The collapse of banking monopoly: financial power shifts to on-chain wallets
We are witnessing a historic paradigm shift: the bank is no longer the center of the financial universe. Over the past two decades, its key functions — from account management to final settlements — have consistently moved to new players. The final point of this process is the on-chain wallet, which is becoming not just a storage place, but a full-fledged personal financial hub.
For centuries, commercial banks held four key functions: account management, payment organization, fund transfers, and control over the settlement network. The 2008 crisis demonstrated for the first time that the bank is not the only possible way to organize financial services. From that moment, a migration of power began, which I divide into four stages.
From accounts to money without a bank
The first wave of neobanks (Revolut, Nubank, Chime) solved the problem of user experience, not the banking problem. They proved that the entry point to finance can belong to an app, not a license. By the end of 2025, Revolut has 68.3 million retail users and $67.5 billion in client funds, with an annual transaction volume of $1.7 trillion. However, the account still belonged to the organization, not the user.
In the second stage, power shifted from the account to the payment network. Visa and Mastercard never issued loans or managed accounts, but they controlled the path of settlements. Visa's total payment volume for the 2025 fiscal year reached $16.7 trillion, with a net margin of about 50%.
The third stage is associated with stablecoins, which separated the dollar from the banking system. By the first half of 2026, the circulating supply of stablecoins reached $250–270 billion. The changes manifested where the banking system is weakest — in Argentina, Nigeria, and Turkey, where USDT is increasingly used as a savings account.
When the account belongs to the user
The fourth stage is directed differently — power is shifting to the user for the first time. The number of non-custodial wallets has exceeded several hundred million, and MetaMask has surpassed the 100 million cumulative user mark. The wallet is no longer just a place to store coins; it is becoming a global financial account.
The main innovation of Gnosis Pay is not in issuing a Visa card, but in the fact that the card is for the first time directly linked to the user's own on-chain account, not to a bank. Assets remain in the user's own wallet, and when making a payment, the system reads them and processes the settlement automatically. Ether.fi Cash works in the same direction, combining stablecoins, yield-bearing assets, and real-world spending into a single on-chain account.
The true innovation of on-chain neobanks lies in the attempt to combine accounts, payments, yields, trading, and real-world expenses into one financial system that the user owns and controls.
My professional opinion: We stand on the threshold of what I call "retail financial sovereignty." When banks, payments, money, and accounts begin to separate from each other, the key will not be which bank becomes the largest, but what becomes the single financial account for each person. The answer may no longer be a bank, but a wallet. The task of the next decade is to determine which wallet will become this universal hub.