The financial sector is undergoing one of the deepest transformations of the past decades, with cryptocurrencies and big data playing a key role in this process. While analytics previously relied mainly on reports from banks, payment systems, and aggregated statistics, the market today has access to a fundamentally new type of information: open transactions, liquidity flows, and financial metrics in real time. Blockchain has effectively become a global financial database where every transaction turns into a data point for analysis.
A telling fact: in 2025, stablecoins processed around $33 trillion in payments, while the Visa network handled about $15 trillion. This means that on-chain payment infrastructure is already processing nearly twice the transaction volume of the largest traditional networks, and it continues to grow by 30–50% annually, providing analysts with a new source of financial signals about capital flows, market participant behavior, and the formation of liquidity.
What Fintech Learned from BaaS - and Why CaaS Goes Further
The transition of fintech companies toward crypto infrastructure in many ways resembles the evolution the industry experienced several years ago with the emergence of the Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) model. It allowed technology companies to build financial products on top of existing banking infrastructure without the need to obtain their own banking license.
The BaaS ecosystem is typically structured as a three-layer model: a licensed bank holds deposits and handles the regulatory framework, a BaaS platform provides APIs for working with accounts, payments, and KYC procedures, while the fintech company manages the client interface and shapes the overall user experience. This is the model used by well-known market players such as Solaris, Marqeta, Stripe, and Galileo Financial Technologies.
However, as the crypto economy grows, a new infrastructure model is gradually forming called Crypto-as-a-Service (CaaS). Unlike BaaS, it is built not around bank accounts but around blockchain networks and digital assets. Instead of connecting to traditional payment rails, companies gain access to cryptocurrency liquidity, trading instruments, global markets, and on-chain analytics.
In simple terms, if BaaS gave fintech companies banking functionality through APIs, CaaS opens access to global crypto liquidity and a new type of financial data that can be analyzed almost in real time.
For a deeper comparison, I selected two popular companies that provide solutions in the BaaS (Solaris) and CaaS (WhiteBIT) formats and analyzed them based on key parameters.
Why CFOs Are Reconsidering Banks in the Age of Crypto
Crypto are gradually moving beyond being merely an alternative asset class and are becoming an integral part of the modern financial system. The reason is quite pragmatic: they address key limitations of traditional infrastructure. This includes global 24/7 settlements without reliance on banking hours, transaction transparency, instant access to liquidity, and - especially important for analytics - vast amounts of public data. For the first time, the financial market has an environment where almost every capital movement can be tracked, aggregated, and analyzed in real time.
Against this backdrop, venture investors and CFOs are increasingly facing a strategic rather than tactical question: which infrastructure can deliver higher business volumes and liquidity - traditional banking models or CaaS integration? While the answer once clearly favored banks, today market indicators and the rapid growth of the crypto economy are shifting the balance increasingly toward crypto infrastructure.
In this context, CaaS is not merely a technological solution but a direct gateway to global markets. Through APIs, companies gain access to crypto liquidity, can integrate trading tools, and launch new revenue streams - from trading and custodial services to lending. At the same time, the core value runs deeper: alongside liquidity, businesses gain access to capital flow data that was previously either closed or heavily aggregated.
For analysts, this creates a fundamentally new level of financial intelligence. Tracking large-wallet movements, analyzing liquidity dynamics, and identifying correlations between different markets become not hypotheses but tools for daily operations. As a result, CaaS transforms not only companies' operational models but also their approach to financial decision-making, where data ceases to be a lagging indicator and becomes a source of competitive advantage.
The conclusion is clear:
the future of finance lies at the intersection of data, infrastructure, and crypto markets. Today, the financial sector is undergoing a transformation from a traditional model - where analytics relied solely on banking data - toward a hybrid system that integrates fiat rails with the blockchain ecosystem.
If BaaS has turned banks into infrastructure by providing companies with tools to manage fiat payments and accounts, CaaS takes this infrastructure to the next level, making the crypto market a source of liquidity, instant settlements, and transparent data. Together, they create a comprehensive financial ecosystem where analytics, speed, and access to global capital flows become the key drivers of growth and strategic decision-making.
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