Daniel Lev Is Building the Payment Company His First Startup Needed

Daniel Lev found his next company inside a failed conversion. He was building a fantasy-sports protocol on Solana, attracting free users and trying to turn some of them into paying ones. Then checkout arrived, dressed as a product feature and behaving like a locked door. Users needed stablecoins to buy things. The available on-ramps converted poorly. A person wanted to pay, and the machinery between intention and money could not complete the introduction.

Lev had already built financial products and worked with banks at PwC and Amount. He had also been writing software since college. So his response to the missing infrastructure was characteristically literal: build it. His team connected a traditional payment method to a smart contract and designed the merchant side to receive funds as soon as a card was authorized. Then other companies started asking the delicious question every founder hopes to hear: who is providing that technology under the hood?

Nobody was. The internal tool had begun attracting more interest than the thing it was built to support. By late 2022, Lev, Benjamin Meeder and Jake Montgomery spun the payment layer into Coinflow. The timing had all the cheer of a November beach party. Crypto sentiment had cratered after FTX, banks were wary, and the category's extravagant promises had acquired a regrettable echo. Yet the practical problem remained. Friday's sale could still become Tuesday's money.

01 / The hidden waitThe ice-cream-cone test

To explain payment settlement, Lev reaches for ice cream. Imagine he owns the shop. A customer swipes a card for a cone and receives an approval within seconds. From the buyer's perspective, the payment worked. Rewards will arrive. If vanilla somehow becomes chocolate, the buyer can complain to the bank. The consumer experience is polished enough to make the rest of the system look instant.

The shopkeeper lives in a different clock. Behind the approval, an issuer, card network, acquiring bank and payment service provider still have to communicate and move money. The seller can wait three or more days for funds. Add a border, a correspondent bank or a holiday in one country, and the chain develops the leisurely manners of international diplomacy.

Coinflow's proposition is to alter the hidden middle without demanding new theater from the customer. The shopper can still use a card, bank transfer or digital wallet. Underneath, stablecoins act as settlement infrastructure. Coinflow wraps that movement with pay-ins, payouts, foreign exchange, fraud prevention and chargeback protection. Lev is not asking the shopper to admire the rail. Plumbing loses some of its charm when the household is expected to study it.

He is equally blunt about what technology cannot do alone. In payments, he has said, winning requires compliance, risk, legal operations, customer support and a coherent front of house. Elegant code may move a token; it does not by itself persuade banks, manage disputes or answer a merchant during a live failure. The product is the whole promise, including the people who pick up when the promise wobbles.

02 / The correctionThe expensive pleasure of saying yes

Coinflow's first strategic error was generous in spirit and ruinous in arithmetic. The company tried to serve everyone: engineers, indie developers, enterprises, anyone who needed payments help. An early founder is hungry for affirmation, and every prospective customer arrives carrying a small, intoxicating yes. The team educated buyers, wrote custom documentation and performed technical deep dives. Then it discovered it had built a nearly bulletproof system for people processing only a few thousand dollars each month.

Lev later called it a classic founder mistake. The work consumed time, damaged margins and tired the team. Coinflow narrowed its customer: businesses with real revenue or venture backing, strong growth, meaningful payment volume and enough awareness of their own pain to value optimization. The lesson has an almost Wildean cruelty. In the beginning, founders long to be wanted by everyone. A business begins to mature when it can survive the heartbreak of becoming particular.

The useful theft: customer enthusiasm is not customer fit. Count the education, integration and support hours before celebrating a small contract. Revenue without proportional pain is a better valentine.

That focus also clarified the merchant profile. Marketplaces collect money from one side and pay another. Gaming companies deal with unusual risk patterns. Remittance providers cross borders as their daily business. Fintechs and e-commerce companies care about approvals, fraud and working capital. These are not customers who need stablecoin poetry. They need money to arrive, books to reconcile and risk to remain within the fence.

03 / The cityChicago as operating strategy

Lev speaks about Chicago with the conviction of a founder who has converted hometown preference into a recruiting thesis. The city, he argues, combines unusually high talent density with relatively low startup density. His word for the advantage is “alpha.” People know financial markets and payment systems; fewer young companies are competing for every person who knows how the pipes fit together.

The location suits the work. Chicago invented and institutionalized ways to trade risk, from futures to options and exchanges. Coinflow's office on North Sangamon Street is tackling a newer species of financial plumbing, but the temperament is familiar: infrastructure, counterparties, risk and the stubborn distance between a price on a screen and money in an account.

After Coinflow announced its $25 million Series A in October 2025, led by Pantera Capital with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Reciprocal Ventures and Jump Crypto, Lev framed the round as local proof. He hoped founders would see they could raise substantial capital in Chicago without decamping to San Francisco or New York. By summer 2026, his posts were still variations on that belief: hiring locally, speaking at Chicago fintech events and helping convene the city's first Stablecoin Day.

The Series A did more than decorate the cap table. Coinflow said it would use the money to expand payout coverage, improve approval rates, increase liquidity and grow its team in the United States and Europe. At the time, the company reported payment coverage in more than 170 countries and 23-fold revenue growth since its 2024 seed. Numbers can become confetti around a funding announcement. Here, they measure the distance from a fantasy-sports checkout that did not work.

04 / The long threadEngineer, operator, translator

Lev's path contains an early clue about how he works. At Iowa State, where he studied software engineering, his senior capstone team built CowChips4Charity, a platform for a nonprofit fundraiser with an unforgettable random-number generator: a cow wandering through a gridded pasture. Participants chose squares, the cow chose in its own fashion, and the software managed the event and its data. The team received a departmental software project award in 2019.

It is difficult to imagine a more useful apprenticeship for startup life. The user is unpredictable, the outcome is public, and the backend must preserve dignity while reality roams wherever it pleases. Lev also served as Head of Product for the Boo Radley Foundation, recruiting technical contributors and developing a roadmap for the platform. The work joined code to an operating system of volunteers, fundraising and actual humans.

At PwC and later Amount, he worked on financial infrastructure with banks. At Phantasia Sports, he became the customer of broken payment infrastructure. Coinflow combines those identities: engineer, product operator and frustrated merchant. His public explanations tend to translate complex systems into ordinary irritation. A payment outage costs a business money by the hour. A reserve account traps capital. A Friday settlement arrives after the weekend. The abstraction always lands on somebody's cash flow.

His ambitions have widened with the product. Coinflow now describes itself as a next-generation payment service provider, not merely a crypto on-ramp. Lev has written about cross-border regulation, remittances, independent software vendors and AI-driven fraud prevention. In June 2026, he announced a partnership with Tempo to power card-to-stablecoin credits for machine payments. The original question remains inside each extension: how can a willing payer and a legitimate recipient complete the exchange with less waiting and fewer patches?

05 / What remainsThe rail should disappear

Stablecoins occupy an odd cultural position. Their advocates can describe them as a revolution; many customers would prefer a refund button that works. Lev's practical instinct is to let the infrastructure recede. He uses stablecoins throughout Coinflow's business, but he has acknowledged that ordinary consumers often prefer cards for daily purchases because cards provide rewards and familiar protections. The shopper need not change habits merely to improve the merchant's settlement.

This is the quiet strength of Coinflow's thesis. Adoption may arrive without a ritual of conversion. A person pays with PayPal, Venmo, a card or a local network. The merchant receives funds quickly. Stablecoins do their work in the middle, where the customer is spared the vocabulary and the operator gains the speed. Infrastructure earns trust when its absence would be more noticeable than its presence.

There are still hard problems in the room: licensing across jurisdictions, fraud that changes whenever defenses improve, bank relationships and the unromantic labor of customer support. Lev does not describe them as scenery. They are the company. His warning to technologists is useful precisely because it limits the romance of invention. A brilliant rail without compliance and service is a bridge that ends over water.

The arc from Phantasia to Coinflow is therefore less a pivot than an act of attention. A founder noticed the part of his first business that hurt, built relief for himself and recognized desire when outsiders asked for the same remedy. Then he learned to refuse customers who would consume the company rather than sustain it. Then he raised money to expand the narrower promise.

Some founder stories begin with a vision of the future. Lev's begins at checkout, with a user who cannot pay. That may be the more durable kind. Large infrastructure often announces itself first as one small, maddening delay. Someone merely has to remain annoyed long enough to build the missing piece.