Headline: Broken billing, not product, is crypto firms’ biggest revenue leak — Vayu CEO
As crypto infrastructure firms race to serve institutional clients and prepare for tougher European rules, Vayu CEO Erez Agmon warns that the weakest link isn’t product engineering but the contract-to-cash layer: billing. In Agmon’s view, homegrown billing systems are the single largest, often-hidden source of revenue leakage — and the problem only grows as pricing gets complex.
Why billing breaks
Early-stage crypto companies typically lean on engineers to stitch together usage collection and invoicing: dev teams add usage hooks, finance exports raw data, and invoices are often compiled manually. That ad hoc approach works while pricing is simple, Agmon says. But once pricing multiplies — with transaction fees, custody tiers, API metering, wallet operations and volume-based rates — manual processes collapse and revenue gets missed.
The regulatory pressure is increasing the stakes. Under MiCA, ESMA has confirmed that crypto-asset service providers operating in the EU must secure full authorisation by July 2026, and regulators expect chronological records and audit trails. Agmon frames billing accuracy and traceability — linking signed contracts, pricing terms, actual usage and invoices — as an operational requirement not just a finance nicety.
Real-world consequences
Agmon highlights unbilled or underbilled usage as the most underestimated leak. Crypto infrastructure is often priced around discrete events — transactions, API calls, verification events or volume thresholds — and if those events aren’t automatically wired into billing rules, firms lose revenue or create friction through disputes and write-offs, especially on overages when customers’ invoices don’t match actual usage.
He points to wallet platform Utila as an example. Utila — which has raised more than $51 million to date and serves over 100 institutional clients — sits inside a broader stablecoin infrastructure effort and processes north of $15 billion in monthly transactions. That scale exposes any mismatch between what’s sold and what’s invoiced. Utila previously relied on engineering to launch products and tweak pricing, creating bottlenecks; Inbal Rosen, Utila’s head of business operations, says Vayu’s partnership provided “deep insights and real-time data on our revenue streams” and improved strategic decision-making.
What the fix looks like
Agmon argues the solution is twofold: move billing ownership from engineering to finance, and adopt disciplined pricing models — a hybrid of committed base fees plus metered usage, backed by tiered rate cards and automated wiring of events to billing rules. That approach not only recovers lost revenue but also creates the auditability regulators will demand as MiCA’s deadline approaches.
Vayu, founded in 2023 and backed by $7 million in seed funding, counts clients including Utila, Au10tix and Mesh Payments. Agmon’s message to crypto infrastructure firms is blunt: modernise the layer between what was sold and what gets invoiced now, because licensing, institutional diligence and regulatory scrutiny will make billing mistakes far more costly.
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