The Neobank Reboot: From Xinja's Collapse to Stablecoin Banking and Tokenised Shares

Australia is one of the most concentrated banking markets in the developed world. Four institutions hold the overwhelming majority of deposits and mortgages, and for a brief, optimistic window between 2018 and 2020 a generation of startups believed an app and a banking licence could change that.

They were mostly wrong, and the reasons they were wrong explain why the second wave of challengers, the ones being built on stablecoins and networks like Solana, looks so different.

What Happened to Australia's Neobanks

The first wave is a short and sobering story. Xinja collapsed in December 2020, burning cash on deposit interest with no lending revenue to offset it; the regulator called it a "successful failure" only because every customer got their money back. Volt handed back its licence in 2022 after failing to raise enough capital to lend at scale. 86 400 was acquired by NAB. Up survives as a beloved brand, but it was built with and ultimately absorbed by Bendigo Bank.

The exception proves the rule. Judo Bank survived, and now posts healthy profits, because it never tried to out-retail the Big Four: it picked small-business lending, a high-margin niche the majors served poorly. The lesson of the first wave was not that challengers are impossible. It was that copying the incumbent model with less capital, higher funding costs and a marketing budget is a slow way to lose.

The New Challengers Don't Want a Banking Licence

The second wave starts from a different premise: what if the account itself lives onchain, and the "bank" is software around it?

Altitude, built by Squads on Solana, is the business-facing version. It gives companies a stablecoin-native dollar account, corporate cards, global payments and yield, with treasuries held in stablecoins in a self-custodial account rather than in a fractional-reserve bank. Since launching publicly in December 2025 it has processed more than US$200 million in payments, and in April 2026 Squads raised US$18 million led by Solana Ventures to scale it.

KAST is the consumer version: a stablecoin "neobank" with cards accepted at 150 million merchants, users in 170-plus countries, and both SWIFT and Fedwire settlement bolted on. It raised US$80 million in March 2026 at a US$600 million valuation, having crossed a million users and roughly US$5 billion in annualised transaction volume.

Neither holds an Australian banking licence, and that is the point. The first neobank wave spent years and hundreds of millions acquiring the right to take deposits. The stablecoin wave skips deposit-taking entirely: the dollars are tokens issued by someone else, the yield comes from onchain markets, and the startup's job narrows to distribution, compliance and product. Whether that model is better is genuinely debatable. That it is cheaper to attempt is not.

The Hybrids: Superapps and Incumbents

Between pure stablecoin accounts and traditional banks sits a widening hybrid zone. Jupiter, Solana's dominant exchange aggregator, has spent two years assembling what increasingly resembles a financial superapp: swaps, perpetuals, lending, its own stablecoin in JupUSD (launched January 2026), and a mobile app with a spending card, cashback and direct bank on- and off-ramps. Users never think of it as a bank, yet it quietly covers most of what a transaction account does.

The incumbents are hybridising from the other direction. ANZ minted A$DC, its tokenised deposit, years ago; the majors participated in the RBA's Project Acacia experiments settling tokenised assets with tokenised bank deposits and stablecoins, which we covered in our AUD stablecoins piece. The likely end-state is not banks versus crypto but a spectrum, with customers caring less about the category and more about whether the money moves.

The Caveats That Matter

Honesty requires a paragraph the pitch decks skip. None of these products is a bank in the Australian legal sense: there is no authorised deposit-taking institution behind your balance and no Financial Claims Scheme guaranteeing the first A$250,000. A stablecoin account is exposure to the issuer's reserves and the platform's custody model, and most of the current products are USD-denominated, which means Australians carry currency risk on their groceries. Local-currency rails, the AUDD and AUDM story, are what eventually close that gap.

Tokenised Shares: Owning the Bank You Bank With

Here is the genuinely novel possibility, and it is more Australian than it sounds. The country's banking history began with mutuals and building societies, institutions owned by their customers. Tokenisation offers a modern version of the same idea: a neobank whose equity is issued as onchain tokens, ownable by the Australians who use it.

Under Australian law this is not a loophole, and that is its strength. Legal analysis of the new framework is blunt: a token that carries equity-style rights is simply a share, with everything that follows: disclosure documents, a proper register, licensed intermediaries. The Corporations Amendment (Digital Assets Framework) Act 2026 brings digital asset platforms and tokenised custody into the AFSL regime from April 2027, and ASIC has published its implementation roadmap. A compliant path already sketches itself: raise from retail investors under the crowd-sourced funding regime or a full disclosure document, issue the shares as tokens on a licensed platform, and let the cap table live onchain where shareholders can actually see it. Projects like Legion are already rebuilding compliant token sales with exactly this rigour.

Why bother? Because ownership is the retention mechanism the first neobank wave never had. Xinja died acquiring customers it then had to pay to keep. A neobank whose users hold its equity turns every customer into a distribution channel, aligns the deposit base with the shareholder base, and revives the mutual model with better plumbing. The customers-as-owners flywheel is the one advantage incumbents cannot copy without dismantling themselves.

The Opening

Nobody has built the full stack yet: an Australian-licensed, stablecoin-native account with AUD rails, superapp features, and tokenised equity in the hands of its users. The pieces exist separately today, on Solana, in the AUD stablecoin issuers, and in a regulatory framework that commences within a year. The first wave of neobanks proved Australians will switch for a better product. The second wave gets to prove they will stay for a product they own.

Explore more ecosystem stories in our articles, or get involved with Superteam to meet the builders who might ship it.

Written by the Solana ANZ team. Nothing here is financial advice. Do your own research.