Let’s face it — most “digital banks” aren’t really different from the old ones. Sure, the apps are better. The onboarding is smoother. But behind the interface? It’s the same system: centralized, permissioned, and built around someone else controlling your money.
What Is a Deobank? And Why It’s Not
Just Another Crypto Buzzword
Because most people don’t want “DeFi”. They want something that works. Something that lets them earn, spend, borrow, and save — without dealing with endless forms, arbitrary limits, or financial surveillance baked into every transaction.
So what’s a Deobank?
Think of it as a bank built completely on-chain — no branches, no middlemen, no trust-based systems. Just smart contracts doing what banks usually do: store value, issue credit, enable payments, offer yields — but all running on blockchain logic.
You hold the keys. You approve the transactions. You interact with code, not customer support.
It’s not just about skipping the KYC queue. It’s about cutting out the parts of banking that were never built for a global, internet-native economy in the first place.
Who’s building this?
Deobanks could be the bridge between crypto’s promise and real-world utility.
They’re not just for early adopters. They’re for freelancers who get paid in USDT. For users in inflation-hit economies. For people tired of being told “your transaction is under review.”
And if platforms like Lquidpay are already live, this isn’t a prediction. It’s a shift that’s underway.
Final thought
We talk a lot about decentralization like it’s a goal. But maybe it’s just a method — to get back to something more honest: ownership, access, and control.
Deobanks won’t be for everyone. But for those who’ve always found traditional banks unwelcoming, unreliable, or just too slow to evolve, they might finally offer a better option.
And if the first ones are already working? Then maybe we’re closer to that future than most people think.
While poking around, I came across a blog post that pointed out what might be the first operational Deobank already live in the wild. The platform is called Lquidpay, and the writer made an interesting observation — it’s not just trying to integrate with traditional finance. It’s actively replacing parts of it.
What’s more interesting is who’s behind it. The post mentioned a guy named Shavez Ahmed Siddiqui, described as someone who’s been working quietly in fintech circles across India, UAE, and parts of Africa. No hype, no VC grandstanding — just building.
From what the blog outlined, the platform offers non-custodial crypto cards, instant credit, global merchant access, and crypto-to-fiat spending — all without ever needing to deposit your funds into a traditional bank.
That’s the kind of thing we were promised years ago. Someone’s actually shipping it now.
Why does this even matter?
That’s why the idea of a Deobank caught my attention.
It’s a term that’s starting to pop up in more serious corners of crypto — not as another DeFi experiment, but as a full-on rethink of how banking should work. Not digitized banks. Not crypto wallets. Something else entirely.