Crypto rails will do to banks what blogs did to media. Between the GENIUS Act, the ever-expanding TAM for stablecoins, and every last bit of pennies the attention economy can squeeze for apps, we may be seeing fertile breeding grounds for the unbundling of banks. Here's my thesis. Traditionally, a bank was almost a pristine, religious institute. One that needed licenses to be able to hold user deposits and lend them out. Fintech platforms came through and flirted with what a bank can be. The app may not have the license itself, but it would borrow capital (float) from a bank and lend it out to users. Banks made much of the money in these endeavours as they were the source of the capital. By some estimates, fintech platforms account for barely 3% of all banking revenue. You can have all the users, but owning the capital is where the money is made as you get to determine the terms on which it flows. The GENIUS act allows non-banking products now to hold digital variants (stablecoins) of dollars. What that means is, an app can hold dollars on its balance sheet. Similar to how starbucks can hold dollars under the guise of its gift card programme. Traditionally, a bank was a complex blend of a database, a compliance layer, a yield engine and a bundle of reputation that allowed it to have credibility. Crypto native products, invert that relationship. It all started when people began embracing stablecoins. Both users and merchants holding stablecoins will quickly realise that they need places to put this capital to use. We see a very early version of this with @BasedOneX being built by @edison0xyz. Users directly trade on Hyperliquid with self-custodied wallets powered by Privy. They can then port it to a debit card that can be used to make real life payments. What would happen if Robinhood allowed users to have real time access to the world's markets, remittance, yield and the ability to spend that money in real time? That is what users on Based will wake up to. Underlying that infrastructure is a complex web of service providers that have evolved to take care of compliance, payments, wallets and trading interfaces. This is evolution that has occurred over half a decade. But where do we go from here? If everything is a bank, nothing will be a bank. What we will see is products rushing to accumulate user deposits on it. Anything with high velocity capital flow has an incentive to be a full-stack bank. Surely, they may not be allowed to lend the deposits out. But they would be able to generate yield on user deposits. Or even better - capture a portfion of transaction fees generated on third-party markets. For instance, a social network (like X) may make money on prediction markets built on Polymarket. In the UAE - Careem already allows a primitive version of remittance. What if that was done on stablecoins but the float (idle money) from user deposits was parked on an on-chain primitive (like Aave?). Google tried to launch Plex in 2021 and failed to get the necessary licenses for it. In India -it built its wallet on an open protoocol (UPI). All products with massive distribution have incentives to accrue user deposits, albeit in paltry sums. These figures will add up to be economies of scale. So you will see two things happen 1. Products with scale - monetise through smaller sums of deposits. Think idle balance on Uber 2. New products without scale - monetising through high velocity user transactions. Think Roblox - but in an open economy. In my view, the GENIUS act allows everything to be a bank. And in turn, it changes the basis of how startups operate on the web. Traditionally, users avoided depositing capital into apps as they are a one-way street. Stablecoins allow easy portability between apps. Which means, apps have an incentive to make stablecoin deposits happen, and then generate yield on it, to add to their balance sheet. We barely know what the business models here could look like. But what is apparent, is that the attention economy on the web, is giving way to a transaction economy. One where stablecoins allow two way transfers of value (user to platform and vice versa) instead of it being only one way. If you are exploring alternative business models, or large-scale banking stacks for the entirety of the web, I'd like to talk. Slide in the DMs. Also read the whole story I shipped last Thursday at the link below.