I've realized over the last year that I spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about how money moves.
Part of my income comes in fiat, part of it comes from crypto, and I've ended up running Revolut, Wise, and Keytom in parallel for longer than I'd like to admit.
Wise is still hard to beat when it comes to international transfers. If someone is paying me from another country, it usually does exactly what I need it to do with minimal friction. The downside is that it feels completely disconnected from the crypto world.
Revolut sits somewhere in the middle. I've used it for years, the app is great, and I like having traditional banking and crypto exposure in the same place. But at the end of the day, the crypto side still feels like an investment feature rather than something designed to be used. Every time I want to spend crypto, there's still an extra conversion step involved.
The interesting one for me has been Keytom. I started using it because I wanted to stop treating crypto as something separate from the rest of my finances. Being able to hold assets like BTC, ETH, or USDC and spend from the same balance feels much closer to what I thought "crypto adoption" would look like years ago.
What I've found is that none of these apps are really competing with each other directly. Wise solves international banking. Revolut solves everyday convenience. Keytom solves the crypto-to-real-world problem.
The funny part is that after years of hearing that crypto would replace traditional finance, I still find myself using a combination of both almost every day.
Maybe that's what adoption actually looks like. Not one app replacing everything else, but traditional finance and crypto slowly becoming indistinguishable from one another.
At this point, I'm less interested in which company wins and more interested in where we're headed over the next five years. The gap between crypto and traditional banking feels a lot smaller today than it did when I bought my first BTC.