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In this edition of The Founder, we sit down with Anton Lobintsev, Co-founder and CTO of SquareFi, the financial infrastructure layer currently rewriting the rules of global money movement. With over two decades in tech—transitioning from the rigid world of enterprise server sales to the liquid frontier of stablecoins—Anton is now leading a lean, AI-powered team that emerged from stealth with a staggering $250 million in transaction volume. As crypto card payments hit record highs and the industry moves away from "grey zones" toward regulated, programmable systems, we discuss how SquareFi is bridging the gap between traditional banking rails and the blockchain. Whether you're a fintech enthusiast or a business owner navigating cross-border complexity, Anton’s insights offer a rare look at a future where the distinction between "fiat" and "crypto" finally disappears.
Anton, you've been in the tech industry for over 20 years, starting in enterprise hardware with giants like IBM and HP. How has your perspective on "infrastructure" evolved from physical servers to the programmable financial rails you're building today?
The core question has always been the same: how do you move something reliably from point A to point B, at scale, without it breaking? The difference is that when I started in enterprise hardware, the stack was already quite mature and well understood. Today, financial infrastructure is being rebuilt in real time. New rails like stablecoins and blockchain networks are emerging alongside legacy systems, and the decisions we make now directly shape how value moves globally. Most of my focus has become about moving value with the same reliability, but in a much more open and programmable system.
SquareFi emerged from your work in real estate tokenization. You mentioned that clients weren't just asking about blockchain; they were asking how to pay for things legally and transparently. Why was that simple "crypto-to-fiat" bridge so broken before you stepped in?
We quickly realized clients were looking for a way to move money legally and reliably, but the infrastructure simply didn't exist in a form their businesses could actually use. Moving between crypto and fiat to pay a vendor, settle a transaction, or distribute returns, you'd hit a wall. The options were either traditional banking, which largely didn't understand or want crypto flows, or staying entirely onchain, which most counterparties couldn't accommodate. There was no system making fiat and crypto work together in a compliant, practical way.
You recently emerged from stealth with a massive $250 million in transaction volume already under your belt. What was the most surprising use case you encountered during that stealth period that proved businesses were desperate for this tech?
On the infrastructure side, most fintechs and global platforms were operating on fragmented stacks: one provider for banking, another for card issuing, a third for crypto, and a separate compliance layer on top. A single unified infrastructure, combining accounts, cards, wallets, and settlement through one API, was the only way to solve such a patchwork of systems that add costs, delays, and reduce control.
We also launched Mosta, which is a modern account for global payments, built for business and individuals operating internationally. The use cases are not as surprising since most businesses are ultimately trying to solve cross-border payments. What was surprising was the share of early demand that came from entirely traditional businesses with no particular prior crypto affiliation or interest. They were coming to us because their existing banking infrastructure wasn't solving their international payment problems, and they were willing to look at stablecoins as a practical fix.
Most people don't realize that traditional banking uses "patchwork" systems from different decades. Can you explain, in plain English, why having accounts, cards, and wallets in one "programmable system" changes the game for a business owner?
Think about juggling a bank account for operations, maybe a separate card program, an international wire setup to pay overseas freelancers or run team payroll, and a payment processor for incoming revenue. Each of these relies on systems that were built in a different era, work differently, and settle on their own timeline. This becomes a manual process that costs real time and money, and is prone to error.
A programmable system collapses that stack. Your account, your card, and your wallet share the same underlying logic, so a payment made on a card is immediately visible in your account balance, and a cross-border transfer settles in the same infrastructure as a domestic one, for example.
You've said stablecoins will be the backbone of modern finance. For someone who sees USDT or USDC as just "digital dollars," how does SquareFi use them behind the scenes to make a cross-border payment faster than a traditional bank transfer?
A traditional cross-border transfer moves through a chain of correspondent banks, each one a checkpoint that adds time, cost, and potential failure. In many cases, settlement relies simply on a chain of instructions between banks rather than a direct, real-time transfer of value, which is why the process can take days. With stablecoins, the value itself moves onchain, and settlement is final within seconds. We also add the compliance and conversion layer on either end, making sure the payment is properly documented, that the recipient can receive it in their preferred form, and that the whole flow meets the regulatory requirements of both jurisdictions. Stablcoins become the settlement layer, one that’s truly effective and reliable.
SquareFi has a team of 25 but aims to reach "Unicorn" status with fewer than 50, thanks to 95% of your code being AI-assisted. As CTO, how do you ensure the security and integrity of financial code when it's being generated at such high speeds?
Using AI to assist in writing code doesn't lower the bar, and we've actually seen the quality of the code increase. Review processes, testing, and audits remain as rigorous as ever, and we're able to spend more time making sure systems behave as expected. It’s mostly about having AI handle the repetitive tasks and logic, which frees the team to focus on critical or creative work that requires human judgment.
Recent data shows crypto card payments hitting all-time highs ($584M in March 2026). We are seeing a divergence in how individuals use crypto versus how businesses use it. What does that "split" look like from your vantage point?
Retail users are gravitating toward smaller transactions such as paying for goods, peer-to-peer transfers, and remittances. For them, crypto behaves more like every other payment method or a spending balance. Business flows are different. They tend to be higher value and tied to specific operational needs like cross-border payroll, supplier payments, settlement, and treasury management, where stablecoins are becoming a settlement layer.
The data shows Visa currently handles 97% of crypto card volume. Why has Visa been able to capture this market so much more effectively than other networks, and do you see that changing as stablecoin-native rails mature?
Visa moved early and built the issuer relationships that crypto-native fintechs needed when they were getting started. That gave them a strong structural advantage: deep issuer relationships, established compliance pathways, and operational familiarity with crypto-linked programs. But Mastercard is also clearly catching up with its recent $1.8 billion acquisition of BVNK, a stablecoin infrastructure provider. I'd expect the gap to narrow from here. The more interesting question, though, is whether card networks remain central at all. A lot of the volume flowing through Visa today isn't necessarily there by choice, but because there hasn't been a viable alternative.
You have the SquareFi infrastructure for businesses and the Mosta account for individuals. How does the feedback from everyday users on Mosta help you refine the "invisible" infrastructure you sell to global platforms?
Mosta is built entirely on SquareFi's infrastructure, so improvements at the infrastructure level reflect directly on the Mosta experience. Users benefit from every rail we add and every currency corridor we open. But more often than not, the feedback loop runs the other way. When we work directly with fintech clients, we hit real walls together, such as currency gaps or edge cases in specific regions, often for the first time. In practice, much of what improved the experience for everyday Mosta users started with a specific infrastructure problem we ran into first.
You've moved SquareFi into 150+ countries. Finance is famously a "regulatory minefield." How do you build a system that is "programmable" but also satisfies the strict compliance needs of 25 different currencies?
You build a flexible core and work with licensed partners who already have the regulatory standing in their respective markets. That's the approach we took, and it's what makes genuine global coverage realistic without trying to hold all the necessary licenses just ourselves. What we built was the architecture that sits on top of that: the logic that routes a payment through the right rails, applies the right compliance checks, and presents a consistent interface to our clients regardless of which jurisdiction they're operating in.
With new regulations like MiCA (Europe) and the proposed Genius Act (USA) providing more clarity, do you think the "stigma" of using crypto for business is finally dead?
It has certainly improved. MiCA and the GENIUS Act matter precisely because they remove legal uncertainty in two of the largest financial markets in the world. Which means for businesses, the conversation has shifted from "is this even legal?" to "is this the right solution for us?" That's a fundamentally different discussion, and it's the one that unlocks serious institutional adoption.
I think the majority of the stigma sits with retail and media. At the infrastructure level, stablecoins are increasingly treated as a settlement mechanism like any other, just a more efficient one.
If you look five years into the future, will we even use the word "crypto" when talking about payments, or will the technology you're building just be the "standard" way a bank account works?
The word will probably survive in crypto-native circles, but for payments broadly, I think it fades into the background. The obsession with rails, networks, and technical architecture is itself a crypto phenomenon. Everyday consumers don't think about SWIFT when they make a bank transfer, and they don't think about card schemes when they tap to pay. The same will be true here. There are already fintechs leveraging blockchain infrastructure where users have no idea and no reason to care. That's the natural end state: the technology becomes invisible, and the conversation shifts entirely to what it enables. Faster payments, lower costs, access to financial products that didn't exist before.
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