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.
Building the plumbing behind crypto apps
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.
From payment rails to funding flows
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.