For years, traditional banks treated crypto companies like the boogeyman. Konstantin Vasilenko remembers it well. “A couple of years ago at Money 20/20, traditional finance institutions were not ready for crypto,” he told me. “Everybody was like, oh, you’re the crypto guys.” Then something changed, and the change has a precise cause. A few weeks before we sat down at Money 20/20 Europe, his company secured one of Europe’s rarest credentials, and suddenly the banks that once shunned him were the ones calling.
| What You Need to Know |
|---|
| 1Interview recorded at Money 20/20 Europe 2026, 2 to 4 June, at the Amsterdam RAI. |
| 2Konstantin Vasilenko is a co-founder of Paybis, a 12-year-old company built around making crypto simple, now for banks and businesses. |
| 3Paybis secured a MiCA license in Latvia (issued by the Bank of Latvia) in mid-2026; Vasilenko says it is one of only around 60 companies of roughly 3,000 registered VASPs in Europe to get one. |
| 4He says that the moment the license landed, traditional banks that once refused crypto began asking to work with Paybis. |
| 5Its model is "crypto-fiat infrastructure as a service": Paybis's license and infrastructure let other businesses offer crypto services compliantly. |
Vasilenko is a co-founder of Paybis, a 12-year-old company whose entire mission is to make crypto simple. This was our second conversation, and the update was big: Paybis now holds a MiCA licence, and Vasilenko is watching, in real time, what a regulatory stamp does to the willingness of traditional finance to work with a crypto firm.
Crypto and traditional finance are becoming one thing
The big-picture observation Vasilenko opened with is that the two worlds are merging. At earlier Money 20/20s, crypto companies and banks were clearly separate tribes. Now, he said, “crypto and traditional finance are converging into one vertical,” and he expects that in a few years the event will be more or less the same crowd, with everyone, banks, and crypto firms alike, talking stablecoins.
Paybis’s job is to help the traditional side cross over. The “crypto made simple” slogan started in the company’s early days, making it easy for retail customers to buy their first Bitcoin. The mission is now the same, but the audience has changed: helping businesses and banks adopt stablecoins. Those institutions, Vasilenko explained, sense the trend accelerating but freeze on the practicalities, do we need a licence, what about infrastructure, what about liquidity? Paybis packaged all of that into a single product. “Take this box, plug it in, and you’re set to go.” The company that spent a decade making crypto simple for individuals is now doing it for the institutions that once kept it at arm’s length.
The licence that changed who picks up the phone
The heart of the conversation was the MiCA licence, granted by the Bank of Latvia. Vasilenko framed its rarity in stark terms: of roughly 3,000 registered crypto businesses in Europe, he said, only a little more than 60 have so far obtained a MiCA licence. (That framing is his, and worth a footnote: the 3,000 counts older VASP registrations rather than active firms, so treat the exact ratio as his point rather than a precise statistic.) What is not in doubt is the effect.
“Immediately after we got this license, we see much more demand from regulated businesses, banks and financial institutions, coming to us saying: we know you, we heard the news, you got a license, now we’re ready to work with you. Even traditional banks that a year or two ago said no to crypto are changing their mind.”
His explanation for why is the most useful insight in the interview. Banks were never fearful of crypto itself; they were afraid of their regulators. A bank could not touch a crypto company because its banking regulator would not allow it. But now the same regulators are issuing crypto licences, which means a licensed crypto firm and a bank sit inside the same regulatory perimeter, reporting to the same authorities. “We’re in the same sandbox,” as he put it. That shared oversight is what flipped the switch. The licence did not just make Paybis compliant; it made Paybis safe for a bank to be seen with.
“Crypto-fiat infrastructure as a service”
What Paybis does with that licence is the clever part. Rather than simply using it to run its own business, the company turned the licence into a product. Vasilenko calls it crypto-fiat infrastructure as a service, modelled on the banking-as-a-service idea: Paybis built a regulated platform that lets other businesses offer crypto services through its licence and infrastructure, compliantly.
In practice, that means two kinds of customer. A retail-facing one: you have a website and want to sell Bitcoin on it, you plug in Paybis and you can. And a business one: you want to give your corporate customers access to stablecoins, and Paybis provides the regulated rails to do it. Vasilenko was careful when I summarised it as “his licence is your licence”, legally you still follow the process, he clarified, but the simple version is that Paybis can let a company offer services that would normally require a licence, through Paybis’s own. His on-the-floor pitch was even sharper: with the MiCA deadline bearing down and few firms ready, he offers himself as a Plan B. “If you don’t have a Plan B, maybe we can be your Plan B.” He said he would even help competitors keep operating, on the logic that the whole industry growing matters more than any single fight.
Why a crypto founder is happy about regulation
Vasilenko is firmly, almost cheerfully, in the pro-regulation camp, which still surprises people who remember crypto’s libertarian roots. His reasoning is pragmatic. Look at what regulatory clarity has unlocked, he said: Bitcoin ETFs, the US GENIUS Act, mainstream adoption. As a self-described Bitcoin maximalist, he is delighted.
He did not pretend it is free. MiCA means asking customers more questions at onboarding, which makes the consumer experience a little more complicated. But he reached for an analogy that lands: Uber and Airbnb also innovated fast and unregulated, consumers loved them, and then regulation arrived to protect those consumers and let the model mature. Crypto, he argued, is following the same arc. Regulation is the methodology that forces companies to become structured and competent enough to manage other people’s funds without losing them. It is friction in the short term and durability in the long term, the same trade other Money 20/20 guests, from Tothemoon to Ledger Rocket, kept describing all week.
Why this is significant for the Dutch and European reader
Paybis is a live preview of what the MiCA era actually rewards. The regulation that the industry once dreaded has become, for the companies that prepared, a moat. A scarce licence does not just keep you on the right side of the law; it opens commercial doors that were previously bolted shut because it lets risk-averse banks treat you as a peer rather than a liability.
For Dutch and European businesses, there are two practical takeaways. First, the MiCA deadline is real, and Vasilenko’s “Plan B” pitch is a reminder that not having a path to compliance is now an existential risk, not a paperwork problem. Second, you may not need your licence to operate compliantly: the infrastructure-as-a-service model means a smaller fintech can build on a licensed provider’s rails, the way neobanks already stitch together other people’s regulated services. The convergence Vasilenko describes is not coming. For the firms holding the right licences, it is already here.
This interview was recorded live at Money 20/20 Europe 2026 at the Amsterdam RAI. For more conversations with the people building regulated crypto, watch the full Cryptofocus series.
