- Role
- Sole author: research, strategy, sizing and concept screens
- Company
- Independent
- Period
- Independent strategy · 2026
- Stack
- Product strategy, Market sizing, Remittances, Stablecoin rails
Situation
The question
GoTyme Bank is winning the race it set out to win: more than 10 million customers, about 300,000 new ones a month. But each customer keeps less money with GoTyme than Maya's customers keep with Maya. The bank wins the sign-up and loses the balance. So the real question is not how to sell more crypto. It is what moves balances per customer.
Independent work. I wrote this strategy alone, from public sources only: the research, the sizing model, the strategy and the concept screens. It is not a GoTyme deliverable, and I am not affiliated with GoTyme.
Deposits per customer (₱)
Public data- Maya6,335
- Sector5,858
- GoTyme4,778
Tension
Why trading can't fix it
The obvious move is to grow Go Crypto's trading. The model says no: the bank is about ₱4.0B a year short of breakeven, and trading cannot get close. Try it.
The opportunity
Where the money already is
Filipinos abroad sent home ₱2.07 trillion in 2025, 48 times GoTyme's whole deposit book. The US is the biggest by far. I picked the Gulf instead: about 12% of the flow, sent in small regular amounts, where a flat fee costs the sender the most and a cheaper rail matters most.
Where remittances to the Philippines come from (% of total)
Public dataHover a segment, or tap a name below, to read it.
The cost and the delay are what Ana complains about. The business problem is the line after: she takes it out as cash within 72 hours, because the kiosk is the step she trusts. Her average balance is about ₱0, every month. Nobody was working on that line, and it is the one GoTyme is short of.
Crypto as the rail
The decision
My call: stop treating crypto as something people trade, and use it as the rail that brings home and keeps them in the bank. Ana sees pesos in minutes. She never sees a . That only works if the vocabulary is disciplined, so I wrote it as a rule.
The decision
Grow trading, or build a remittance rail?
Use crypto to bring remittances home and keep them in the bank. Trading stays as a supporting product.
Cost I accepted: Trading stops being the headline and becomes a supporting product.
Source: Thao Dao, GoCrypto V2 Product Strategy (July 2026, built from public sources), p.11 and p.44 (trading gap), p.50 (corrected figures).
The plan
Build order and outcome
Build order
- CustodyThe long pole; everything else depends on it
- ReceiveMoney in before money out
- Send, cappedLimits until the rail is proven
- One corridorOne Gulf corridor, volume capped until reconciliation is known
From the first corridor to scale
Strategy model- Corridor volume landed₱10.1B
- Receiving households45,800
- New customers acquired13,700
- Deposits₱321M
- Contribution₱85M
Crypto is a supporting product in a bigger machine.
Results
- GoTyme trails Maya in deposits per customerPublic data
- ~25%
- contribution in Phase 0, mid-2027 (modelled)Strategy model, not a result
- ₱85M
- contribution at scale, 2029 (modelled)Strategy model, not a result
- ₱1.5B
Source: Thao Dao, GoCrypto V2 Product Strategy (July 2026, built from public sources), p.6 (deposits per customer) and p.45–48 (corrected figures, per p.50). Independent strategy built from public sources.
