Recently, I’ve been pondering a question: what will the next super app in crypto look like?

When we open a banking app, whether it’s a traditional bank or a digital bank, the interface looks pretty much the same—accounts, transfers, wealth management, loans. Essentially, banks help us manage four basic relationships: saving, spending, earning, and borrowing. Ten years ago, mobile internet gave rise to digital banks like SoFi and Revolut, bringing branch services into our phones, making financial services no longer a privilege for the few.

Now, a decade into the crypto era, I increasingly believe it’s drawing a new blueprint. Self-custody wallets, stablecoins, on-chain lending—the permissionless nature of blockchain is fostering a global, real-time, composable banking experience. If mobile tech created digital banks, then crypto tech is building permissionless banks: a unified, interoperable, self-custodied front end that allows you to perform the full suite of banking operations—saving, spending, earning, borrowing—on the chain.

Looking at this decade of evolution, crypto has already carved out its own “wedge.” Self-custody wallets enable censorship-resistant storage, stablecoins create accessible digital dollars, protocols like Aave establish permissionless lending markets, and 24/7 global capital markets turn online culture into wealth tools. What remains is to connect these permissionless backends with user-friendly front ends akin to digital banking.

Wallets are the most direct entry point. MetaMask, Phantom, and similar front-end wallets are the first gateways for users entering the crypto world. Data speaks—about 35% of Solana’s transaction volume flows through Phantom alone, built on a moat of mobile experience and user stickiness. But relying solely on wallets to build a full digital bank is tough because users don’t just want to store their money—they want to spend it. MetaMask and Phantom are heading in this direction, launching crypto cards to capture the “how to spend crypto” scenario.

Spending is the most interesting part. Recently emerging projects—Kast, Tria, Tempo, Stable—are almost all targeting this track. One wave focuses on retail stablecoin card applications, another on enterprise-specific stablecoin chains. Crypto cards are no longer a high barrier; the real differentiation lies in how to grow transaction volume and retain users. This script is identical to the early days of fintech digital banks: the winner isn’t the first to launch a card but the one who captures a niche user segment first.

A more aggressive possibility: Bitget Wallet has piloted merchant QR code payments and stablecoin payments in Indonesia, Brazil, and Vietnam. Native crypto settlement could bypass traditional card networks altogether. And when it comes to cross-border payments, the case of TRON is worth studying. 25-30% of global stablecoin trading volume occurs on TRON—not because it’s the most technically advanced, but because it captured emerging markets first—Nigeria, Argentina, Southeast Asia. Low fees, fast settlement, global usability—these have become the underlying infrastructure for countless merchants’ payments and cross-border remittances. This involves integrating traditional payment systems like ACH, and for crypto digital banks to truly scale, they must bridge these legacy systems with blockchain standards.

From the “earning money” perspective, Hyperliquid has processed $3 trillion in trading volume over the past 18 months. Such perpetual contract platforms are among the most profitable companies in the industry. Starting from these high-frequency trading platforms offers natural advantages—users spin the flywheel quickly, and migration costs are high. But the problem is they’re highly cyclical and often tagged as “financial casinos.”

Lending is another key area. Today’s crypto lending mainly relies on permissionless, over-collateralized on-chain loans—Aave, Morpho, and other DeFi giants use over-collateralization to ensure repayment. The true “Holy Grail” is undercollateralized consumer credit, the niche SoFi entered years ago. Crypto still hasn’t fully cracked this, mainly due to the lack of robust digital identity resistant to sybil attacks and on-chain default consequences. If this path is successfully navigated, it could dramatically accelerate on-chain money velocity and push the on-chain economy into a new scale.

I see at least five major avenues for the next generation of crypto digital banks. First, privacy and compliance must reach parity—enterprise scenarios require transaction privacy, and retail needs compliant frameworks. Second, real-world composability—bridging blockchain standards with legacy systems like SWIFT, POS, ISO 20022. Third, leveraging the “permissionless” advantage—allowing perpetual contracts, prediction markets, staking, and other primitives to freely integrate with bank cards and remittance services.

Localization versus globalization—this is a choice. One approach is to follow Nubank’s path: dominate a region first, then expand outward through deep local trust. The other is to prioritize global reach, deploying permissionless products worldwide simultaneously. Both paths are viable—local trust wins in the first, scale wins in the second. Lastly, undercollateralized loans and consumer credit are the true Holy Grail, requiring breakthroughs in identity systems, credit data bridging, and mechanism design.

My observation is that the biggest opportunity for crypto digital banks may not lie in slow-money areas like savings and spending but in the fastest-moving money flows. Securing a position in high-velocity zones like earning and borrowing, then cascading down the pyramid to convert existing users into full-spectrum financial clients.

Privacy, compliance, real-world composability, permissionless power, local-global pathways, and consumer credit breakthroughs—when crypto digital banks solve these challenges one by one, they will evolve from niche entry points for crypto assets into the default operating system of the global economy. This wave is rewriting the very underlying logic of money itself.