Joining us now is a guest who probably has the coolest title of anyone I have ever interviewed.
Alex Fine is the CEO of Fun.
Alex, it's nice to see you today.
Let's talk about fun.
What is it all about for people unfamiliar and why does moving money still feel so complicated for far too many people in the banking system here in 2026?
Yeah, so fund uh builds a fund funds a payments company, and we approach payments a little bit differently than what you see in web 2.
In web 2, in traditional banking, companies piece together payment rails, and in web 3, and for blockchain-based payments, we build what are called a universal, universal deposits.
And so we build the highest converting way to get money onto a blockchain, which is a better conduit for moving money in general.
Does the average consumer even need to know if their money is moving on chain?
Yeah, that's the beauty of it.
No, the average consumer does not need to know, nor in my opinion, should they know.
And in the future, most money, we believe will be moving on chain, and most customers won't even realize that it's happening.
In what ways is moving money on chain different from a more traditional payment stack, let's say a more traditional credit card with a bank, Venmo, etc.
Yeah, so I, I think the cross-border use cases, is a really good, uh, example.
If you're moving money cross border, you have a number of intermediaries to go from point A to point B.
So if you're moving money on a credit card, you go from your bank to what's called the merchant's bank, then the merchant, if they're international.
Needs to move from a local bank to a US bank, and then they need to manage their ops from there.
Each one of these legs takes a fee.
Each one of these legs takes time.
Each one of these legs adds uncertainty.
Whereas if you're moving money on chain, all that can be instant.
It could be 1 to 1, um, and just simply much more efficient.
What do you think is the biggest mistake that far too many companies are still making when they try and build payments in-house?
Yeah, so we, we see a lot of companies say, hey, we want to uh build a global payment stack.
And their approach to building a global payment stack is to go through region by region.
How do we find good rails for Europe?
How do we find good rails for, you know, Brazil, or Turkey, or South Korea?
And when you're piecing those together yourself, you end Up with an extremely high overhead on the, uh, you know, for the team, for the engineers.
And then you also have generally a much lower product performance.
And so, generally, the, the problem is the teams try to build themselves as opposed to just using a, a universal payments partner.
All right, Alex Fine is the CEO of Fun.
Alex, grateful for your time.
Thanks a lot for taking time for the broadcast.
Coom.
Thanks guys.
Appreciate it.
You got it.
We'll talk to you again soon.
