The financial services industry has always followed a pattern of digitization. Paper ledgers gave way to spreadsheets; transactions migrated online; cloud platforms replaced filing cabinets; paper trails became digital histories. Each wave of progress streamlined how we store and move information. But while the internet made this info easy to share, it never quite solved the problem of trust. Concepts like ownership and credit depend on verification—something the internet wasn’t necessarily built to handle.
Blockchain was developed as a response to that gap. It introduced secure, programmable systems for transferring value over the internet. Today, public blockchains record more than half a million transactions per day, creating a transparent, tamper-proof trail of how digital assets move across the globe. For fintech companies, that transparency might become the next big thing for big data.
Alex Chen is a high-impact data scientist whose career has spanned roles at both enterprise and high-growth fintech environments. He has contributed to some of the most ambitious blockchain initiatives at a leading digital currency infrastructure firm, including cross-chain asset protocols and multi-chain stablecoin deployments. He’s presented at leading Web3 forums including ETHDenver’s DeAI Summit and the State of Crypto & Web3 series, and his writing has appeared in data science and fintech publications. He brings both technical fluency and strategic awareness to a challenge many in fintech are just beginning to understand: how to read and act on blockchain data.
Why Fintech Should Care About Blockchain Data
For many outside the developer community, blockchain might still evoke cryptocurrency speculation. But Chen argues that this misses the bigger picture. “Every wallet interaction is public, and every smart contract event is public. This means every asset movement is visible, and that’s unprecedented.”
In other words, blockchains offer something fintech companies have always wanted but never had: a global behavioral dataset. Instead of relying on limited app logs, closed API integrations, or delayed partner reporting, fintech teams can now observe, directly, how users interact with digital assets. This can show them how liquidity flows across platforms, and even where attention is shifting in the broader Web3 ecosystem.
This visibility is especially useful for fintech companies building crypto payment features, integrating stablecoins, or expanding into DeFi. On-chain data provides immediate, empirical feedback about how users interact with digital money—whether or not they ever touch your product directly.
The Challenge of Making On-Chain Data Usable
There’s a catch. Blockchain data is transparent, but it’s also cryptic. Transaction payloads are encoded in hexadecimal, and those events may reference opaque smart contracts with no clear documentation. Wallet addresses may belong to individuals, bots, DAOs, or arbitrageurs. What looks like activity could be spam or an exploit.
Chen and his team build analytics systems capable of solving these problems. Their goal is to go one step beyond standard metrics like active users or retention curves—concepts that don’t translate cleanly to decentralized systems. A wallet isn’t necessarily a user, and a spike in activity might reflect growth, or manipulation, or something in between.
To solve this, Chen developed a new key metric to categorize smart contracts not just by whether they transacted with the firm’s product, but by whether the asset was used as a core building block in the contract’s logic. It enabled the team to see where real traction was forming, across multiple chains, as the market changed, and offer the same advantages to their customers.
Rethinking Product Analytics for Web3
Most fintech companies already rely on behavioral data to drive product decisions. Web2 tools like funnel analysis and retention curves help teams understand how users move through apps and respond to features. But these tools assume closed systems and walled gardens of data.
That assumption breaks down in Web3. As Chen explains, “A user might never log into your app but still rely on your infrastructure regularly. They might hold your tokens and spend it entirely in someone else’s protocol.” Metrics like logins or session length miss this activity completely.
Chen points to metrics such as wallet-to-wallet transfers, bridge usage across chains, and stablecoin inflows. These behaviors can signal trust, usage, or even the early stages of product-market fit. For instance, if a dollar-backed stablecoin’s volume spiked on decentralized exchanges in Southeast Asia, that could signal an opportunity for regional service expansion—even if no one from that region has signed into your app.
In one internal case, Chen’s team identified that a key friction point for users occurred when bridging tokens between chains. While not a product issue per se, the behavioral signal, users abandoning transfers, revealed a design flaw in the broader ecosystem. This data informed the development of a new protocol that allowed digital assets to move natively between chains, reducing reliance on third-party bridges, and ultimately delivering a permissionless, capital-efficient solution to a long-standing problem.
Proprietary to Public: Looking Ahead
Perhaps the most important shift blockchain introduces is a cultural one. In traditional fintech, internal data is treated as a competitive advantage, guarded and tightly controlled. In Web3, that wall disappears almost entirely. Your product’s activity is public, and your competitors can analyze it as easily as you can.
Crucially, blockchain analytics is proving to be an important bridge between technical systems and an organization’s ability to make market-responsive business decisions. To stay competitive in crypto-integrated spaces, fintech teams must now understand what’s happening across the ecosystem, instead of just what’s ‘inside the app’. Chen puts it plainly: as more financial systems move on-chain, your ability to read and respond to public blockchain data will define your edge. And in a system built on transparency, there’s little room for weak links.
Source: The Strongest Link: Why On-Chain Data is FinTech’s Clearest Signal
