Author: Sleepy.txt, Insight Beating
Editor: Kaori
In a sense, the previous generation of FinTech may have already died.
In early July, Silicon Valley's top angel investor, Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures, liquidated its holding of 4.8 million shares of Wise stock, with a transaction price of £10.30, totaling nearly £50 million. This venture capital firm was Wise's earliest and most core supporter, accompanying it through a complete entrepreneurial cycle from early investment in 2013 to Wise's arrival at the London Stock Exchange in 2021.
Now, this relationship ends with a quiet transaction.
This is certainly not an exit in a panic, nor just a realization of paper profits.
Many decisions in the financial world do not immediately reveal their significance. Whether it is investment or exit, it may not show clues at the time, but looking back, one can piece together a clear path; those choices have long pointed to another future.
Peter Thiel and his fund Valar Ventures are among the most radical believers in Fintech. They believe that the gaps in the banking system hide overlooked efficiency dividends, and they bet on entrepreneurs trying to use technology to bypass regulation and reshape payment paths. These companies have risen in the crevices of the times, telling one story after another that challenges the traditional order.
But every technological revolution eventually grows old. Paths are copied, growth stabilizes, and the initial rebels begin to conform. And those who bet are often the first to notice this change.
To truly understand the significance of this exit, one must return to twelve years ago, when Peter Thiel had just decided to bet on Wise. At that time, the banking system was still slowly recovering from the 2008 financial crisis, while a group of self-proclaimed 'hacker spirit' entrepreneurs was trying to use technology to break through the closed barriers of traditional finance.
Peter Thiel was among the earliest believers in them.
1. From TransferWise to Wise, the golden decade of Fintech
In 2013, Wise was still called TransferWise, just an inconspicuous small project in an East London shared office. The team was small, with one founder coming from Skype and the other having consulted at Deloitte.
The problems they wanted to solve are not new—cross-border transfers are too expensive and too slow, but the methods are quite unconventional. TransferWise did not talk about licenses or seek bank partnerships but designed an exchange rate matching mechanism that allows capital to circulate without needing to 'cross borders'.
The model is simple, the path is clear, and it does not rely on financial institutions; for this reason, TransferWise caught Peter Thiel's attention.
Peter Thiel has never liked the mainstream.
He has always been one of Silicon Valley's most well-known libertarians, remaining vigilant against government, regulation, and centralized organizations, and thus prefers to bet on systemic improvements that bypass the old order and emphasize individual efficiency. TransferWise fits this logic perfectly, relying on no licenses, bypassing institutions, achieving exchange rate pricing through direct matching between users, with product logic self-consistent and a clear growth path.
In this company, Peter Thiel saw the '0 to 1' model he has long adhered to, which is to occupy a small market through structural design, achieve micro-monopolies through efficiency advantages, and then expand along the logical boundaries. TransferWise's currency matching mechanism is precisely the system-level cut he has always focused on.
In 2013, Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures led a new round of financing for TransferWise. That was the year when social media, cloud computing, and mobile internet took turns dominating the narrative, and he made a completely different choice.
The unusual growth curve exhibited by TransferWise in subsequent years proved Peter Thiel's vision.
In 2017, TransferWise's monthly settlement amount had exceeded 1 billion pounds, achieving operational profitability for the first time, with revenue growing by over 150% year-on-year; by 2020, the annual transaction volume rose to 67 billion pounds, of which about 42 billion were cross-border transactions, achieving a valuation of $5 billion, making it one of the fastest-growing Fintech companies in Europe at that time.
In 2021, TransferWise officially changed its name to Wise and directly listed on the London Stock Exchange in July, with a valuation of £8.75 billion, equivalent to approximately $11 billion. On its first day of trading, Wise's stock price rose by 10%, becoming one of the most eye-catching tech stocks in the London market that year. As an early investor in Wise, Valar Ventures held over 10% of the shares at that time, making it one of the biggest winners of this IPO.
The rise of Wise has almost become a model for the success narrative of Fintech in the 2010s, breaking the bank monopoly, winning through efficiency, and prioritizing ideas. It did not rely on complex financial engineering or attempt to reconstruct the entire monetary system, but rather focused on finding efficiency gaps within the existing system, using product advantages to penetrate and replace some of the functions of banks.
The decade of Valar Ventures and Wise indeed validates the high points of this model.
But every hero's story must eventually come to an end. The golden age of Fintech has already concluded.
2. The narrative of the previous generation of FinTech is no longer viable.
Once a synonym for 'new finance,' decentralized, tech-driven, and user-experience-first, using a lighter model to nibble away at the traditional financial heavy asset system. In the early decade, those FinTech companies repeatedly replicated that classic path, prying open a gap at the edge of the traditional system, fragmenting banks' profit models into API, fees, and UX combinations.
But by 2025, this path will clearly be unwalkable, as venture capital interest in FinTech is cooling.
According to Crunchbase statistics, global FinTech financing transactions totaled only 1,805, a decrease of more than 30% year-on-year; a year ago, this number was still 2,633. The contraction in numbers is not surprising, but the speed of decline is much faster than expected.
The first to feel the chill are the retail financial services close to the consumer end. PitchBook data shows that in the first quarter of 2025, retail FinTech financing fell by 37.8% month-on-month. By the second quarter, even relatively counter-cyclical enterprise financial technology was not spared, with transaction volumes decreasing by about 13% year-on-year.
The past Fintech relied on making moves on the margins of the traditional financial system, using lighter models to penetrate higher efficiency points. But when all easily optimizable links have been transformed, what remains are increasingly heavy compliance obligations, increasingly high customer acquisition costs, and increasingly difficult growth spaces to break through.
Wise is one of the typical cases.
In the past year, not only has its stock price fallen more than 20% from its 2024 peak, but it has also been questioned multiple times by regulatory agencies. In June of this year, the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) fined it $9 million for serious non-compliance with anti-money laundering regulations. Meanwhile, British regulators have also begun to re-examine its risk control mechanisms, and Wise's previously proud light asset compliance model is being gradually dismantled by reality.
Meanwhile, new pressures are also spreading from the Crypto field.
The on-chain payments, real-time clearing, and settlement paths brought by stablecoins have begun to erode the profit margins of traditional cross-border transfers. Compared to transfer solutions like Wise, more and more companies are beginning to consider directly deploying on-chain settlement channels, no longer relying on complex scheduling systems between banks and payment platforms.
In the face of rising pressures, Wise has also begun preparing for a U.S. listing, considering an ADR format to list in the U.S., which means it does not need to change its company structure and can seek higher liquidity and valuation expectations from the U.S. capital market.
This relisting attempt, described by officials as a 'valuation optimization move,' is actually seeking rescue; it reflects a deep unease about liquidity, valuation, and whether the narratives of the previous generation of FinTech can withstand a new round of capital cycles.
The previous Fintech model indeed spawned a number of outstanding companies. But as Crypto begins to rewrite the clearing and account systems, the path of 'optimization' itself gradually loses its foothold.
This revolution ultimately reached its ceiling.
Looking back, Valar Ventures' bet in 2013 was a direct response to the high costs and low efficiency of the banking system; while this liquidation in 2025 is a clear farewell to the old model of financial innovation.
3. New protocols are devouring the old system.
Today's Crypto is becoming FinTech 2.0.
If the previous generation of Fintech was an efficiency patch built on the banking system, then the new generation of Crypto protocols is trying to bypass banks and rewrite the system itself.
This is not just an idealistic narrative; it has now become a visible reality.
The average daily on-chain settlement amount of stablecoins has long surpassed several billion dollars, becoming the new default path for cross-border capital flows for many enterprises. It does not rely on Swift or traditional bank accounts; it only requires an address to complete global settlements within minutes.
A deeper transformation is happening at the backend. The clearing paths are being reconstructed on-chain, identity authentication no longer relies on financial institutions, and interest rates and asset pricing logic are detached from the settings of central banks and banks. Modules that once drifted out of mainstream view are becoming core components of the parallel financial system.
This is also forcing a fundamental shift in the value capture logic of Fintech.
The innovations of the previous generation of Fintech mostly focused on the performance layer, such as account systems, payment channels, and UX design. They resemble a friendlier exterior shell wrapped around the existing financial system, fundamentally enhancing the usability of banks rather than replacing the banks themselves.
Crypto, or FinTech 2.0, bets on protocol layers and settlement layers, the components that operate independently of banks. It constructs a complete set of clearing paths and identity systems independent of the banking system, fundamentally circumventing the dependencies of the original financial architecture.
When value is no longer concentrated on the front-end interface but begins to sink into the back-end structure, investors will naturally turn their attention to the bottom of those systems, the place that can truly leverage order. Peter Thiel is a keen hunter; he focuses on projects that can reconstruct the basic financial order because they have the potential to shake the existing rules at the structural level.
Under this betting logic, Wise's withdrawal also carries its true significance.
From serving the front end to building the back end; from connecting banks to bypassing banks; from optimizing reality to rewriting reality.
4. So, turning towards the new world
Peter Thiel has never left the financial technology table.
In addition to Valar Ventures betting on Wise, Peter Thiel also has another fund with more strategic intent, Founders Fund. This institution was one of the earliest investors in SpaceX and Meta, managing assets exceeding $12 billion by 2023.
Compared to Valar's focus on early growth companies, Founders Fund tends to participate directly in building system-level, infrastructure layers. In recent years, this fund has gradually withdrawn from traditional tech tracks and begun to focus on Crypto infrastructure, constructing the future financial framework around stablecoins, on-chain clearing, and on-chain banking systems.
From late summer to early autumn 2023, Founders Fund bought a total of $200 million in Bitcoin and Ethereum, each accounting for half. Thiel's fund had already invested in Bitcoin back in 2014 and liquidated before the market peak in 2022, making a profit of about $1.8 billion. This time, they are back at the table, but the posture and context are completely different from those years.
Peter Thiel's renewed bet on crypto aims at the power to shape the future financial order, building his financial empire from assets to protocols.
In his investment portfolio, Bullish is the front end of trading scenarios, connecting users with liquidity; Paxos provides compliant issuance capabilities for stablecoins; Ubyx builds clearing protocols responsible for on-chain fund and asset flow; Erebor attempts to establish an on-chain banking system, creating an on-chain financial Visa + Swift; while CoinDesk, as one of the largest media platforms in the crypto field, was acquired by Bullish in 2023, becoming the voice of the entire system.
These invested companies together form a hidden but complete financial underlying structure, controlling asset anchoring, controlling clearing paths, controlling information dissemination, akin to a 'shadow central bank' in the crypto era.
Peter Thiel never intended to bet on just one platform company; he aimed to build a new financial machine that does not rely on traditional financial institutions but can independently maintain credit, liquidity, and regulatory order.
This main line ultimately still revolves around Peter Thiel's own betting philosophy. He often bets on those futures that have not yet been accepted by the market, or even have no name. He has funded experiments in autonomous ocean cities, invested in cryogenic human research, and also invested in defense technology. Many of his investments seem fanciful and far ahead.
For him, waiting is a waste. Investing is a way to drive the future into reality.
Peter Thiel once said a famous quote: 'We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.'
This is a satire of the so-called 'technological innovation' over the years, which ultimately has only optimized advertising placements, extended user engagement time, and created more information cocoons. People have used all their intelligence to create tweets with higher click-through rates, yet they have not moved any closer to the future.
Peter Thiel is not satisfied with optimizing within the existing system; he seeks to find the starting points that can rewrite the underlying logic of the system, from energy, healthcare, space exploration, to now Crypto.
The projects he invests in can be obsessive, the pace can be slow, but every step must be directed towards that 'flying car' world.
Betting on Wise over a decade ago was because it could enhance efficiency within the gaps of the traditional financial system; while now betting on Crypto is because he wants to reconstruct a financial system from the ground up.
From optimization in the cracks to reconstruction at the base level. Peter Thiel is moving his chips from the end of an old consensus to the starting point of a new consensus.
Thus, he exits Wise and turns towards a more distant world.
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