Beyond Banking Summit 2025: WeFi’s Bid to Redefine Digital Banking

WeFi staged its first Beyond Banking Summit in Bangkok on June 14, bringing more than 2,000 people to the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center. The event mixed panel discussions on digital finance with live product demos, while also leaning heavily on spectacle. Former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson appeared on stage, and the day ended with a custom Ferrari raffle that went to one attendee.

Notably, several important developments marked the event. 

Introducing the Deobank Model

The summit was designed to showcase a new category of financial institution that WeFi calls a “deobank.” The idea is to take the security and transparency of blockchain and make it feel as straightforward as modern digital banking. 

Co-founder Reeve Collins described it as the missing bridge between two worlds. Traditional banks are familiar but slow and expensive, and blockchain systems are fast and empowering but intimidating for the average user.

Chief executive Maksym Sakharov set out the company’s three core innovations. The first is that WeFi is built natively on blockchain, which allows services to be offered at a fraction of the cost of banks and opens the door to the 1.4 billion people globally who remain unbanked. There’s also access to yields of up to 18% on stablecoin deposits through DeFi protocols. Most importantly, a community model where users are treated as stakeholders and rewarded for participation.

To underline those claims, the company shared results from a pre-event poll conducted by an external agency. Respondents listed high fees, slow transfers, and a lack of savings growth as their biggest frustrations with existing financial services. The same survey found that users want security, simplicity, and growth as their top priorities. Collins argued that WeFi’s model addresses each of those concerns directly.

A Record-setting Milestone

The Bangkok gathering was not just about product pitches. WeFi also presented a Guinness World Record certified earlier this year. During a livestreamed launch in Dubai two weeks before the summit, the company recorded 121,348 concurrent viewers on YouTube, the highest figure ever for a blockchain-related event. 

In a sector often criticised for inflated claims, the record gave WeFi a metric that regulators and investors can verify.

The company is also working to back up its model with regulatory credentials. It holds a money services business licence in Canada and is registered as a virtual asset service provider in the Czech Republic. 

Sakharov said WeFi is pursuing approvals in the UAE, the European Union, the United States, and Singapore. Users will be routed through different legal entities depending on where they are based, a modular approach that is becoming more common in crypto finance but still untested on a global scale.

Recognition has also come from outside the crypto space. At the FinanceFeeds Awards recently, WeFi was named Best Digital Bank of 2025. The award cited its app that integrates fiat and crypto accounts, support for over 7,000 digital assets, and a set of Visa cards that allow users to spend directly without converting to cash first.

The Bigger Picture

The summit revealed both the promise and the risks of WeFi’s model. The company is positioning itself at the intersection of digital banking and decentralized finance, with an emphasis on compliance and inclusion. 

WeFi’s Bangkok debut showed how crypto firms are trying to reach beyond their own industry. The mix of celebrity appearances, record-setting livestream numbers, and banking-style messaging made the summit one of the most visible attempts yet to frame blockchain finance as ready for the mainstream. Whether the model can deliver at scale remains an open question.