The Ex-Revolut Lead Building a Neobank for Everyday Europe

From Revolut to DeFi rails

Joao Alves spent around four years at Revolut building cards globally. He says traditional fintechs will never move onto decentralized infrastructure, citing the innovator's dilemma and the risk of competing against the moat they have built. His thesis is that a better fintech can be built on top of stablecoins or DeFi for retail customers.

Bleap runs non-custodially on Arbitrum One. Alves says not holding customer funds makes the company less risky from a regulator's point of view, so entering a new country looks more like payment service provider work than bank activity. Its MiCA licensing covers fiat-to-crypto conversion.

Savings drive adoption

The company has relaunched its high-yield savings vaults, and Alves says the dollar vaults pay around eight to 9%. When the vaults were running before, 30% of retail customers used them, with an average deposit of around $4,000, and he calls them one of the main reasons people signed up. He was surprised that most users converted euros to USDC and accepted the FX exposure.

Crypto in the background

Alves says one balance works for DeFi, wallet transfers and card spending without the user knowing. Bleap charges no card fee and passes through the Mastercard rate, which he says is under 30 bips for major European currencies, maybe 20. It is adding currencies: it already has the euro and Mexican peso, and the Brazilian real is coming soon. Users can top up from MetaMask or Phantom from any chain.

What to build in-house

Joao Alves says outsourcing the risk engine was a mistake: during licensing it was hard to explain and needed many manual fixes. He argues integrations and wallet UX should never be outsourced, while on- and off-ramps will become commodities. Early on, he had to build ramps himself because no provider converted euros to a euro stablecoin instantly at a decent fee, and he says these now exist pretty much everywhere.