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 s...