Stablecoins and self-custody are a transformational moment for the next generation of fintechs. Together they unlock global reach and the ability to ship a broad catalogue of financial products at speed.
Stablecoins and self-custody are a transformational moment for the next generation of fintechs. Together they unlock global reach and the ability to ship a broad catalogue of financial products at speed.
Traditional fintech has been hamstrung by one core limitation. Banking has always been welded to a rigid custody model that requires expensive licences and regulatory approval in every new geography. Self-custody and stablecoins break that mold. Distributing banking products becomes analogous to distributing technology. But the world doesn’t run on stablecoins. It runs on fiat, and therefore the licensing and regulatory burden moves to the edges.
Rhinestone is building the stablecoin operating system that makes distributing banking products universally accessible and instantly global.
There are three core problems we’re solving:
Rhinestone is offering four pillars to solve these problems:
Traditionally banking equals custody which equals licensing, regulations and intermediaries. Not your keys, not your crypto is an ideology, but self-custody is a commercial tactic. When the application is removed from the chain of custody, with no control over the flow of money, there is no licensing requirement and no compliance overhead attached to each new product launch.
Under a custodial model every new onchain product comes with an expensive (time and money) admissions process. In the EU each token and protocol integration into a custodial application requires an admission to trading. This means submission of regulatory whitepapers, screening, carbon emissions footprint assessments, sanction screening of founders, etc.
Under self-custody the user holds the asset, the app is a technology provider. The consequence is cycle time and reach advantage. A self-custodial product ships products a custodial one cannot, at a speed and global reach that a custodial one cannot match.
In practice that means shipping banking products without becoming a regulated entity. No custody licence, no money-transmitter licence, no CASP authorisation.
Self-custody is not clear-cut. Embedded wallets on the market today are not meeting the bar global regulators are setting. What passes as self-custody in the US may not pass in the EU. A backend that can sign without the user, reconstitute the key or censor recovery jeopardizes self-custody. Within regulated fintechs, this equates to long compliance reviews and red tape that become significant blockers in a product roadmap.
Rhinestone is innovating at the key layer to solve this exact problem and offer a key management layer that is unquestionably self-custodial. It all starts with client-side key generation and smart accounts. More on this to come in future posts.
The world still runs on fiat. Every app is a fiat in, stablecoin, fiat out sandwich, and the sandwich reintroduces every regional barrier self-custody works to remove. Local ramps, sponsor bank relationships per currency, KYC, and more. These are business development challenges, not engineering challenges.
With Rhinestone, virtual accounts and card issuing run through licensed partners. KYC and AML sit with the licence holder, with one shared verification across them, so the app integrates once, not once per region.
Today, every neobank builds the infrastructure before building the product. Stitching together wallets, gas abstraction, swap routing, multichain, onramps, virtual accounts, cards, yield. Four to six vendors minimum, each with its own contract, SLA, integration and surrounding technology to get it all harmoniously operating. Eighteen months of plumbing before a builder can start innovating and differentiating. And when a flow breaks halfway across vendor boundaries, no single vendor owns the outcome – they all point at one another.
In traditional finance, fintechs rent a charter, buy a bank core, and launch. With stablecoins, blockchains and self-custody replace the charter, and Rhinestone is building the “bank core” to unlock these new primitives for the next wave of fintech builders.
Four products form the foundation of the stablecoin bank core, all welded together at the account layer. One integration. One contract. One SLA.
Rhinestone is already supporting teams building on the frontier of fintech, including Plasma One, Safe, Startale Group and many more.
Fintech made payments embeddable. Self-custody and stablecoins embed banking, without the need for a charter or a licence stack per region. Neobanks are the first wave of builders taking advantage of this technology. Ultimately, any application that holds balance or moves value is next. Marketplaces, payroll, creator platforms, remittance, gig economy platforms, agents.
If you’re building on the frontier of fintech, going global and shipping products at speed, we are here to support. Get in contact to learn more.
