Vayu CEO Erez Agmon says broken crypto billing is the biggest hidden source of revenue leakage at scaling infrastructure firms.
Summary
- Erez Agmon says unbilled and underbilled usage is the most underestimated revenue leak at crypto infrastructure firms.
- He points to Utila moving billing from engineering to finance as the model rivals should follow.
- Tightening rules like MiCA are raising the bar on auditability and usage-to-invoice traceability.
Vayu chief executive Erez Agmon argues that the contract-to-cash layer, not the product, is what breaks first as crypto firms chase institutional clients. He says homegrown billing setups collapse once pricing turns complex.
The pressure is rising as European rules tighten. Under MiCA, crypto-asset service providers must hold full authorisation to operate in the EU by July 2026, with regulators demanding chronological records and audit trails, ESMA has confirmed. Agmon frames billing accuracy as part of that same operational standard.
Why crypto billing breaks at scale
Early crypto firms lean on engineering for billing, Agmon says: developers build usage hooks, finance exports the data, and someone turns it into invoices by hand. That works while pricing stays simple.
It stops working once terms diversify. Transaction charges, custody tiers, API usage, and wallet operations multiply, and the manual process becomes untenable. Agmon says the fix is moving billing from an engineering task to a finance-owned workflow.
He points to wallet platform Utila, which reported more than $51 million in total funding and over 100 institutional clients. The firm sits inside a wider stablecoin infrastructure buildout and processes over $15 billion in monthly transactions, a volume that exposes any gap between what was sold and what gets invoiced.
Utila previously depended heavily on engineering to launch products and adjust pricing, which created bottlenecks. Inbal Rosen, Utila’s head of business operations, said the partnership changed that. “By providing us with deep insights and real-time data on our revenue streams, Vayu enhances our strategic decision-making capabilities.”
The biggest hidden leak
Asked for the most underestimated leak, Agmon names unbilled or underbilled usage. Crypto infrastructure firms price around events, he says: transactions, API calls, verification events, and volume thresholds.
When those events are not wired to billing rules automatically, revenue gets missed or delayed. The problem is sharpest with overages, where a customer may already hold an invoice that does not match actual usage, leading to disputes or write-offs.
Agmon ties the gap to a broader compliance shift, where auditability now hits cash flow directly. Traceability is the gap most firms still leave open, connecting the signed contract, the pricing terms, the actual usage, and the invoice.
The emerging fix, he says, is a hybrid model: a committed base fee plus metered usage, a tiered rate card, and finance owning the billing logic directly. That discipline matters more as the MiCA deadline forces firms to prove what they sold, used, billed, and recognised.
Vayu, founded in 2023 and backed by $7 million in seed funding, counts clients including Au10tix and Mesh Payments alongside Utila. Agmon says the layer between what was sold and what gets invoiced is where crypto firms must modernise next, especially as licensing and institutional diligence intensify.
