Jasper Tay on Making On-Chain Finance Boring Enough to Matter

Jasper Tay has spent the past decade building at the edge of crypto, financial infrastructure, and regulation.

As Co-Founder and COO of Plutus, he helped scale the company from an early crypto-fiat idea into a platform serving more than 125,000 users, navigating card payments, AML/KYC, Visa partnerships, banking relationships, and multiple market cycles along the way.

What stands out with Jasper is the operational weight behind his views. He is not looking at on-chain finance through hype or theory, but through the reality of making financial products work when real users, real money, and real regulatory constraints are involved. He has seen what breaks, what scales, and what it takes for people to trust new financial infrastructure.

On-chain finance is entering a different phase. The conversation is moving from speculation and volatility toward stablecoins, tokenised money market funds, programmable settlement, and business treasury. The question is no longer whether crypto can be exciting, but whether it can become useful, trusted, and boring enough to matter.

We sat down to talk about what people misunderstand about investing on-chain, why risk is often framed too broadly, and where founders and investors still get regulated frontier markets wrong.

Q&A

Q1: You mentioned wanting to demystify what it means to invest "on-chain." When people hear that phrase, what do you think they usually misunderstand?

Most people hear "on-chain" and immediately picture a speculative token or a whitepaper. What they don't picture is a money market fund settlement layer, or a treasury management system running on programmable rails. But that's increasingly what it actually means in practice.

The honest comparison is this: a business holding yield-bearing stablecoins backed by US Treasuries through a regulated fund structure is doing something structurally very similar to a corporate treasury holding a money market fund. The underlying risk profile is comparable. The difference is that one settles in two days through a correspondent banking chain, and the other settles in seconds, globally, with full programmability built in.

People conflate the technology with the asset class, and it muddles the whole conversation. Bitcoin is volatile. Ether is volatile. But a USDC position earning yield from T-bill exposure on a permissioned network is a different thing entirely. Until we separate those two conversations, we're going to keep arguing about the wrong question.

Q2: A lot of people still equate on-chain finance with speculation, complexity, or risk. What parts of that concern are fair, and what parts are outdated?

The speculation concern was entirely fair for 2016, and honestly parts of it held through 2021. The infrastructure was genuinely immature, smart contract risk was real, and a lot of projects were built on narrative with no underlying business logic, it was the wild west.

But the landscape has shifted structurally since then. Regulated tokenised money market funds now exist: WisdomTree, Ondo, Spiko built specifically for institutional and business treasury use. Stablecoin infrastructure has matured to the point where Visa and Stripe are building on it. The FCA, the Fed, and the EU have all moved from "this might be a problem" to active framework construction. That's not hype, that's real adoption at the highest level.

The complexity concern is still partially fair, but it's a product problem more than a fundamental one. The underlying infrastructure is complicated in the same way SWIFT messaging or SEPA clearing is complicated. It's difficult under the hood, but it's not your problem as a user. What's genuinely outdated is the assumption that on-chain inherently means unregulated and unaccountable. That was true of a particular era. It's not a structural feature of the technology.

Q3: From a product perspective, what has to be true for on-chain investing to feel safe, boring, and usable for normal businesses or investors?

A few things have to be true simultaneously, and you can't paper over a gap in one with strength in another.

The underlying assets have to be genuinely boring. Not "boring" as a marketing word, but structurally conservative. The moment you're explaining duration risk or protocol governance to a finance director at an eight-person company, you've already lost. The default options need to be the safe options.

The UX has to make the technology invisible. A business using on-chain treasury infrastructure shouldn't need to understand what a blockchain is. They should understand what their yield is, what their liquidity terms are, and what their counterparty risk looks like. It should feel like banking, not like a crypto wallet.

And the compliance and reporting layer has to be complete. For any real business, "can I explain this to my auditor" is non-negotiable. If the product can't pass that test, it doesn't matter how good the underlying yield is. Get those things right and on-chain finance doesn't need to be sold.

Q4: You spent ten years building Plutus across crypto, card payments, AML/KYC, Visa partnerships, and multiple market cycles. What did that teach you about turning crypto infrastructure into something people can actually rely on?

Its not the wallet UI or the card design thats core, its the AML framework that stops you getting de-risked by your banking partner at the worst possible moment. The Visa scheme governance that means you don't wake up to a programme suspension.

Market cycles also taught me a lot. Every downturn burns off the projects built on narrative and what survives is whatever was actually solving something real. We went through that more than once at Plutus and it clarifies your thinking in a way that a single bull run never does and also gives you an iron stomach.

The hardest-won lesson though is that trust at scale behaves differently. When you have 125,000 cardholders, your compliance decision is someone's rent payment. Your infrastructure failure is someone's holiday ruined. That effectively changes how you make decisions and you stop optimising for the demo and start optimising for the edge case.

Q5: Where do you think founders in crypto or fintech most often underestimate the difficulty of building trust?

Compliance and customer support, almost universally.

Founders tend to think about trust in terms of product design and brand, and those things matter. But trust is actually built at the edge cases. That is what happens when a payment fails, when a transaction gets flagged, when a user can't access their funds for forty-eight hours because of an AML hold. Those are the moments that define the relationship, and most early-stage teams are nowhere near prepared for them.

On the compliance side, I've seen founders treat regulatory requirements as a checklist. Something you hand to a compliance lead, get signed off, and move on from. That's the wrong model entirely. Regulators want to see that compliance is embedded in how decisions get made, not just in what gets documented. The FCA in particular has very good instincts for the difference between a compliance function that exists and one that actually runs the business.

The deeper issue is a cultural hangover from an era when moving fast and figuring out regulation later felt viable. The founders who understand that and who treat compliance as a competitive moat rather than a tax are the ones building things that last.

Q6: Your new startup, SYSTM, is building around programmable finance and stablecoin-based workflows for businesses. What is the first use case where you think people will stop thinking "this is crypto" and just think "this is better financial infrastructure"?

Treasury.

It's less glamorous than payments but the problem is more acute than people realise.

Most businesses sitting on cash are earning nothing on it, or jumping through hoops to earn something modest through a traditional money market fund with holding periods, minimum balances, and a week of paperwork to get set up. The incumbent options were built for a different era and it shows. The rules and friction that made sense in a pre-digital banking world are now just dead weight.

On-chain treasury changes that. A business can deploy idle cash into yield-bearing instruments, move it when they need it, and see everything in real time without a relationship manager, without a holding period, without calling anyone. The integration should take hours, not months.

What we're building at SYSTM is the layer that makes that accessible to businesses that have never had a dedicated finance function. Not hedge funds, not treasurers at multinationals its founders running real companies who just want their cash working harder without the complexity. When that works well, nobody is thinking about stablecoins or on-chain. They're just thinking their treasury is finally doing what it should have been doing all along.

Q7: Having built through multiple cycles, where do you think investors are most disconnected from the reality of building in regulated, frontier markets?

Timeline expectations, mostly, and the related question of what traction actually means in a regulated context.

When you're building something that requires FCA engagement, Visa scheme approval, banking partner relationships, or any kind of institutional trust, the timeline to first meaningful commercial signal is structurally longer than it is for a SaaS tool. That's not a team problem or a product problem. Investors who've mostly backed software companies often pattern-match to software timelines, which creates a mismatch that can quietly destroy good companies.

There's also a tendency to underweight regulatory risk as a moat. Compliance requirements get read as friction; something a faster-moving competitor might route around. But the cost and difficulty of building correctly in a regulated environment is one of the most durable competitive advantages available. The companies that do the hard work early create barriers that genuinely aren't easy to replicate.

The flip side is that investors sometimes overweight it as a blocker, treating “FCA uncertainty or evolving stablecoin frameworks” as a reason to stay out of a space entirely. Being in the room during framework development isn't a risk. It's positioning. The founders building at that frontier understand this!