One startup at a time
Startups have one goal: find product-market fit (PMF).
Though PMF is difficult to define and measure, one reliable indicator is achieving organic referrals between target customers: the engine of exponential growth. In practice, this means beginning with a few users who love you, as opposed to many users who tolerate you ("It's easier to expand userwise than satisfactionwise").
This is good news for crypto, because we don't actually have that many users. However, the ones we do have are "10x users": disproportionately engaged, willing to try new products, and generous with their feedback. Crypto is fertile ground for finding and iterating with early adopters.
The problem? Until recently, operating onchain sucked. And there was no credible path to cross the chasm once you found something worth scaling. This is changing quickly:
- Teams makes onchain finance both usable and secure.
- Farcaster makes it easy to find your earliest customers.
- Project coins make it feasible to fundraise for more ambitious experiments.
- Privy and Porto make it easy to give customers invisible wallets.
The last missing piece is seamless onramping, which companies like Stripe and Coinbase are working hard to fix. We are on the cusp of an actually convenient consumer crypto experience.
The other business advantages of operating onchain are here today. If you can get the ball rolling within the existing crypto population, the benefits are tangible.
Fast, global, efficient
Traditional banking is slow and expensive. Sign-ups are permissioned, and payments take multiple business days to arrive. Your checking account hasn’t paid interest since 2008. Fintech interface improvements over the last decade are real, but they’re constrained by old infrastructure, as Stripe CEO Patrick Collison recently outlined.
Think of snail mail versus fax: faster delivery, yet stuck on paper. Email and the web broke free by being internet-native, which is the opportunity today. When startups operate onchain, they gain three decisive advantages:
- Accelerated formation and operations. The US financial system is best-in-class, yet creating an LLC takes days, costs hundreds, and demands ongoing maintenance and cognitive overhead. Onchain? In seconds, for pennies, you can form unbreakable global agreements that minimize mistakes and fraud. Finding your first investors and paying customers onchain takes less time than incorporating your company and opening a traditional bank account.
Once you have capital and customers, your operations benefit from the crypto ecosystem's breadth and depth of open-source business legos: revenue splitting, treasury management, payroll processing, accounting tools, vesting schedules, etc. Blockchains bring "build once, run anywhere" to finance with their open standards and composability guarantees. - Instant global reach. Businesses can seamlessly collect revenue, pay staff, and distribute equity and dividends worldwide in real-time — no correspondent banking relationships, no international fees and delays, no concerns about local banking stability. For example, SpaceX uses Bridge "to collect payments in different jurisdictions in different currencies and move them through stablecoins into its global treasury."
- Cash efficient. Credit card processors send payments slowly and charge ~3% plus fixed fees, not counting currency conversion, wire transfers, and international payments. When the funds eventually hit your bank account, the interest they pay you is negligible. Stablecoins, on the other hand, transfer for ~free, arrive ~instantly, and yield substantially more onchain than offchain. For early-stage companies where cash determines survival, every extra dollar earned extends runway.
Business-first adoption
Consumer payment habits resist change. Most people only switch payment methods when incentivized through discounts, perks, or necessity. That’s because, for the consumer, the standard options are Actually Pretty Good.
Businesses, however, follow operational velocity and margins. When founders discover that onchain operations provide speed and cost advantages, they migrate naturally.
The path to mainstream adoption doesn't require every consumer to understand crypto, and if it did we would be doomed. Rather, what's required is for businesses to recognize the advantages and gradually expose customers to the benefits. This "progressive adoption" approach lets businesses capture crypto's operational advantages immediately while onboarding customers who may not even realize they're using blockchain technology.
Consider two founders launching a new project. Along with their shared GitHub repo and Notion workspace, they can permissionlessly create a Team with a project coin, raising capital and seeding their early community with financially aligned users and contributors. No paperwork, no lawyers, no bank accounts required.
The product can be validated by selling to customers who pay in crypto. Once the founders have iterated toward product-market fit, they can incorporate traditionally and integrate fiat payment rails for mainstream consumers. Customers don't need to realize that the business operates on Ethereum, just as they don't think about what servers or databases companies use. The infrastructure fades into the background.
This is how crypto advances: one startup at a time, built on a better foundation from day one.
The foundation is ready
The infrastructure pieces have quietly fallen into place. What seemed impossible just two years ago — seamless onchain operations that don't sacrifice security or usability — is now table stakes. The early adopter tax has been paid by others.
This creates a different kind of opportunity: building on proven infrastructure rather than betting on unproven technology. You can focus on product-market fit instead of wrestling with wallet UX. You can concentrate on customer acquisition rather than explaining why crypto matters.
The question is no longer whether the technology is ready — it's whether you are ready to take advantage of it.
At Splits we're building institutional-grade banking that's instantly available to everyone in the world. Built on Ethereum. No account minimums, paperwork, or legal entity needed. Sign up today.