SoFi, the nation’s newly chartered bank, added 25 new cryptocurrencies to SoFi Invest in 2021. The company now touts “thirty available coins” on its website.

Despite calling crypto a growth product in the Q4 earnings call, there was no mention of it in the year-end investor presentation.

SoFi Invest competes with Robinhood. Touting that anyone can get started “with just $10,” the company advertises that the cool part about crypto is that it can be traded 24/7.

“Weekends, holidays, middle of the night-no time is off limits,” the company says.

The service is a profit center for SoFi, who charges a markup of up to 1.25% on crypto transactions. Users are not permitted to transfer their crypto to external wallet, however.

“We take security seriously at SoFi Invest and by having a closed system we can better secure your crypto assets,” the company’s website states. “In the future, we may consider adding the ability to transfer crypto into or out of your SoFi Invest account, but it isn’t a planned feature at this time.”

Wedge, a ‘smart’ debit card that lets users pay for everyday purchases with any asset, announced a strategic partnership with Sila Inc., a  fintech software platform that provides payment infrastructure as a service. The partnership between the two companies adds a new and improved layer of speed and safety for Wedge customers.

“The integration with Sila puts Wedge in a position to scale our offering and change the way people think about daily spending,” said Billy Roberts, CEO of Wedge. “Instead of moving money around on antiquated and expensive ACH rails with limited capacities to ledger funds between digital wallets and hold funds for our users, Sila allows us to move funds more safely, more quickly, and at a much better scale than competitors. And our users benefit with more robust and reliable digital wallets where they can securely hold cash.”

While Wedge’s executives spoke of their product changing the infrastructures of spending for an everyday consumer, those from Sila spoke more broadly, highlighting innovation’s impact on the larger financial landscape.

“Fintech is changing the way people spend, save and move money,” said Shamir Karkal, co-founder and CEO, Sila Inc. “Sila is supporting companies that work on what’s next in the payments space.  Partnering with Wedge, we created a vision for how smart spending solutions can really look at scale. We’re excited to bring our companies together to achieve this innovation.”

Wedge changes how consumers use their assets. Things like stocks, ETF, and cryptocurrencies are enabled for use in everyday purchases. Wedge claims to “put money to work in the markets without sacrificing liquidity.” According to them, this model allows their customers to capitalize on market movements any time they make a purchase.

The concept of actively spending investments is not new. Robinhood, one of the world’s largest digital trading platforms, has begun sending its users debit cards.

Regulators have been historically weary of companies that provide bank-like services but aren’t regulated as such. As digital assets become more accepted both domestically and abroad, it’s likely to see crypto-payment mergers moving forward.

As the world market responds to the conflict in Eastern Europe, digital assets are being used as a way for Russian citizens to preserve their savings. As the Russian Ruble is bombarded by international sanctions, everyday Russians have been turning to digital assets, at least partially through Binance, as a way to preserve their personal finances.

When asked about their operations inside Russia, a Binance spokesperson told CNBC that the crypto exchange will not halt operations there on a whim. “We are not going to unilaterally freeze millions of innocent users’ accounts,” said an unnamed Binance spokesperson.

With Binance allowing Russian transactions, the numbers speak for themselves. Coinbase is now showcasing Bitcoin prices peaking over $44,000 as of Tuesday morning.

“Crypto is meant to provide greater financial freedom for people across the globe,” the spokesperson continued. “To unilaterally decide to ban people’s access to their crypto would fly in the face of the reason why crypto exists.”

Other cryptocurrencies saw quick growth, as Ethereum and Dogecoin both jumped 10% and 6%, respectively. Tether, a widely used and heavily scrutinized stablecoin, has seen record highs of Rouble-based transactions, with $29.4 million worth of trades tripling pre-invasion numbers.

As confidence in their fiat currency dwindles, the integrity of decentralized assets may provide digitally-active Russians a way to preserve whatever savings they may have. The Moscow Exchange, Russia’s stock market, has remain closed as a run on the banks has begun across Russian cities. As an incentive for citizens to keep their money in the banks, interest rates in Russia have soared to over 20%.

Investors appear to be “trying to get out of the ruble” due to its “drastic devaluation after all the sanctions,” said Bendik Schei, Head of Research at Arcane, a Norwegian cryptocurrency research firm, when discussing the influx of Russian assets going digital with CNN. “This is where they find the most comfort at the moment.” Under the current market conditions, I’m not surprised to see investors, at least those in Russia, seeking stablecoins.”

“This is about saving their funds,” said Schei, “not investing.”

Coinbase generated $2.5B of net revenue and $840M of net income in Q4, the company reported. At year-end they had 11.4M “Monthly Transacting Users.”

Coinbase said that strong growth in the “utilization” of crypto played a role in their success. “Prominent use cases [of crypto] included non fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized finance (DeFi) adoption, decentralized applications, play to earn gaming, and metaverse related opportunities,” it stated in the annual report. NFT sales reportedly reached $20B in 2021 compared to just $100M in 2020.

“Going forward, we plan to add to our product suite by investing in products like Coinbase Wallet and Coinbase NFT, as well as international expansion, which we believe will generate more MTUs,” they added.