almost every consumer financial app has always been building towards the same long-term goal of being a user's financial home, which includes the core functions of: saving, investing, speculating, paying, credit access
what's changed in the last few years is not the goal but the extent to and pace with which this goal can actually be achieved
1. much more regulatory freedom to pursue this goal in full
2. open products are more easily embedded. Ex: stablecoins for neobanks, Morpho<>Coinbase, Phantom<>Hyperliquid (Kalshi<>Robinhood is only sort of a counterexample)
3. the attackable surface area of what it means to serve a consumer's financial needs has expanded. ex:
- paying: cross-border payments can be serviced very cheaply
- investing & speculating: massive asset/category expansion with long-tail crypto tokens and prediction markets
consumer capital is quite sticky and thus incumbents (Robinhood, Nubank, Revolut, Coinbase, etc) are very advantaged by default
#3 creates opportunity for new players but simultaneously #2 helps existing products realize their northstar product surface faster
all in
1) this is a great setup for consumers and
2) consumer-app fragmentation should be a boon for open protocols
exciting times!