Crypto is increasingly emerging as Europe’s most credible response to Revolut’s dominance in the fintech arena. For founders who feel boxed in by Revolut’s scale and speed, the path forward may not be to build “another Revolut,” but to build what Revolut is still not: a deeply crypto-native financial platform designed first and foremost for the digital asset economy.
Revolut’s growth illustrates why competing on its own turf has become so difficult. By September 2025, the company reported 65 million customers worldwide, including 12 million in the UK alone, and has publicly set a target of 100 million users by mid‑2027. That kind of scale creates a gravity field: acquiring customers gets harder, marketing becomes more expensive, and user expectations skyrocket. Founders who try to replicate a general‑purpose neobank now face an entrenched brand with huge capital, regulatory experience, and an almost omnipresent marketing machine.
In practice, this leaves European fintech entrepreneurs with two realistic strategies. The first is to go ultra‑niche: build hyper‑local payment solutions, specialized SME tools, or domain‑specific products that are too small or too complex for a giant like Revolut to care about. The second is to target Revolut’s biggest blind spot: crypto-finance. While Revolut has experimented with basic crypto features, its strategic priority has clearly been traditional banking licenses and classic financial services. It has not fully embraced the idea of building a truly crypto-native financial infrastructure.
That blind spot matters. Unlike card payments or FX, where incumbents and regulators are mature and well‑entrenched, crypto is a relatively open field in which rules are still being written and winners are not yet locked in. This is precisely where European startups can attack. A crypto-finance company founded in Europe today has a realistic chance not just of pan‑European scale, but of global relevance—something that is increasingly difficult to imagine for another generic fintech app.
One of the main reasons is regulation. For years, crypto founders operated in a fog of uncertainty: rules differed wildly by country, and many regulators had not even decided whether they welcomed digital assets at all. The introduction of the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) has transformed that landscape. MiCA did not make crypto “legal” in some dramatic new way; rather, it did something more valuable for businesses and investors: it clearly spelled out the regulatory requirements for operating in Europe.
That clarity is a competitive advantage. When founders know what licenses they need, how to structure custody, what disclosures to provide, and how to manage stablecoins, they can plan a real business instead of gambling on future legal interpretations. Investors, in turn, can evaluate risk more rationally: a licensed, MiCA‑compliant company is no longer perceived as a speculative experiment but as a recognizable financial institution with a regulated framework.
MiCA also has an important external effect: it exports trust. In many non‑European markets, particularly in regions such as Latin America, a MiCA‑compliant license is increasingly seen as a strong positive signal. Regulators there regard a project that satisfies rigorous European rules as more credible than an unregulated offshore entity. For European crypto startups, that means a regulatory “home base” that travels well: they can enter new jurisdictions with a built‑in badge of reliability.
Europe’s labor market is another structural advantage. Hiring top product and engineering talent in the US has become extremely costly. In many cases, the cost of employing one senior engineer in the US is comparable to hiring two or even three similar specialists in Europe. For a startup trying to balance burn rate with ambitious product development, that multiplier matters. The situation is even more favorable when you consider the talent pool: Europe is home to thousands of experienced fintech professionals, including former Revolut engineers, product managers, and compliance experts who intimately understand how to build and scale a regulated financial product.
For founders building crypto-finance platforms, this means they can assemble teams that combine hardcore engineering skills with practical knowledge of payments, KYC/KYB, AML, and risk management. This cross‑pollination is crucial: a crypto app that ignores compliance is not viable in today’s Europe, but a compliance‑heavy app that lacks great UX will never reach mass adoption. People who have already built successful fintech products inside neobanks bring both perspectives.
On the demand side, the European crypto economy is no longer a fringe phenomenon. Trading volumes, stablecoin usage, and on‑chain transaction activity are growing steadily. Many users now expect to receive stablecoins directly into their accounts and treat them as a parallel means of payment, especially for cross‑border transfers and freelance work. For a Ukrainian engineer working for a German startup, or a Portuguese designer building for a client in Brazil, stablecoins often solve pain points that traditional banking never addressed well: speed, transparency, and predictable fees.
The investment environment is also beginning to favor crypto‑aligned fintech again. After several years of contraction and caution in the broader fintech sector, capital is flowing back, but in a more selective way. Recent European fundraising data shows a clear recovery: by September, total funding had reached around €6.3 billion, already exceeding 70% of the previous year’s total. Importantly, this rebound is not happening uniformly across all fintech segments. Investors are increasingly distinguishing between legacy business models and those aligned with structural shifts like digital assets and tokenized money.
Crypto-finance sits at the intersection of both. As the sector becomes more institutionalized under MiCA, licensed players are reclassified in investors’ minds. They are no longer “crypto experiments” but regulated financial institutions dealing in a new asset class. A license under MiCA can dramatically increase a startup’s valuation potential, reduce perceived risk, and open doors to larger, more traditional pools of capital such as banks, corporate VCs, and late‑stage funds.
Looking ahead, many industry observers expect the next wave of innovation to center on “stablecoin rails” rather than speculative tokens. Once MiCA is fully in effect and legal uncertainty decreases, euro‑denominated stablecoins and other regulated digital currencies are likely to become the backbone for cross‑border B2B and B2C payments. Several major European banks are already testing euro stablecoins and tokenized deposits, exploring how they can streamline treasury, settlement, and international trade.
If this scenario plays out, the image of crypto as a “wild west” will give way to a much more mundane reality: stablecoins and tokenized cash working in the background to move value faster and cheaper than legacy systems. For startups, that opens enormous opportunities: issuing compliant stablecoins, building wallets and treasury tools for businesses, constructing merchant acceptance networks, or providing APIs that let any app send and receive digital euros without users even realizing they’re interacting with crypto rails.
Still, MiCA is not a magic wand. Some of the thorniest problems remain unsolved. Compliance with existing tax rules is complex when revenues are earned, held, and spent in crypto. Accounting standards are still catching up, particularly for tokenized assets and on‑chain financial instruments. Regulators, for their part, continue to grapple with topics such as staking, DeFi, and the exact treatment of yield‑bearing products. For founders, this means legal and compliance costs can be significant, and the rules may continue to evolve for several years.
This is precisely why targeted policy improvements could unlock even more growth. Well‑designed tax incentives for crypto-finance innovation—such as reduced capital gains tax for certain long‑term holdings, R&D credits for blockchain infrastructure, or simplified VAT treatment for stablecoin‑based payments—could accelerate adoption and draw more founders to build within the European framework instead of abroad. Clarity on accounting, standardized reporting formats, and sandbox environments for experimenting with new token models would further enhance Europe’s appeal.
For fintech founders currently squeezed by Revolut’s presence, crypto-finance offers not just an escape route but a shot at category creation. Instead of competing feature‑by‑feature with an established super‑app, they can define the next layer of financial infrastructure: programmable money, on‑chain credit rails, tokenized treasury management, and embedded crypto accounts inside vertical SaaS platforms. These are areas where size is less important than speed of innovation and regulatory agility.
Strategically, the strongest opportunities are likely to appear in segments where Revolut is either constrained or culturally uninterested. Corporate treasury tools that manage multi‑currency stablecoin balances, white‑label wallets for platforms, compliance‑first remittance products using on‑chain rails, or specialized custody solutions for SMEs and high‑net‑worth individuals are all examples where a nimble, crypto‑native startup can out‑innovate a large, generalist neobank.
Founders should also think beyond the “wallet app” model. The real promise of crypto-finance is not just holding digital assets, but integrating them deeply into existing business processes. Payroll in stablecoins, instant supplier payments across borders, programmable escrow for marketplaces, or automated on‑chain invoice factoring can all be built on top of compliant European infrastructure. Each of these use cases addresses long‑standing inefficiencies in traditional banking that even successful neobanks have not fully solved.
Europe itself is well positioned as a launchpad for such products. It combines a large, affluent market with relatively harmonized regulation, strong technical universities, and experienced fintech operators. Unlike the US, where regulatory fragmentation between states can slow crypto deployment, MiCA offers the possibility of building once and scaling across multiple countries with the same license. From there, the trust exported by European compliance can help unlock markets in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia.
For entrepreneurs willing to navigate regulation and think globally from day one, this is a rare moment of alignment: a massive incumbent like Revolut has captured much of the traditional fintech space, but a new rails‑based financial system is being standardized at the same time. Those who move now, with a clear crypto-finance strategy anchored in European rules, can build the infrastructure that both consumers and businesses will rely on in the next decade.
If Revolut’s rise has made it nearly impossible to win by copying its playbook, the logical move is to change the game. Crypto-finance provides the tools to do exactly that. Europe offers the regulation, the talent, the user demand, and an improving funding landscape. What remains is for founders to stop viewing crypto as a side feature and start treating it as the core of their next‑generation fintech businesses.