The $11.6 Billion FinTech Tollbooth

What you're really buying with Chime

Payments are so hot right now. Every day there’s another headline about “the future of money movement” or how some company is about to “disrupt the way value changes hands.” It’s become the favorite cocktail-party conversation of fintech founders, crypto diehards, and banking execs who want to sound like visionaries without changing a line of code. And if you zoom out, the whole narrative starts to sound less like infrastructure strategy and more like urban planning, who gets to build the roads, who collects the tolls, and what happens when someone invents flying cars that don’t need roads at all.

That’s where we are today. Circle fresh off it’s scorching IPO and others are trying to build the skyways. Chime still operates a tollbooth. A beautifully designed tollbooth with great customer reviews and slick interface, but a tollbooth none the less.

Last week I wrote up Circle, the most grown-up company in the stablecoin universe not named Tether, who is riding the momentum of a system that moves money 24/7, digitally, globally, with no card rails and no cutoff windows. The believers say it’s not hype anymore, that the future is now. Stablecoins already account for trillions in volume, mostly crypto-to-crypto, mostly bots, mostly outside the mainstream, but the rails are real and the use cases are creeping closer to everyday payments. Shopify even jumped on the bandwagon a day ago. I remain skeptical they’ll take enough of “the system’s” deposits to truly leave a mark.

Elswhere and right on cue, the capital markets window stay wide open. Invest for longer than a cycle and you know that IPO windows go from droughts to downpours, and when the sun comes out, they come fast. Last week it was Circle. This week, it’s Chime. The company IPO’d at $27, popped to $43, and briefly touched an eye-watering $18 billion market cap, all for giving people a cleaner interface to swipe their debit card.

But Chime and Circle aren’t just different. They’re structurally inverted. One earns on stillness. One earns on motion. One is building a financial internet. The other is renting space on roads that might not matter in ten years.

And here’s the irony: if Circle works, if you really believe stablecoins work and that programmable dollars actually become the settlement layer of the internet, then Chime’s model doesn’t just struggle. It becomes obsolete. Two companies. Two IPOs. One week apart. One future, and for me the irony for me is beautiful.

The lingering question for you all as investors is, should you buy Chime (CHYM) or let the hype traders have their food fight over limited shares and hype driven euphoria?

Read on to find out.