In 2025, the biggest payment players stopped treating crypto as a product and quietly turned it into infrastructure.
Visa could continue pushing stablecoin settlement through Visa Direct. Revolut might route stablecoin transfers over Polygon, potentially passing hundreds of millions in flow. PayPal may keep crypto fully hidden — just a conversion layer at checkout.
Meanwhile, a mid-tier EU neobank could take the opposite path: planning to build an internal “crypto module” — custody, wallets, monitoring, liquidity logic — just to support a simple EUR → USDT → payouts flow.
And this could easily become the core issue: they might not actually need a crypto platform; they might need a payment rail.
When “Let’s Add Crypto” Quietly Becomes a Six-Month Engineering Project
The team in this position could assume stablecoin payouts require:
custody and safeguarding
- hot/cold wallets
- blockchain monitoring
- a risk engine
- compliance stack
In reality, none of this may be required for their use case. The second blind spot could be liquidity. They might think “holding USDT” means “access to liquidity.” Without exchange-grade depth, every conversion batch could widen spreads and slow execution.
Their roadmap might not reflect what they truly need — it could reflect what they think crypto requires.
Alternatives: Close, but Not Close Enough
They could review the usual players:
- MoonPay — great UX, but retail-first and no mass-payout engine.
- Ramp Network — clean fiat↔crypto rails, but no business-scale payout logic.
- Binance Pay — technically fit, compliance risk made it a poor EU dependency.
Each option might cover a slice of the problem. None may cover the entire EUR → stablecoin → payouts loop with liquidity and custody offloaded.
At this stage, the conversation could shift from “How do we build crypto?” to “Which rail executes this with zero operational baggage?”
WhiteBIT On/Off-Ramp: The Option That Matches the Flow
Once the actual need becomes clear — EUR in, convert, pay out — the decision could narrow quickly. WhiteBIT’s On/Off-Ramp can deliver the entire loop without requiring the team to build or maintain anything:
- SEPA / SEPA Instant funding (€5 fixed fee)
- upfront quotes removing ~15–20% spread uncertainty
- mass stablecoin payouts through a single flow
- exchange-grade liquidity (their model showed 0.4–0.6% slippage)
- no wallet or custody overhead
- deployment measured in weeks, not months
During a potential integration, they could align limits, run a SEPA Instant test, enable auto-conversion on arrival, and see their risk-pricing logic become redundant. Mass payouts could go live after a two-day mapping of their export file and a 10-user test run.
What might originally look like a 5–6-month build could become a sub-four-week launch.
Reconciliation time could drop from ~40 to ~10 minutes a day, removing custody could cut ~€40–50k/year in policy overhead, and engineering spend might fall by roughly 60%.
Operational Impact
The team might originally budget to build an internal stack with an operational footprint 5–10x heavier across every core component. The comparison could look like this in practice:
WhiteBIT’s On/Off-Ramp consistently reduces the operational load across custody, wallet infrastructure, liquidity sourcing, and compliance.
Liquidity, Finally Done Right
Their internal model could assume they can source USDT at scale with minimal slippage.
Reality may suggest otherwise: without deep books behind them, every payout batch could drift execution costs upward.
WhiteBIT may remove that variable entirely: stable, predictable, exchange-grade liquidity, enough to handle daily operations without price movement. They could launch in under four weeks, stabilize conversion costs, remove custody and liquidity exposure, and cut ~60% of infra spend.
The product they want to launch could become the product they can actually operationalize.
Conclusion
Don’t build infrastructure for flows you only need to execute. Most fintech teams don’t get wrecked by crypto — they get wrecked by trying to become an exchange instead of using one.
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