Fun CEO predicts future crypto payments will bypass on-ramps and bridges

Alex Fine, CEO of payments infrastructure startup Fun, has made a bold claim: the on-ramps and bridges that currently serve as tollbooths between traditional finance and crypto will be dead within a year. In their place, he envisions purpose-built “deposit” products that use behavioral data and chain-specific defaults to route users from fiat to on-chain actions without the friction that has plagued the industry for years.

Fun says its deposit flows have delivered over 8x higher fiat volume compared to previous setups, and conversion rate improvements ranging from 3.4x to 8x over existing aggregators like MoonPay and Stripe.

The three eras of moving money on-chain

Fine frames the evolution of crypto payments as a story told in three chapters. The first era was the centralized exchange on-ramp, where users had to deposit funds into a CEX, buy tokens, and then withdraw to a wallet. The second era brought iframe aggregators — embedded widgets that let apps offer fiat-to-crypto conversion without sending users to a separate exchange. MoonPay, Transak, and eventually Stripe’s crypto tools fell into this category. Fine argues we’re now entering a third era: purpose-built flows designed specifically for fintech companies transitioning to on-chain solutions.

A $72 million bet on killing the on-ramp

Fun closed a $72 million Series A round on May 1, 2026, co-led by Multicoin Capital and SignalFire. The capital is earmarked for expanding Fun’s engineering team, opening a new office in Singapore, and exploring potential acquisitions.

Fun doesn’t have a token. There’s no governance coin, no utility token, no airdrop farming. The company generates revenue purely from facilitating fiat-to-on-chain conversions.

Fun originally started with a focus on wallet infrastructure before pivoting to what it now calls high-conversion deposit rails.

What this means for the payments landscape

MoonPay, which has built its brand on being the default fiat-to-crypto widget, would need to evolve significantly. Stripe, which entered the crypto payments space with its acquisition of Bridge, occupies a different strategic position since it already has deep fintech relationships and could potentially build similar tailored flows. The conversion rate gap Fun claims — 3.4x to 8x improvements over these incumbents — suggests the current crop of aggregators may be leaving enormous amounts of money on the table.

There’s a credibility check worth applying here. Fun’s conversion rate claims are self-reported, and the company has obvious incentives to present its performance in the most favorable light. The 8x figure in particular deserves scrutiny. Until independent benchmarks emerge, investors should treat these numbers as indicative rather than definitive.

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