In ten years, there will be 300 banks left in the United States. Today there are roughly 4,500. Davis Hart, founder of Omnia, thinks about this statistic constantly.
Hart tried to build a crypto-focused bank before FTX collapsed, went deep on infrastructure at Solana Labs, and now runs Omnia, which helps banks actually operationalize stablecoin strategy.
On this episode of Bits to Bricks, Hart unpacks why stablecoins' real domestic value isn't speed, how fintechs are quietly assembling bank-like products in months with tiny teams, and where banks still have a structural advantage.
An idea before its time
In late 2022, Hart left Paxos with a thesis: stablecoins should bear yield. If you create a purpose-built bank that holds only Treasuries on its balance sheet and issues tokens to depositors, those tokens become stablecoins that pay interest to known customers. When the token moves to someone outside the bank, it just stops paying yield.
Unfortunately, Hart left Paxos two or three weeks before FTX imploded and then in early 2023, federal banking regulators issued a joint statement that effectively told banks to stay away from digital assets. Silicon Valley Bank failed, Signature failed, Silvergate failed.
"The market got the better of us," Hart said. The idea wasn't wrong: it was just early. Figure recently launched a similar dual-life model with a tokenized money market fund.
10,000 institutions, one question
The US banking landscape is unlike any other in the world. Australia runs on six banks. The US has roughly 4,500 FDIC-insured banks and a similar number of credit unions. That fragmentation comes from a long history of community-oriented banking, dating back to the National Bank Act of 1864, and a federalist system where states have maintained strong control over chartering.
Community banks serve a function that's hard to replicate at scale. Hart described an event in Texas where local bankers pooled their own money and matched donations to help with flood recovery. "Would Bank of America do that? I don't think so."
But the economics are shifting. Fintechs have spent the last 15 years reselling banking services to demographics that community banks don't reach, layering purpose-built UX on top of bank infrastructure. Hart's framing was blunt: "You go to any fintech's website, you scroll all the way to the bottom. You'll see banking services provided by so-and-so." Fintechs are a layer on top of banking, tailoring products by customer need rather than geography.
The question for banks is whether stablecoins accelerate that unbundling or give them a way to fight back.
The real domestic use case isn't speed
When other Bits to Bricks guests like Thomas Cowan of Galaxy and Alisha Chhangani of the Atlantic Council talked about stablecoins, much of the conversation centered on cross-border payments and dollar dominance. Hart pushed in a different direction. He's focused on what stablecoins can do inside the United States, and he's honest that the answer is still developing.
"The reality is, even if you look at the international use case, it's not always faster and cheaper to use stablecoins. I think that's the dirty secret." – Davis Hart
The domestic case that's live today is account-to-account transfers between platforms that don't share infrastructure. You can move money instantly between PayPal and Coinbase right now using stablecoins. There's no other way to do it that fast. As more digital wallets and institutional brokers add stablecoin support, that network of instant settlement points expands.
Hart has even more conviction in composability. When you tokenize different asset types, stocks, bonds, stablecoins, the same on-chain software can facilitate trades between any of them. "That's where you stop treating stablecoins as just faster dollars and start treating them as a different kind of asset altogether."
Technology is accelerating that idea too: Hart pointed to fintechs that have assembled banking-like products, stablecoin balances with ACH on-ramps, card spending, and onchain yield, in under a year (with tiny engineering teams).
Banks as the cheapest liquidity in the system
Hart argues that: banks might be the most important piece of the stablecoin economy precisely because of their charters.
Most stablecoin use cases still move in and out of fiat. That conversion is a liquidity operation, a trade between a fiat dollar and a stablecoin dollar. Whoever has the lowest cost of capital can offer that conversion most cheaply. Banks, with access to low-cost deposits, win that race.
"As we sit on the side that we sit on, where we're kind of pro-stablecoin, pro-digital assets, I think we want banks to exist. They're going to provide an advantageous cost that makes the stuff that we do grow faster." – Davis Hart
One in 300
Hart closed with a hope from one of his customers, the CEO of a regional bank: "Around here we have this phrase, one in 300. We think in 10 years there will be 300 banks in the United States. We want to be one of them."
Banking is consolidating. Technology adoption curves that used to take decades now take months. ChatGPT went from zero to 100 million users in two months. When that kind of adoption speed applies to money, the pressure on banks to evolve becomes existential.
Hart sees specialization as the likely outcome. Some banks will focus purely on lending, others will focus on payments and FX. The generalist community bank model (deposits and loans and local sponsorships) will survive in some places, but will be squeezed everywhere.
Omnia's bet is that the banks that engage with stablecoins now are building the foundation for whatever comes next, tokenized deposits, tokenized securities, agentic commerce. The composability of on-chain infrastructure means the investment compounds. The banks that wait are the ones that won't be one in 300.
This article draws from Amira Valliani's conversation with Davis Hart, Founder and CEO of Omnia. For the full discussion, listen to the complete episode of Bits to Bricks.
