Crypto Payments Are Going Invisible — Here’s What That Means for Everyday Holders
Fun's CEO says clunky on-ramps and bridges are dying out as apps hide the blockchain plumbing. Here's why that could make crypto easier to use.
If you’ve ever tried to move money into a crypto app and found yourself stuck juggling a card processor, a separate on-ramp site, then a bridge to get funds onto the right blockchain, you’re not alone — and according to one payments executive, that whole clunky process is on its way out.
Alex Fine, CEO of payments infrastructure firm Fun, told CoinDesk that standalone crypto on-ramps and bridges — the separate tools people currently use to turn cash into crypto and shuffle it between blockchains — are becoming obsolete. He argues the future belongs to apps that quietly handle all of that in the background, so users never have to think about it.
“The age of on-ramps will be completely dead and the age of external bridging sites will be dead,” Fine said. “Nobody wants to use a bridge for the purpose of using a bridge. They want to use an application.”
Why this matters for people who just want to use an app
For everyday crypto users, this is really a story about friction disappearing. Fine’s argument is that nobody actually cares about converting dollars into crypto or bridging tokens between networks — those are just annoying steps standing between you and whatever you actually wanted to do, whether that’s betting on a prediction market, lending on a DeFi platform, or trading a tokenized stock.
Fun is one of the companies building the infrastructure to make that happen. It doesn’t run a consumer-facing app itself; instead it provides the backend tools — the “plumbing” — that other platforms plug in to handle deposits, withdrawals and checkout without sending users off to a separate site.
According to the company, it currently powers all deposit and withdrawal flows for the prediction market platform Polymarket, as well as deposit flows into Aave’s largest vaults. Fun says it processes more than $3 billion in transaction volume every month and has raised over $75 million to date.
Web2 habits meet Web3 complexity
Fine’s comparison to how online payments already work is telling. When you buy something online today, you don’t think about which card network or bank rail is processing the transaction — it just happens. He says crypto has been stuck doing the opposite: developers rebuild the same fragmented funding infrastructure over and over, stitching together card processors, banks, specific crypto assets, blockchains and bridges for every new app.
“In Web2, payments are highly fungible,” Fine said. “In Web3, they’re much more complex because every payment method behaves differently. Teams keep rebuilding the same infrastructure over and over instead of building unified optimized funding flows.”
That fragmentation is exactly what has made crypto intimidating for newcomers — the very audience CreamCoin writes for. If Fine’s prediction holds, the apps you already use for prediction markets, lending or tokenized assets could increasingly let you fund your account with a saved card or one-click payment, with the blockchain conversion happening invisibly behind the scenes.
Prediction markets still have room to grow
Fine also weighed in on where this smoother payment experience could have the biggest impact: prediction markets and tokenized equities, which he called two of crypto’s most promising growth areas. He estimated prediction markets are only at “perhaps 10%” of their eventual size, suggesting that as liquidity grows, platforms could support millions of niche event contracts — making them more useful as tools for hedging real-world risk, not just betting.
Fine also flagged that fraud and risk checks are likely to evolve alongside payments, with platforms treating trusted, long-time users differently from first-time depositors rather than applying the same checks to everyone.
None of this changes what coins are worth today, but it’s a reminder that the biggest barrier to crypto adoption has rarely been the technology itself — it’s been the awkward on-ramps standing between newcomers and the apps they actually want to use. If that friction genuinely fades, it could be one more reason more people feel comfortable holding and using crypto day to day.
Read more: George Santos’s Kalshi Bet Just Showed Why Prediction Markets Need Watching
