After watching the interview, it turns out the last straw that broke Infini's back was the refund being stuck:

In May, we wanted to slowly stop this business, and the core reason was that our card refunds were very slow.

Generally, a normal international card refund takes about one to two weeks, but ours have taken four weeks, a month, or even a month and a half. We keep urging our upstream channels, but they just can't process the refunds. We are bombarded with customer complaints every day, and we feel very helpless because we are at the downstream of the industry. Apart from pushing the channels, there is nothing we can do; we have the will but no power.

It's not difficult to start a U card company; anyone with money, time, and patience can do it. The barriers to entry are low. If you want to be compliant, you have to spend money; but if you don't care about compliance, anyone can do it. Essentially, you just need a custodial company and find an upstream provider for a card group API. Once you connect to the API, you can issue cards.

Almost all cards on the market are done this way, but no one knows how many layers of upstream there are. Some may cooperate directly with card groups, while others may have layers upon layers of middlemen, like an onion, and it can even stack infinitely. For example, we could also create an API and open it up to you, and you could then create another API to open it up to others.

After a few months of working on U cards, I increasingly feel that Infini is regressing in the U card business. Personally, I hope to break the traditional payment barriers, but U cards turn stablecoins into USD, which goes to banks, and users then swipe their bank cards, effectively returning to the old path of traditional financial payments. This is also why we have decided not to continue.

For example, the refund issue mentioned before is very draining. U cards have indeed not changed any logic in this industry; it is just a traditional payment solution, not the ultimate solution. The ultimate solution in the future is to directly accept stablecoin payments.