On June 17, Infini announced the official cessation of its crypto card business for individual users. For many users, this decision came as a sudden surprise; however, for the Infini team, it was the result of a long and deliberate thought process.

The once highly-anticipated crypto cards have increasingly been labeled as “challenging” and “thankless.” Regulatory barriers, cross-border settlements, risk management... these issues, which would traditionally belong to conventional financial institutions, have become realities that these Web3 entrepreneurs must confront head-on. Faced with the imbalance between resource investment and business returns, Infini ultimately decided to hit the stop button on this venture.

What exactly happened behind the scenes? What are the specific challenges of running the U Card business? Why are regulatory costs so high? With these questions in mind, BlockBeats conducted an exclusive interview with Infini Co-Founder Christine (“Princess”). Through the accounts of a front-line operator, we gain a comprehensive view of this business shift.

The following is the interview transcript.

The Origin of the U Card Story: When NFT Players Fell in Love with “Simple DeFi”

In May 2024, Blast introduced the “dividend-bearing” stablecoin USDB. Simply holding USDB allowed users to earn capital gains derived from its underlying assets. This attracted a large number of NFT community players to deposit their assets on the Blast blockchain. “Iron Shun,” a top-tier entrepreneur in the NFT space, leveraged this stablecoin product to showcase the appeal of “Simple DeFi” to many NFT players.

Around the same time, Ethena used USDe to open up Funding Rate Arbitrage yields to retail users, similarly making complex blockchain yield strategies accessible to the everyday person.

It was during this period that Christine and Christian, emerging from the NFT community, recognized the potential of stablecoins. They believed it was a venture with immense mainstream adoption potential—bringing blockchain yield opportunities to the average person. They decided to take action in this promising space.

At that time, discussions around stablecoins within the industry were far from lively. Infini was undoubtedly a trailblazer in the field. However, the challenges of stablecoin entrepreneurship turned out to be far greater than they had anticipated. This domain stood in stark contrast to the casual, “playhouse” vibe of past Web3 startups. Christine and Christian faced harsh financial realities and the unyielding dominance of the "old money world."

The Origins of Infini

BlockBeats: What was Infini's initial motivation and purpose when starting the company?

Junzhu: When we first started Infini, it was back in July of last year. At that time, stablecoin yield products were trending. We noticed that Blast had introduced a stablecoin called USDB, which offered an APY of around 5%-10%.

We found that many GameFi and NFT users were particularly interested in USDB. These users were generally unfamiliar with DeFi yields before that. Blast essentially packaged the complex and abstract concept of DeFi yields into this stablecoin. Simply holding the stablecoin meant users could automatically earn interest.

DeFi yields actually come from various sources, such as lending, RWA (Real-World Assets), and so on. We realized that many people were drawn to a stablecoin like USDB, which could be likened to a synthetic asset. This suggested that there was indeed demand for "simplifying on-chain yields and making them accessible to the masses." This insight was the initial reason why we wanted to create Infini.

In fact, we had already conceived this idea around May of last year. As a deep user of Blast myself, I thought Blast did something very interesting—it introduced DeFi products to the NFT and GameFi user base. Around the same time, I noticed that suddenly a lot of people around me were talking about stablecoins, and many institutions also started showing interest in them.

This got me thinking—it became clear to me that we needed to work on "expanding the circle." NFTs became highly popular because they brought in many novice users into the crypto space. Blast became a hit because it brought NFT users into the DeFi space. Blast indeed accomplished something meaningful: it educated the market. I saw many people start learning about DeFi through Blast.

At that time, we also considered creating a stablecoin, but we found that the space was already highly competitive. Moreover, we believed we lacked the funding, team capacity, and resources to compete with projects like Ethena. So, we began to think about how to differentiate ourselves through misaligned competition.

We started analyzing the primary use cases of stablecoins and tracing their application scenarios, going back to a very fundamental concept: we invented money in order to use it.

So we thought, why not start with payments?

Initially, we considered creating our own stablecoin. All U Card users under Infini would conduct payments using our proprietary stablecoin.

We also looked into the costs associated with USDC and USDe. The cost of USDC is extremely high, and they are already pioneers in this industry. USDe, in my opinion, is a genius-level contender, but even now, Binance has not supported trading pairs for USDe. This shows that launching a new stablecoin and getting it listed on mainstream exchanges is an incredibly difficult task. So why not focus on niche and "small but beautiful" use cases? Start with daily consumption scenarios to enable people to use it. After all, the two most important functions of a stablecoin are: supporting transactions and supporting payments.

BlockBeats: After your research, you concluded that launching a stablecoin involves high costs. Why do you believe launching a U Card would incur significantly lower costs?

Jun Zhu: Because we believe that a U Card doesn't require as many resources, like distribution channels, for example. We can use growth tactics targeting consumers (to-C strategy) to scale up this card. And indeed, we proved that we were able to roll out the U Card at very low costs. But creating a stablecoin is different; you need extremely strong resources to back it. We don't have a figure like Arthur Hayes playing a central role in our project.

We are more of a grassroots startup. For a grassroots startup, lacking top-tier resource support is a significant disadvantage.

BlockBeats: That’s quite interesting, because structurally speaking, Infini has actually already launched its own stablecoin—it just hasn’t packaged it under the "USDe" label. The app shows it as "USD," but in essence, it’s already functioning in a way very similar to a stablecoin.

Jun Zhu: Right. I feel that packaging it under that label doesn’t add much value. While it’s true that rebranding it this way could potentially increase the company’s valuation—because a stablecoin’s valuation is definitely higher than that of a U Card company—doing so without first achieving PMF (Product-Market Fit) would, in my view, only waste time. I’d rather focus on getting the business to achieve PMF first, and then think about whether to rebrand and package it later.

U Card Business

BlockBeats: What preparations did Infini make after initiating the U Card business?

Princess: After we initiated the project, the first thing we did was research. Our company initially knew nothing about the payment industry. The first person we consulted was Yishi from OneKey. He’s very nice and was one of the people close to us who had actually worked on the U Card business before, so he had a lot of valuable experience to share.

Yishi shared quite a bit with us, including information about the costs of this business, how to acquire customers, and the reasons for shutting it down. Regarding the shutdown, he mentioned that the high compliance requirements were one of the main reasons. Back then, I didn’t pay much attention to this, but looking back now, what he said was on point. I had underestimated compliance, thinking as long as we avoided doing anything illegal, it would be fine. In reality, "compliance" carries a lot of hidden costs.

BlockBeats: At the time, you didn’t anticipate handling compliance would be so challenging, did you?

Princess: That’s correct. From the start of our entrepreneurial journey, we were very clear about avoiding anything illegal or crossing any regulatory boundaries. However, as we delved deeper into the business, we discovered the high compliance requirements, as well as the significant costs associated with obtaining the necessary licenses. On top of that, there are numerous hidden compliance costs to consider.

BlockBeats: What are the major areas of compliance costs for U Card companies?

Princess: Firstly, you need a highly professional legal team, and quality legal teams can be expensive. Secondly, the cost of applying for licenses is quite high. If some licenses are unobtainable directly, you might have to acquire other companies to secure them. Take Hong Kong as an example. The MSO (Money Service Operator) license requirements have become extremely stringent. It’s often more feasible to acquire a company that already holds the license, and the price depends on the seller’s offer. Currently, obtaining a license through acquisition can cost around 3 to 4 million HKD.

In addition to monetary investments, the time spent on communications is a massive hidden cost. This depends on the specific situation. Some licenses can be obtained within a month or a few weeks, while others may take several years. The requirements also vary by jurisdiction and the type of license. From day one of the project, we hired a dedicated legal team to handle these matters.

Initially, we hadn’t anticipated the extent of the time and resources needed for compliance. Since we aim to operate compliantly, we don’t concern ourselves with return-on-investment timelines—instead, we focus on securing the licenses at any cost. This differentiates us significantly from many Web3 projects. Over time, we’ve realized that we are essentially a FinTech company. What we’re doing is enabling payments, not directly engaging in Crypto.

BlockBeats: Do you ever feel like you went overboard with the U Card initiative? Did you regret it midway?

Princess: That’s a great question. Actually, when you’re getting positive feedback on something, it’s hard to realize that you might be on the wrong track—you just want to keep going. Our user growth was rapid, and seeing those daily numbers rise became quite addictive.

Before we tackle any project as a company, we always set an OKR first. Initially, the foundational assumption of our entire business logic was that as the number of U Cards increased, our TVL (Total Value Locked) would grow as well. We believed there would be a clear correlation between card user growth and TVL growth. So we made increasing the number of users of the U Card our North Star metric, to the extent that I stopped prioritizing TVL growth for quite a long time.

However, we later discovered that this assumption wasn’t valid. While the number of users indeed skyrocketed, TVL didn’t show significant growth. We realized that although our momentum was strong, we were heading in the wrong direction. Our initial business hypothesis, that more users enjoying the card would result in higher deposits, turned out to be incorrect. Instead, users' behavior revealed that they only loaded money onto the card when they were ready to spend it.

BlockBeats: How much profit did you make from the U Card business?

Princess: Net losses—we didn’t make a single penny.

BlockBeats: Do you mind the idea of turning into a FinTech company?

Princess: I wouldn’t mind becoming any type of company—even a yoga apparel company, for that matter. The key is that the company has to be profitable. We can’t stray from the fundamental essence of business, which is to generate sustainable and effective revenue. U Card, however, was purely draining our resources—human, material, financial, and mental. If a venture continually consumes resources without generating returns, then it’s time to shut it down.

BlockBeats: When did you start considering shutting down the U Card business?

Princess: It was around May when I started thinking about gradually phasing it out, or at the very least, ceasing our efforts to grow it further. The main issue was that our card's refund process was extremely slow. Normally, international card refunds take about one to two weeks, but in our case, some refunds were taking four weeks, a month, or even as long as a month and a half. We tried reaching out to upstream providers repeatedly, but they just couldn’t process the refunds. We were bombarded with customer complaints every day, and honestly, we were helpless. Being at the tail end of the industry chain, there wasn’t much we could do apart from pressuring our upstream partners. It was frustrating to have the intent to act but no real means to resolve it.

This caused me nearly two to three weeks of internal struggle.

Starting a U-Card company isn’t hard. I think anyone with money, time, and patience can do it—the barrier to entry isn’t high. Of course, if you want to operate compliantly, it’ll cost you money, but if compliance isn’t a concern, anyone can make it work. Essentially, all you need is a custodian company and an upstream provider offering a card suite API. Once you integrate the API, you’re ready to issue cards.

Almost every card on the market is set up this way, but people are often unsure how many layers of upstream providers actually exist. Some providers may work directly with card schemes, while others might pass through a series of intermediaries, like layers of an onion, stacking endlessly. For instance, we could even create an API, share it with you, and then you could build another API to share with someone else.

After several months of working on the U-Card project, we’ve come to realize that Infini’s involvement in this business is essentially taking a step backward in history. Personally, I hope to break traditional payment barriers, but transforming stablecoins into USD, transferring them to banks, and letting users swipe cards ends up walking the same traditional financial payment path again. That’s why I ultimately decided to stop working on this project—because I believe this approach is fundamentally flawed.

Take the example of refunds that I mentioned earlier. It’s caused me significant internal strife because I’ve come to realize that U-Cards don’t fundamentally change any core logic of the industry. They’re simply a traditional payment solution, certainly not a definitive answer to the problem.

BlockBeats: Do you think U-Cards address a genuine need, or are they just an acceptable workaround?

Junzhu: If you could use USDT or USDC directly to buy a hamburger, would you still need an off-ramp solution? It’s precisely because this need can’t currently be met that people turn to a middleman like U-Cards to bridge the gap.

I think U-Cards do address a real need, but they’re far from being a final solution. I believe major platforms like ChatGPT, OnlyFans, and Twitter will inevitably accept stablecoin payments in the future—it’s a trend that’s bound to happen. And when they do, U-Cards will lose most of their practical use cases.

Realignment: What’s Next for Infini?

Making DeFi simple for users has always been the founding mission of Infini. After stepping back from enabling crypto users’ daily consumption, the team is returning to this core focus. Now, Infini plans to redirect its attention to on-chain yields and wealth management. This represents a shift away from stablecoins and crypto payments, presenting new challenges alongside existing ones. For instance, how should the Infini brand position itself? After incidents of theft and business shutdowns, how can Infini rebuild trust with its users?

However, the determination of the Princess and the team to pivot is resolute: Infini must not take a step backward in history. Stablecoins and crypto payments cannot revert to the traditional banking system. "Use Stable Coins Directly—that's the future."

BlockBeats: After shutting down the U Card service, what is Infini's current positioning?

Princess: We are focusing on two things now. The first is to get back to what we initially set out to do when we started the company—wealth management. Our current returns mainly come from on-chain lending. With the bear market upon us and reduced on-chain activity, returns are inevitably lower. During a bull market, you might see occasional days with APRs of 40%+, while in a bear market it could drop to around 2%. Therefore, we need to integrate some CeFi products to make returns more resilient across cycles, distribute risks, and evolve into a more diversified fund-of-funds (FoF)—essentially a solution that feels as effortless and reassuring as a 'digital savings account' for users.

This was our original intent—to simplify complex yield opportunities and make them accessible to the masses. But this core focus was increasingly overshadowed by our involvement with "payments." Over these past months, we spent zero time on our core business, which is our actual revenue driver. As a result, we decided to eliminate the most time-consuming but unprofitable segment: "payments."

BlockBeats: So, rather than pivoting into a new direction, you're returning to what you originally intended to do?

Princess: By last August or September, we had already started integrating wealth management products. At the time, we aimed to bring in diversified CeFi products because, for most people, CeFi isn't user-friendly. Good CeFi strategies are never short on capital, while bad ones aggressively seek funding and often lead to losses.

So, our approach was to leverage economies of scale to secure relatively low-risk, stable-yield products. For example, an annualized return of around 10% would already be highly appealing to many retail users. From Blast's goal of simplifying complex DeFi yields to our current aim of making wealth management accessible to retail users, this overarching vision has remained unchanged. But the U Card initiative did divert us off course for quite some time, consuming significant resources.

So the first thing we absolutely need to do is excel in financial planning, ensuring it is highly secure and resilient to market cycles.

BlockBeats: Do you think this track will become crowded?

Junzhu: I think it will become crowded, but it ultimately depends on people's needs. Since capital naturally flows toward higher returns or, in the long term, more stable and secure options, we will categorize our financial products into different tiers based on varying demands.

BlockBeats: Previously, you've mentioned multiple times that Infini has no plans to issue tokens and is not looking to use token issuance expectations for user acquisition and growth. Now with the business transformation, has there been any adjustment in this regard? Or have you considered going public or taking a reverse merger route?

Junzhu: Whether it's issuing tokens or going public, it essentially involves asset issuance. Once assets are issued, they transform into liabilities, and you need to be responsible to the token or shareholders. If our business doesn’t have stable cash flows or hasn’t achieved a perfect PMF (Product-Market Fit), prematurely choosing to issue tokens would be irresponsible both to ourselves and to our community.

So to answer this very officially: In my opinion, token issuance and going public are merely tools for financing and customer acquisition. These tools need to be leveraged appropriately and used at the right time. They are financial instruments, and I'm not going to give a definitive Yes or No. We will consider them when needed, but at this point, it’s still too early. We need to solidify our core business, refine our product, and fulfill users' needs through productization. Only when we have robust cash flow and revenue will we consider such financial maneuvers. After all, the product and PMF are the foundation of everything.

BlockBeats: As users who initially came from the U Card business, how can we now engage with your transformed model? If you pivot completely to a B2B business, wouldn’t it be a shame to lose the large user base you’ve already accumulated?

Junzhu: Reflecting on this journey, I think we’ve had three major takeaways.

The first is that we’ve built a great team. The team is always the number one priority. I believe that as long as we share the same vision and maintain our capabilities, energy, and stamina, we will achieve significant progress even after the transformation. Building and nurturing the team has been the most important achievement for us over the past six months.

The second point is branding. In this space, having a good reputation is a must—it serves as the foundation for everything you aim to build in the future. If someone lacks a good reputation, achieving sustainable growth becomes incredibly difficult. We’re not interested in short-term user acquisition or quick cash-outs. Our hope is to turn this initiative into a long-term endeavor, one that spans decades or even centuries.

The third point is understanding. We are committed to fully embracing decentralized payment solutions and will not pursue centralized options—we cannot afford to reverse the progress of history. Imagine in the future, if we deploy on MegaETH or BNB, users can simply open their wallets, scan a QR code, and pay for a ChatGPT subscription directly, using stablecoins from their wallets. That would be an incredibly cool scenario.

This is what spending stablecoins should look like—not using them via a "U card" or similar mechanisms. Payment solutions like this are what truly hold value, rather than falling back into the framework of traditional banking systems.

What we need is a decentralized payment solution where transactions are confirmed on-chain, payments are made directly through wallets, and the currency used is stablecoins.

In my view, this is the future.

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