I looked at the interview and found that the last straw that broke Infini was the refunds being stuck:

In May, we wanted to slowly stop this business, and the core reason was that our card refunds were very slow.

Generally, a normal international card refund takes about one to two weeks, but ours have taken four weeks, a month, or even a month and a half. We have repeatedly urged the upstream channels, but they just cannot process the refunds. We are bombarded with customer complaints every day, and we feel very helpless because we are downstream in the industry. Besides urging the channels above, there is nothing we can do; we have the will but lack the power.

It's not difficult to start a U card company; anyone with money, time, and patience can do it. The threshold is not high. If you want to be compliant, you need to spend money; but if you don't comply, actually anyone can do it. Essentially, you just need a trust company and then find an upstream provider for card group APIs. Once you connect to the API, you can issue cards.

Almost all cards on the market are made this way, but nobody knows how many layers there are upstream. Some may be directly working with card groups, while others might have layers of middlemen, like an onion, and can even be infinitely stacked. For example, we can also create an API to open for you, and you can create another API to open for others.

After a few months of working on U cards, I increasingly feel that Infini is reversing history in the U card business. Personally, I hope to break the traditional payment barriers, but the U card turns stablecoins into USD, goes to the bank, and users swipe their bank cards, which essentially goes back to the old path of traditional financial payments. This is also the reason I am determined not to continue.

For example, the refund issue mentioned earlier is very internally consuming. U cards have not changed any logic in this industry; they are merely a traditional payment solution and not the ultimate solution. The ultimate solution in the future is to directly accept stablecoin payments.