Bullrun Bunker Interview with Jasper Fu: The Payment Infrastructure Nobody's Talking About

What does it actually take to bring crypto payments to the world's 100 million merchants?

In this conversation, Jordan sits down with Jasper Fu — CEO of Coinsub and a veteran of both PricewaterhouseCoopers and the early peer-to-peer crypto trading world — to explore the infrastructure quietly being built beneath the surface of global commerce. 

From white-label payment gateways to stablecoin settlement, cross-border transactions, and the regulatory clarity that's finally starting to emerge, this is a grounded, strategic look at where blockchain adoption really stands — and where it's heading. 

If you've been watching the space and wondering when things will truly click into place, this conversation offers some compelling answers.

This session was recorded on March 11, 2026.

🧠 Key Takeaways:

1. Coinsub Is the "Invisible Rail" Behind Crypto Commerce

Jasper Fu describes Coinsub as a white-label, plug-and-play infrastructure provider — not a consumer-facing brand. Rather than competing for individual merchant sign-ups, they sell full-stack crypto payment gateway solutions (dashboards, compliance, APIs, developer docs) to payment service providers (PSPs) under those PSPs' own branding. The result? Each contract brings thousands — sometimes hundreds of thousands — of merchants into the crypto payment ecosystem at once.

Current reach: ~12 PSP partners, approximately 400,000 merchants, and roughly $500 million in processing volume in their first year of operation.

2. The "First Mover Pressure" Shift Is Already Happening

Jasper identifies the single biggest shift in crypto payments right now as competitive pressure from first movers. Once Stripe crossed $1 billion in stablecoin payment acceptance, the dynamic changed. Other PSPs can no longer afford to ignore crypto — it's no longer a "vitamin" (nice to have), it's becoming a "painkiller" (must have to defend market share). The conversation has flipped from "why should we do this?" to "we can't afford not to."

3. The Build vs. Buy Problem — And Why Middle-Market PSPs Are the Real Opportunity

The market currently offers two inadequate options for mid-market PSPs: API-first solutions (which still require significant internal builds) or direct-to-merchant gateways (which puts you in a crowded, commoditized fight for merchant market share). Coinsub's answer is a fully packaged, white-label turnkey solution deployable in under a week — solving both problems simultaneously.

4. Stablecoins, Cross-Border Payments & the Real Bottleneck

Jasper makes a sharp observation: the bottleneck to global commerce growth isn't workforce capability — it's the flow of money itself. Stablecoins offer 24/7 settlement, fractional transactions at consistent cost, and a truly global rail. Coinsub even uses its own infrastructure to pay its Turkish team members because cleaner alternatives simply don't exist yet.

Upcoming feature (Q2 2026): Any crypto from a self-custodial hot wallet (e.g., MetaMask) transferred directly to a bank account — instantly. Jasper claims Coinsub is first to market on this.

5. Regulation Is a Feature, Not a Bug — But Global Fragmentation Remains a Challenge

For enterprise-level clients, regulatory clarity signals legitimacy and reduces friction. Coinsub holds an MSB in the U.S. and is registered with FINTRAC in Canada. However, Jasper flags global regulatory fragmentation as the biggest structural hurdle — what qualifies as "self-custodial" software infrastructure in the U.S. may be treated entirely differently in Singapore or the EU. His proposed solution: advocate for a globally recognized software infrastructure classification that carves out protocol-layer technology from financial/money-movement regulation entirely.

6. Real-World Asset Tokenization Meets Everyday Payments

Jasper paints a compelling picture of where tokenization is heading — beyond speculative assets into cash flow tokenization. Examples discussed:

• Payroll running on-chain, with funds flowing directly from revenue to recipients
• Agriculture and spirits businesses (whiskey, wine) tokenizing future barrel sales to solve capital timing gaps
• Medical records, customer acquisition data, and other traditionally siloed assets becoming accessible via shared, trustless ledgers

7. AI and Crypto Payments — Grounded Optimism

Jasper pushes back on the hype around AI agents autonomously managing payments. His view: hallucination risk makes LLMs unsuitable for direct access to financial instruments right now. However, he draws a smart parallel — corporations are already legally recognized as non-human entities with bank accounts and credit. The framework for AI-as-financial-agent already exists structurally; it just needs another iteration of model reliability before it's trustworthy at the purse-string level. Coinsub's wallet infrastructure is already built to be agnostic to whether a human or an agent sits behind it.

8. What Accelerates Adoption — and What Could Slow It

• Accelerators: Geopolitical instability, war, social unrest — anything that erodes trust in centralized institutions drives stablecoin adoption. U.S. policy is also quietly incentivizing stablecoin issuance because it requires 1:1 purchases of Treasury bills, helping offset the national deficit.
• Risks/Hindrances: Incumbent players prematurely setting standards (e.g., mandating chargeback/refund capabilities) before the ecosystem matures — which could constrain innovation before it scales.

9. Practical Advice for Small Business Owners

Don't try to integrate crypto payments yourself. Instead, pressure your existing payment service provider — your Stripe, Square, Toast, or Valor Pay — to offer it. Demand creates supply. The biggest barrier Coinsub faces from PSPs is "where's the demand?" — so asking is the single most impactful thing a merchant can do right now.

10. The Most Underestimated Trend: Follow the Incentives

Jasper's sharpest insight: most people are focused on the technology of stablecoins, but the real story is game theory and incentives. The U.S. government is quietly one of the biggest beneficiaries of stablecoin adoption — every dollar of stablecoin issued requires a dollar of Treasury bill purchased. Understanding who benefits from a trend tells you more about where it's going than any technical analysis.

#CryptoPayments #Stablecoins #BlockchainAdoption #Web3Commerce #DigitalPayments