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This guide walks through how to build a modern stablecoin-powered neobank from scratch—or integrate stablecoin capabilities into your existing banking platform—using Crossmint’s infrastructure.

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Overview

With stablecoins, you can launch global accounts and other financial products in days, build better experiences than traditional banking, and unlock new revenue streams.
  • Global reach — Serve customers in 180+ different countries from day one.
  • New revenue streams — Generate 3-4% of interest on deposits and offer embedded financial products including cards, trading, prediction markets, and more.
  • Instant settlement — Enable 24/7 instant transfers instead of 2-5 day settlement windows.
  • Lower costs — Reduce international transfer costs. Eliminate correspondent banking fees and reduce pre-funding requirements.
Crossmint offers the full technology stack and licensing to help you launch faster, without having to orchestrate many different vendors, including wallets, on and offramps, and additional embedded finance products.

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Key Architectural Decisions

Building a stablecoin-powered neobank requires making several foundational architectural decisions. These choices shape your product capabilities, regulatory requirements, and unit economics. The optimal architecture depends on whether you’re launching a new digital bank or enhancing an existing platform, your preference around custody, and what infrastructure you have already built.

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Key components

There are three key components:
  1. Wallets — The foundation of the system. Wallets allow users to hold, send, and receive stablecoins and other crypto assets.
  2. On and offramps — Allow users to fund and withdraw funds from their wallets.
  3. Embedded financial services — Additional products built on top of wallets, including yield, cards, swaps, trading, and more.

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Existing vs new neobanks

Existing neobanks typically reuse their core banking and payment infrastructure, adding stablecoins as a complementary payment rail. Some expose both fiat and stablecoin balances within their current geographies, while others launch separate, globally available products built primarily around stablecoins. New neobanks have the advantage of building stablecoin-first from the ground up. They can design the entire customer experience and flows around blockchain rails from day one. They also often start with plug-and-play on/offramps to go-to-market faster instead of relying on traditional payments processors.

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Custody model

The custody decision is fundamental—it determines who controls the private keys to customer funds, which shapes your regulatory obligations, liability exposure, operational complexity, and product capabilities. Crossmint supports multiple custody models, and many neobanks use different approaches for different customer segments or account types. The general recommendation is to use non-custodial wallets as they offer global coverage from day one, more functionality, lower cost, compliance, and operational overhead; without compromising on user experience.
Private keys are held by Crossmint, an affiliated partner, or by you on behalf of your users. You can choose between segregated wallets or an omnibus wallet structure.Omnibus wallets are generally not recommended. They significantly constrain future functionality and external integrations, and concentrate risk by pooling funds in a single structure.Best for: Companies focusing on only one or a small subset of geographies. Closed-loop systems. Non-financial use cases.Tradeoffs: Significantly higher operational and compliance burden and costs (KYC, insurance, additional security controls, travel rule checks in and out of the wallets). More complex and fragile external integrations (e.g., cards, banking rails, and third-party payment providers).
Users control their own private keys, accessed through intuitive web2-style authentication (email, social login, biometrics, passkeys). Behind the scenes, Crossmint handles all of the complexity so the blockchain is invisible to the user.Best for: Global products. Apps that interact with third-parties or protocols: paying merchants, signing transactions, accessing DeFi protocols.Tradeoffs: Same UX as custodial wallets. Some traditional banking features (like reversing fraudulent transactions) become difficult or impossible.
Crossmint allows you to define custody granularly at the user, asset, or transaction level. This allows you to combine both strategically, everything with the same API. For example, offering custodial wallets in the US and non-custodial internationally. Or start with one model and then migrate to the other one, without having to migrate vendors or change wallet addresses.

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Onramp structure

How users move between fiat currency and stablecoins is critical to your product’s accessibility and regulatory posture. You have flexibility in how much of this infrastructure you own vs leverage from Crossmint.
You pre-fund Crossmint and use a single API to deliver funds to users’ wallets. This model gives you full control over the onramp experience while Crossmint handles the licensing, stablecoin settlement, and compliance checks. Best for teams that already work with their own PSPs and just need the stablecoin last-mile. Read more about stablecoin orchestration.
Crossmint manages the entire flow including payment processing, fraud prevention, chargebacks, currency conversion, KYC/AML, and regulatory compliance. Best for teams who want a plug-and-play solution, want to reduce their chargeback exposure, or don’t have an internal anti-fraud team. Read more about the onramp.

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Approach to yield

There are multiple ways to generate yield. You can read more about yield strategies.

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Embedded financial services

Beyond core banking capabilities, stablecoins unlock a rich ecosystem of embedded financial products that can offer more value to your customers and unlock new revenue streams:
  • Cards — Virtual and physical debit cards that spend directly from stablecoin balances, with instant settlement and transparent fees. Capture interchange revenue while offering customers global spending power.
  • Trading — Enable swaps between stablecoins, cryptocurrencies, and other digital assets. Capture spread revenue while providing customers access to crypto investment opportunities.
  • Yield products — High-yield savings accounts, automated yield optimization, and access to structured products. Generate fee revenue while offering rates that crush traditional banks.
  • Prediction markets — Let customers participate in decentralized prediction markets for events, elections, or market outcomes—a unique offering unavailable through traditional banks.
  • DeFi access — For crypto-savvy users, provide direct access to lending protocols, DEXs, and other DeFi primitives through your interface.
The key is selecting the right mix for your target customer segment and regulatory environment. Start with core features and add capabilities incrementally based on user demand and market readiness.
Need a custom solution? Crossmint’s Forward Deployment Engineers can help you design, build, and optimize it end-to-end. Reach out to set up a personalized consultation.

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Solution Components

Crossmint’s platform provides all the building blocks needed to implement any of the architectures above via simple APIs. Key solution components include:

Embedded wallets

Create wallets for your users.

Onramp

Allow users to fund their wallets directly.

Stablecoin orchestration

Send stablecoins to users.

Cards

Issue stablecoin-linked cards.

Yield

Earn yield on balances.

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Get Started

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