The future of crypto payments won’t include on-ramps or bridges, Fun CEO says

Legacy crypto infrastructure such as standalone on-ramps and blockchain bridges is destined to disappear as digital asset applications adopt unified payment systems that make moving money onchain largely invisible to users, according to Fun CEO Alex Fine.

Rather than forcing users through separate funding, bridging and conversion steps, Fine said the next generation of crypto applications will embed payments directly into the user experience, abstracting away the underlying blockchain complexity. The shift, he argued, mirrors traditional Web2 payments, where consumers rarely think about the infrastructure processing their transactions.

“The age of on-ramps will be completely dead and the age of external bridging sites will be dead,” Fine told CoinDesk in an interview. “Nobody wants to use a bridge for the purpose of using a bridge. They want to use an application.”

Fun is a payments infrastructure company that builds the backend technology connecting traditional payment systems with blockchain networks. Rather than operating as a consumer-facing exchange or wallet, it provides APIs that allow fintechs and crypto applications to embed deposits, withdrawals, settlement and checkout directly into their products, abstracting away the complexity of moving funds between fiat currencies, stablecoins and blockchains.

The comments come as prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi, along with tokenized equities platforms, continue to attract growing numbers of users and trading activity.

While those applications have become increasingly visible, the infrastructure that enables deposits, withdrawals and settlement has largely remained behind the scenes.

Fun is one of the companies building that infrastructure. The firm said it powers 100% of deposits and withdrawals on Polymarket and deposit flows into Aave’s largest vaults, while processing more than $3 billion in monthly transaction volume.

The company has raised more than $75 million to date.

Fine said today’s crypto payments ecosystem remains unnecessarily fragmented, with developers forced to stitch together different card processors, banking partners, crypto assets, blockchains and bridges to create funding experiences.

Instead of relying on individual payment rails, platforms should optimize around the end goal of getting users funded as quickly and seamlessly as possible, he says.

“In Web2, payments are highly fungible,” Fine said. “In Web3, they’re much more complex because every payment method behaves differently. Teams keep rebuilding the same infrastructure over and over again instead of building unified optimized funding flows.”

That shift means many existing crypto payment businesses risk becoming obsolete, according to Fine. Companies built around converting fiat into crypto or moving assets between blockchains are solving an intermediary step that users never cared about in the first place, he argued.

“People don’t care about converting fiat to crypto,” Fine said. “They care about taking an action inside an app. The conversion is just something that has to happen.”

Fine pointed to signs that standalone on-ramp providers and bridge interfaces are already losing prominence as more applications integrate payments directly into their own products. Rather than sending users to external services, platforms are increasingly embedding native payment experiences, allowing customers to reuse saved payment credentials and complete transactions in a single click.

The evolution also extends to fraud and risk management, Fine said. Instead of applying identical checks to every transaction, payment systems should adapt based on a user’s history and behavior. Longstanding customers with significant balances, for example, should face a different experience than first-time users, allowing platforms to maximize funding while managing risk more efficiently.

Looking beyond payments, Fine said prediction markets and tokenized equities remain among crypto’s most promising growth sectors, arguing that both are still in the early stages of adoption.

Prediction markets today represent “perhaps 10%” of their eventual potential, he said, with broader liquidity expected to unlock markets on increasingly niche events and improve their usefulness as hedging tools.

“As liquidity expands, you’ll see millions of potential event contracts,” Fine said. “That’s what ultimately makes these platforms more valuable.”