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In 2023, while UPay was integrating with a major card network, CEO Owen Yang began to see the limits of the system his company was working within.
The process gave him a closer look at how card payments move behind the scenes. What stood out was how heavily the system still depended on fiat-based clearing and settlement.
“We spent a lot of time integrating with the card network’s systems, and that process made me realize that the entire system was still built around fiat-based clearing and settlement,” Yang tells CEO Today.
To him, much of what crypto could bring to payments was still being left unused.
“It barely took advantage of what crypto can actually bring to payments, faster settlement, eliminating counterparty risk, consensus-based systems, and many other characteristics that could fundamentally change how payments work,” he says.
“That was when I realized the destination was still a long way off.”
Yang traces the idea behind UPay to a wider problem in the crypto market at the time. Moving between crypto and fiat was often difficult, OTC trading was common, and frozen funds or accounts could make it harder for people and businesses to move money back into the wider economy.
That gap helped shape UPay’s original goal: giving people a compliant way to spend crypto.
For Yang, cards were never the end goal.
“For us, there may never be one final destination,” he says. “I think every stage has its own destination, and once we get there, we move on to the next one.”
The Gap Between Two Worlds
Building UPay gave Yang a closer view of how differently crypto and traditional payments operate.
“I think it was really the gap between crypto and fiat,” he says. “They’re completely different worlds, not just in terms of scale, but also in the way people think about and use money.”
That difference shaped how his view of the industry developed.
When UPay started, the company focused on one relatively small part of the payments space. As Yang went deeper, he began looking beyond the point where a customer actually makes a payment.
“When we first started UPay, our focus was on just one small part of the payments space,” he says. “But as we went deeper, I realized there’s so much more to crypto payments, acquiring, clearing and settlement, remittances, and many other parts of the payment flow.”
Almost every part of that process, he argues, still has room for improvement.
UPay is now exploring more of those areas, while Yang’s longer-term view centers on merchants being able to accept and settle with crypto directly.
“For the next stage, I’d like to see more merchants accepting crypto directly for settlement,” he says.
As crypto becomes more widely used, he believes businesses should have more options to use it directly as a settlement asset instead of automatically converting back into fiat.
Why Cards Still Matter
Even if Yang sees cards as a bridge, he expects them to remain important for the foreseeable future.
Cards are still one of the most widely accepted ways to pay, which makes them useful for connecting crypto users with the existing payments system.
“Cards are still a much more universal way to pay,” he says. “At the end of the day, our goal is to solve real payment problems for our users, so at this stage, crypto cards are still a very important tool for us.”
The bigger challenge is getting merchants to move beyond them.
Yang points to regulation as one of the main barriers. Rules around crypto vary from one market to another, making direct adoption more complicated for businesses operating across countries.
Demand is another issue.
“Most users don’t really care whether a merchant accepts crypto directly,” Yang says. “They just want the payment to work.”
That means merchants may not see a strong reason to change how they accept payments purely to support crypto.
“So merchants often don’t see a clear demand from their customers to accept crypto,” he says. “I think that’s one of the biggest challenges when it comes to wider adoption.”
For Yang, the opportunity lies in building products that make crypto useful to merchants rather than simply giving them another payment option.
He sees settlement and acquiring products as one promising area.
“If we can make crypto easier for merchants to understand while also solving the technical challenges they face, I believe it can take crypto payments to the next level,” he says.
What the Industry Gets Wrong
Yang believes one of the biggest misunderstandings around crypto payments comes from focusing too heavily on the customer paying with a digital asset.
“I think the biggest misunderstanding is that crypto payments simply mean paying with crypto,” he says.
For him, the more important changes are happening behind the transaction.
“The real change is happening underneath, how money moves, how transactions are settled, and how merchants receive funds.”
A typical payment can involve several parties between the customer and the merchant. Yang sees crypto and stablecoins as a way to rethink some of that structure, particularly when money needs to move between currencies or across borders.
That also shapes how he thinks about mainstream adoption.
“I don’t think the future is about convincing everyone to pay with crypto,” he says. “Ideally, users may not even need to know what infrastructure is being used. They just know the payment is instant, cheap and works across borders.”
Rethinking Settlement
Yang believes merchants could be among the biggest beneficiaries if payment settlement becomes faster and involves fewer intermediaries.
“The impact could be bigger than we imagine,” he says. “By removing many of the intermediaries in the payment process, the cost of payments could come down significantly.”
Those costs already matter to merchants accepting traditional card payments.
Yang says some businesses are becoming less willing to accept credit cards because of the fees involved. Lower-cost alternatives could give them a stronger reason to consider digital wallets or crypto-based payment systems.
“Lower costs could become one of the key reasons for merchants to move toward digital wallets or crypto payments,” he says.
The model Yang imagines would also change what happens after a customer pays.
Someone could pay a merchant in one country, while the merchant receives the currency it wants, with the transaction settling almost immediately.
The technical complexity would remain in the background.
The AML Noise Problem
Yang also sees growing complexity around crypto anti-money laundering checks, particularly when global platforms have to operate under rules that vary by region.
“From an institution’s perspective, I wouldn’t say they’re doing it wrong,” he says. “I’d rather say that we need to find better ways to solve the problem.”
The core issue, he argues, is that regulation is often regional while crypto platforms operate globally.
Different know-your-transaction providers may focus on different regions and rely on different data sources. That means the same funds can sometimes receive very different assessments depending on the provider reviewing them.
“The exact same funds can sometimes be assessed very differently depending on which KYT provider you use,” Yang says.
That inconsistency can create more work for companies trying to operate across markets.
“Finding a unified standard, or even a partially unified one, would make a huge difference and significantly reduce the amount of work institutions like us have to deal with.”
What Comes Next
UPay is also exploring less conventional ideas around payment infrastructure.
“What immediately caught my attention was its transparency and verifiability,” Yang says. “I thought those qualities could have some interesting applications in payments, and that was what motivated me to start exploring TapeOut more deeply.”
That experiment fits into Yang’s broader view of where the industry is heading.
He sees the future of crypto payments becoming increasingly focused on infrastructure that users may barely notice.
That is also how he imagines stablecoin adoption developing over the next five years.
“For me, real mainstream adoption happens when people stop thinking about stablecoins as crypto,” he says.
Yang pictures a payment system where someone can pay a merchant in one country, the merchant receives the currency it wants, and the transaction settles almost instantly without either side needing to understand what happened behind the scenes.
“Stablecoins could simply become part of the payment infrastructure, connecting wallets, merchants and different currencies behind the scenes,” he says.
For Yang, that would be the clearest sign that stablecoins had moved into the mainstream.
“That’s when I think we’ll know stablecoins have really become mainstream,” he says, “when everyone can use the infrastructure without thinking about it.”