When Ian Krotinsky and Aashiq Dheeraj worked at Citadel, they spent their nights and weekends on hacking projects. Krotinsky says that they built a version of Reddit where the user who made it to the front page would be paid $50. That’s when the two learned that sending money to people around the world was surprisingly difficult. This led them to co-found Fin, a stablecoin-powered app where people can instantly send money across borders—including large sums.
On Wednesday, Fin, formerly known as TipLink, announced it raised $17 million in funding led by Pantera Capital, with participation from Sequoia and Samsung Next. Krotinsky, the CEO, did not disclose his company’s valuation.
“Fin is built as the payments app of the future,” he said in an interview with Fortune. “We’re building an app that takes advantage of all the benefits of stablecoins without all the complexity, and it’s going to work anywhere in the world.”
The startup shared a walkthrough of the app in its interview with Fortune. The app is built on user-friendliness, with a simple yet elegant design. Customers have three main options: they can send and receive money to and from another Fin user, someone’s bank account, or someone’s crypto wallet. Krotinsky says that by using stablecoin rails, the financial transfer fees will be far cheaper than sending money via a bank.
The app is primarily designed to send large amounts of money—in the hundreds of thousands or millions—from one country to another, or even domestically. For example, if a watch dealer in Switzerland wants to sell his product to a customer in the U.S., the buyer would traditionally wire the money with a big commercial bank, and it might take a few days and incur fees. Fin aims to build an alternative to that system with its app. Within the U.S., payments apps like Venmo and Zelle have payment limits, and cannot instantly process a payment of, say, $100,000. Fin aims to solve that problem, as well.
The app has not launched yet but plans to pilot with businesses in the import and export space in the next month. The company says it will generate revenue from fees, though for the user those fees would be cheaper than alternatives. It will also generate revenue by earning interest on the stablecoin in the Fin wallet.
Fin is launching in the year that stablecoins became mainstream. President Donald Trump signed the Genius Act in July, which established a regulatory framework for the technology. Since then, major remittance players and financial institutions like Western Union and Mastercard have heavily invested in their stablecoin offerings.
Krotinsky views his startup’s competition as big commercial banks, like JPMorgan Chase or Barclays, that are incumbents in providing international money transfers. He says that these large financial institutions have been building payment products the wrong way for decades, and that it will be hard for them to migrate their existing payment systems onto stablecoin rails.
“I think we have the opportunity of being the next largest payments app in the world,” Krotinsky said. “People are going to be surprised at how quickly we move to get there.”
