Keep Going: A Podcast About Failure and Success

On this episode of The Innovators, I spoke with Jasper Fu, CEO of CoinSub, about what crypto payments actually look like when you strip away the hype and aim for real adoption. CoinSub has been operating for roughly two and a half years and has grown to a 22-person team, most of them engineers. The company’s focus is narrow by design. Instead of trying to convince millions of merchants to adopt crypto directly, CoinSub sells infrastructure to payment service providers. These are the companies that already process card payments for thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of merchants. CoinSub’s bet is that adoption happens faster when crypto looks like just another payment option, not a new system merchants have to learn. Fu framed the problem simply. Crypto and stablecoins are often described as liquid assets, but in practice they are hard to use for everyday payments. Merchants do not want to think about wallets, chains, or conversions. They want money in their bank accounts. CoinSub handles the movement behind the scenes, converting between dollars, Bitcoin, and stablecoins, then packaging that capability so payment processors can offer it under their own brands. For merchants, the experience is meant to feel familiar. Crypto becomes another icon at checkout, alongside cards or digital wallets. Whether funds settle as stablecoins or dollars is not something the merchant has to manage. Fu compared it to card networks. Merchants do not think about how Visa or Mastercard clears transactions, they just expect it to work. That distribution strategy also shapes CoinSub’s view of competition. While many crypto payment companies target merchants directly, CoinSub targets the providers upstream. There are billions of dollars flowing through a relatively small number of payment processors, many of which lack the technical capacity to build crypto infrastructure themselves. CoinSub positions itself as a way for those companies to keep pace without rebuilding their stacks. Usage data suggests there is real demand, even if it remains early. Fu said CoinSub processed roughly $400 million in transaction volume last year. That number varies widely by region and industry, but it reflects actual consumer-to-business payments, not trading or speculation. Some sectors adopt faster than others, including cross-border commerce and industries that struggle to maintain stable card processing relationships. Fu pushed back on the idea that crypto adoption hinges on hype cycles. He views blockchain and tokenization as infrastructure, a more efficient way to store and move data and value. Speculation and scams, he argued, appear in every new technology wave and do not define the underlying system. In his view, hype draws attention, but utility determines what survives. Stablecoins are central to CoinSub’s timing. Fu said regulatory clarity, treasury backing, and growing institutional interest have aligned incentives across governments, issuers, and payment networks. Payments and commerce, he said, are the logical next phase after issuance. Once stablecoins exist at scale, the question becomes how people actually use them. Fu’s path to CoinSub started outside crypto. After leaving a corporate role, he took time off to think about what he wanted to build next. Payments stood out as a place where incremental efficiency could have broad impact. Making money movement cheaper and more accessible, particularly across borders, felt like a net positive use of time and capital. That mindset also shapes CoinSub’s internal culture. Fu said he prefers the startup environment because it allows for empathy-first leadership and long-term thinking. He believes effort cannot be bought, only invited, and that teams perform better when people are treated as contributors rather than interchangeable resources. Looking ahead, CoinSub is expanding beyond its initial engineering phase. The company is working to capture more of the payment service provider market while it still has an early mover advantage. Longer term, Fu sees applications beyond checkout, including payouts, invoicing, and potentially ATMs, anywhere money needs to move across systems or borders. Fu is realistic about maturity. He expects fragmentation before consolidation, with many stablecoins and blockchains competing before a smaller set emerges as dominant. In that environment, CoinSub’s role is to abstract complexity away from customers and let them benefit from whichever systems ultimately win. Crypto payments, in Fu’s telling, are not about replacing everything overnight. They are about quietly fitting into existing workflows until their presence feels unremarkable. That, more than price swings or headlines, is what adoption looks like. Transcript John Biggs (00:07.982) Welcome back to The Innovators, a podcast about amazing people doing amazing things. Today on the show I have Jasper Fu. He’s the CEO of CoinSub, a stable coin operation. We do a lot of crypto on here, so I’m happy to have somebody back from the crypto world. Welcome, Jasper. Jasper Fu (00:27.501) Thanks for having me, John. John Biggs (00:28.588) Yeah. So tell us about CoinSub. How long have you been around and what are you up to? Jasper Fu (00:33.923) Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve been around for two and a half years. The team is about 22 people now with 17 being engineers. And what we jumped into the space to do is like everyone’s heard of this stable coin crypto blockchain Bitcoin stuff, right? And there’s a variety of value, value props. But what we realized is a lot of it’s just not hitting to the mass market. We particularly target payment service providers in fintechs, right? A lot of stable coin around, a lot of Bitcoin around, why can’t we pay with it was our first thought. You say it’s liquid, how do we make it liquid? And as we dug into the space, we realized this early, early stage of adoption, there’s a lot of demand from both the merchants, the businesses, as well as these payment providers to be able to offer this, right? But this is totally new tech to them. And most of the solutions in this space are either going for, hey, directly to the businesses themselves, or they’re these esoteric APIs that are hard for non-technical people to understand. So what we do is we pre-build out the infrastructure so that somebody could go from US dollars to Bitcoin to stable coin to US dollars. And we apply that to different things like payment acceptance and payouts. and we wrap and package that whole thing up and allow other companies, allow other payment providers who are already selling say card payments to now add this additional capability underneath their own brand. John Biggs (02:07.726) Interesting. in a nutshell, is the focus more on stablecoins? Is the focus more on general crypto? What am I as a merchant? So say I’m a merchant, want to sell my widgets online or I want to sell them in the store. What am I doing with you guys? How do you sell to me? Jasper Fu (02:25.924) So merchants usually get their payment products through their payment provider. So that’s the interesting insight that we had, right? You usually only want to work with one person and that might be say your stripe or your clover or whatever it is. So we actually sell to the clovers, you know, the clovers of the world, the payment service, the payment processors of the world. But what that looks like for the merchant is you reach a point of awareness where you’re like, I know that I should probably accept this kind of payment, but at the end of the day, I’m just trying to expand my business and grow my revenue. So for us, it’s just one more thing that gets added on at checkout, and that’s the last thing you have to worry about. Whether it ends up as stable coin or whether it ends up in US dollars in your bank, you shouldn’t have to worry about it. Focus on your business. You don’t worry about how your credit card gets there from Visa or MasterCard, and you don’t worry about how PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, Clarion don’t work. And so that’s the kind of level of adoption we want to bring where people understand that there’s some value there and we just go, great, here you go. Let me make sure that it’s comfortable for you. John Biggs (03:32.383) So the icons when you check out are like credit card, don’t know, PayPal, Venmo, Alipay, and then crypto. OK. You’ve got a lot of competition in that space. How is that working out? Jasper Fu (03:37.997) with crypto. Jasper Fu (03:46.244) So the competition in this space would only apply if the target market is the merchants themselves. There’s very few companies that are actually targeting the payment service providers. If you think about it, there’s hundreds of millions of merchants in the world that capture trillions of dollars of payment volume. But there’s only really thousands of payment service providers, independent sales orgs, and these are the ones that are already kind of selling card processing. they’ve already captured the entire market. And the reality is most of these have been around for 15, 20, 25 years and they’re not tech savvy. So when you get these first movers like a stripe, right, offering stable coin payment acceptance, what that actually does for the rest of the industry is it pressures kind of the middle of the pack or the earlier adopters to take action. And there’s not enough time for them to build it because as you said, the space is saturated and it applies to not just crypto but traditional payments as well. And so the options to buy and to date, we think of ourselves as like orthogonal to the competition. Our difference isn’t in what necessarily we’re offering them as an end product but rather the deployment model. Rather than deploying it to the merchants and trying to onboard millions of merchants, we onboard a couple dozen. payment providers that then grant us access to hundreds of