Fin

Fin

Fin is a Solana-based stablecoin payments platform designed to move high-value money globally — from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars — with the speed and cost structure of on-chain settlement and the usability of a mainstream financial app. Founded in 2022 as TipLink and rebranded to Fin in December 2025, the company raised a $17 million Series A led by Pantera Capital to launch its commercial payments product.

From TipLink to Fin

The company began as TipLink, a lightweight Solana-native tool that turned URLs into self-custodial wallets. The founding insight was precise: "the link itself is the wallet." A sender could push USDC to a URL, and any recipient — regardless of whether they held crypto or understood wallets — could claim the funds by opening the link with a Google login or withdrawing directly to a bank account. The platform used Solana's sub-second finality and sub-cent fees to make transfers at any scale practical. A $100 USDC transfer cost less than one tenth of a penny. TipLink also integrated Solana Pay for in-person checkout and used compressed NFTs for mass QR-code token distributions at events, partnering with projects across the Solana ecosystem.

By late 2025, the team had identified a larger opening: the global market for high-value cross-border payments. Traditional wire transfers are slow, expensive, and opaque. Stablecoin infrastructure had matured enough to handle institutional-scale flows. The company renamed itself Fin and raised to pursue this opportunity at scale.

How Fin Works

Fin is a stablecoin-powered payments application that supports three core payment flows:

1. Fin-to-Fin transfers — Instant settlement between Fin users anywhere in the world.
2. Bank account transfers — Direct off-ramp to traditional bank accounts without correspondent bank intermediaries.
3. Crypto rails — Transfers to external cryptocurrency wallets.

The platform supports USDC and USDT, positioning itself as a bridge between stablecoin infrastructure and everyday financial operations. The design philosophy prioritizes simplicity: no jargon, no visible blockchain complexity — just a clean payments interface intended to work anywhere in the world. Fin earns revenue through transaction fees and interest on stablecoins held within Fin wallets.

Solana at the Core

Fin is built on Solana and inherits the network's core throughput and cost advantages. Solana processes tens of thousands of transactions per second with sub-second finality and average fees of fractions of a cent — a cost structure that becomes meaningfully competitive at large notional amounts where basis-point fees from traditional rails compound quickly.

The TipLink infrastructure Fin evolved from was Solana-exclusive from day one. The team has deep familiarity with the ecosystem's payment primitives, and the TipLink Wallet Adapter — a 2024 product that let any website integrate TipLink checkout — demonstrated the team's capacity to build developer-facing infrastructure alongside consumer products.

Team

Fin was co-founded by Ian Krotinsky (CEO) and Aashiq Dheeraj, both alumni of Citadel. Krotinsky was a quantitative portfolio manager and trader at Citadel from 2016 to 2022 and previously a programmatic trader at Goldman Sachs. Dheeraj was a quantitative researcher at Citadel Securities from 2018 to 2022. The two built TipLink together before transitioning the company into Fin.

Beyond the founding team, Fin has recruited talent from Google, Meta, Uber, Rippling, and Chime — a hiring profile that reflects ambitions to compete in mainstream payments infrastructure rather than purely crypto-native markets.

Funding and Investors

Fin's $17 million Series A was announced on December 3, 2025, led by Pantera Capital, with participation from Sequoia Capital and Samsung Next. This followed an earlier $6 million raise as TipLink co-led by Sequoia and Multicoin Capital. The cumulative investor roster reflects both crypto-native conviction (Pantera, Multicoin) and mainstream venture confidence (Sequoia, Samsung Next).

Target Market and Positioning

Fin is initially targeting import-export businesses and international merchants — companies that routinely move large sums across borders and face the worst of traditional banking: slow settlement, correspondent bank fees, and FX spread on top. Early pilot programs were announced with businesses in this segment within weeks of the Series A close.

As Krotinsky observed in press coverage, incumbents face a structural ceiling: "It's difficult for incumbents to rip out their whole infrastructure." Fin positions itself as the greenfield alternative built natively on stablecoin rails from day one, without legacy system constraints.

The longer-term ambition is broader — to become the next large-scale global payments app, competing with the reach of consumer payment platforms but without the friction, transfer limits, or geographic restrictions that define the category today.