue, and also to unit economics. Because there is no middleman, there is no bank between us and the scheme.”
The demand for that plumbing came to Wirex, he said, not the other way around. “Companies were basically coming to us saying, I want what you have, but for my company. I want Wirex, but for my company,” Matveev said. “Can I issue cards through you, can I issue bank accounts through you?” A company that owns the card program keeps the interchange fee the merchant pays and the foreign-exchange spread when a user with dollars pays in euros. The ones renting a license split it. Wirex says it now has more than 8 million users and has processed over $20 billion since 2014, figures it attributes to itself. Its banking-as-a-service line, launched at the end of 2025, reached $1 billion in annualized card volume in 131 days, according to the company.
‘Banking is becoming a stablecoin’
“10 years ago, it was just better user experience and no fees, that was the main value proposition,” Matveev said, describing the first fintech boom that produced Revolut, Chime, Nubank, Monzo and Starling. “This time, the underlying rails are changing, the underlying rails are becoming stablecoins. Banking is becoming a stablecoin.”
Stablecoins are no longer a niche. By some counts they moved more value in 2025 than Visa and Mastercard combined, though that comparison flatters the technology, since much of that volume is trading and treasury flows rather than shopping. Non-dollar stablecoin supply has still roughly tripled since early 2023, driven by payments and payroll rather than speculation.
The incumbents, Matveev argues, cannot simply follow. The Revoluts and Monzos of the world are publicly listed or heading there, and their businesses run on legacy rails. “It’s very difficult for them to just give up on the existing rails and switch to stablecoins,” he said. “So it creates the opportunity for a new wave of challenger banks.” He estimates almost 1,000 stablecoin neobanks now exist, a figure that runs ahead of most industry trackers. The reason so many can launch, he said, is companies like his. “Now you go to a company like Wirex and you have all the building blocks. You can issue stablecoin-linked cards, stablecoin-linked bank accounts. You can offer cashback as a service, and it’s quite easy.”
The picks-and-shovels view
There is independent evidence that Wirex has become that layer. Will Harborne, chief executive of Rhino.fi, said on the On The Margin podcast that Wirex sits among his own customers, naming it unprompted while listing the companies his stablecoin payments firm serves.
“Wirex, and many companies that build on top of Wirex, which are kind of a banking as a service, is a customer of ours,” Harborne said. He also frames the same rails-are-shifting thesis from the other direction, arguing the biggest fintechs will absorb the technology rather than be replaced by it. “All of the top fintech players, whether that’s Revolut or Robinhood or WISE or Stripe, they’re instead adopting the best parts of the technology and using the fact that they’ve already got great distribution and lots of customers to just improve their own products,” he said.
Marc Boiron, chief executive of Polygon Labs, makes the ownership argument one layer deeper, at the blockchain itself. “Most people don’t realize yet. Polygon is just a payments focused chain,” he said on the same podcast. The logic is identical to Matveev’s: pick the part of the stack that actually settles money, own it end to end, and stop renting it.
‘Structurally, nothing’s really changing’
Not everyone buys that issuing a card on top of a stablecoin amounts to owning anything. Neo, chief executive of onchain neobank UR, said on the On The Margin podcast that most of the category is taking the easy way out.
“Everyone’s taking the easy way out in Web 3, Web 2 world today,” Neo said. “Easy USDC stablecoins, you issue a card, suddenly you’re NEO Bank and you can spend, and it’s very cool. But structurally at its core, nothing’s really changing.” His version of real ownership sits at the deposit and license level, not the card BIN. It is the open question hanging over the whole category: whether the moat is the payment license Wirex holds, or something further down still.
Matveev is candid that the road here was not a straight line. “Being the first mover is more difficult than anything else,” he said. The advantage lasts three to six months before a copy shows up. “We don’t want to be first mover. We want other guys to make the first move,” he said. “And maybe then we can copy some of the things they’re doing.” Wirex was an early mover but not the inventor it sometimes claims to be. Xapo shipped a Bitcoin debit card about ten months earlier, in 2014.
“One year in crypto equals probably three or four years in a traditional industry,” Matveev said. The cycles are violent, and being early is no protection. He points to TenX, a Singapore competitor that raised about $80 million in the 2017 ICO frenzy while Wirex had raised a fraction of that. TenX shut down by 2021. “We had a product and they had hype,” Matveev said. “Product hype, product wins.”
Wirex’s own stablecoin app, Wirex One, built on Circle’s Arc blockchain, launched only after the category it helped seed filled with rivals. He is blunt about what he would tell anyone starting now.
“Right now it’s an extremely good time to build everything related to stablecoin or AI or stablecoin and AI,” he said. “If I were a new builder or a new founder, I would just go and try something rather than sitting and waiting.”
