2026 - Goal is to see an app with
- Aesthetically appealing UX
- Compliant yet Private
- Multi-chain support with seamless UX
- Self-custodial yet recoverable
- Secure and safe
- Fast in execution
- Cheaper in transactions
- Used across world (with exceptions like N.Korea, syria)
- Used by retail as well as businesses
Who's building this 👀
Stablecoin only chains with native issuance, GENIUS compliance and an ecosystem of lending apps, dexes have high chances of killing it.
- Native issuance- Keep the yield.
- GENIUS compliant- Offramps,
- Payment apps - FX exchange, cards.
- Native Staking - Yield maximisation using integrations(with @pendle_fi , @SuperstateInc $USCC etc).
- Native Lending infra - On-chain bank. Keep NIM and increase native stable currency utilisation.
- Dexes - Fees generation(perps) and stableswap currency exchange. (Usd to Eur /Sgd etc.,).
*Other features wishlist:*
- On/off-ramps
- Onboarding using social auth for non-native crypto users.
- Privacy transactions
- Refund mechanisms using escrow in case of enterprise payments.
- Self custody & decentralisation
*Well positioned chains* :
@HyperliquidX@stable & @fraxfinance (merger is highly likely)
@arc & @circle@tempo & @Stablecoin & @stripe@Plasma (will be farmed hard, I’ve less hopes for some reason).
@m0 for upcoming Neobanks.
Who’s building this 😑
This will be a huge narrative for 2026 and beyond.
@AFDudley0@koeppelmann It can happen if NASDAQ(or something similar onchain) enables tokenisation of float and let it be traded onchain. Otherwise only derivatives or synthetics will remain.
Few things I noticed:
@MoneyGram dropped MGUSD on @StellarOrg the other day, with their native stable baked right into the app. Moneygram has 60M+ customers with ~500k cash locations as per public sources. @Stablecoin + @m0 issuance infra.
@WesternUnion shipped USDPT on Solana a month ago . 150M customers, with ~500k cash locations as per their public source,they're not doing retail first. they're ripping out SWIFT for agent settlement. Issuance partner @Anchorage@deel just launched DLUSD with @Stablecoin as issuance partner - their native wallet for contractors to receive payroll. They have presence in 150+ countries(reportedly). Payroll going on-chain, out in the open. Even @GustoHQ adopted stablecoin payroll (via Zerohash) a few months ago.
If this isn't enough check @tempo partner's list: DoorDash, UBS, Klarna, Kalshi, Howard Hughes and more.Looks like nobody is sitting on the sidelines anymore and things are accelerating.
Pre-2025, stablecoins were basically a trading + DeFi native. Transfer funds into wallet, farm some yield, maybe move money across borders with limited on/offramp options. Now? payroll. remittance. treasury, card spend powered by real-world money plumbing. and the boring old use cases are the bullish ones.
looking back, 2026 will be remembered as the year stablecoins stopped being a crypto thing and become a part of real world commerce. Most banks haven't locked-in yet.
Exactly why recognition of stablecoin as a currency and stablecoin<>inrCBDC is need of the hour.
Imagine, there's just no incentive left for an export / import business(product / service) to convert into INR after massive proliferation of stablecoins with lowcost on/off-ramps at us/europe. Same with NRI inward remittances. You can trade on the arbitrage of inr<>USD if the seamless exchange isn't available. It can further have a drill down effect on CAD.
https://t.co/6wb1ruszBe
Notice the satisfaction on the faces of Padma awardees as PM Modi honours them...
Have 100 disagreements with Modi if you want, but he ensured Padma is no longer reserved for elites, babus & bootlicker journalists🔥
Neobanking Weekly Recap (18-24th May)
Stablecoin cards saw an impressive $166.6M in volume this past week, just shy of the all-time high set a week prior.
Top gainers:
🥇 @AviciMoney $1.421M (+40.5%)
🥈 @Hyperbeat $91.33K (+32.8%)
🥉 @Plasma One $889.7K (+23.8%)
You will appreciate what life has to offer much better if you ever made a 36+ hr journey in 2nd class sleeper across India in peak summers.
If by any chance you fall asleep, the seat sticks to your skin. You are forever short of water, the window is like a 21 inch hair dryer. You wish to splash your face with water for some respite, the water in the sink is boiling. The only respite is the guys moving around with buckets with icy water, with an assortment of cold drink bottle submerged in it, sold at the rate of an arm & a leg. You settle for a chilled Frooti. It tastes so godly that you write about it on Twitter 20 years later :)
A major unforced error in crypto is treating technical dashboards as financial dashboards. Nowhere is this as obvious as with TVL of lending protocols. TVL is NOT a substitute for accounting!
Let’s look at TVL defined as “Value of all coins held in smart contracts of the protocol”, and how it would treat a bank with the following balance sheet:
Deposits (a liability): $100m
Loans (an asset): $80m
Reserves (an asset): $20m
Equity: $10m
The TVL of this simplified balance sheet would show up as:
$100m deposits - $80m loans + $10m equity = $30m TVL
Does that feel accurate to you? It should not, because it structurally undercounts economic activity.
In fact, TVL - a technical metric - is treating the bank’s largest asset (its loan book) as a liability and largest liability (its deposits) as an asset!
The problem is one of using the wrong tool for the job. TVL counts how many tokens are in a smart contract or group of affiliated smart contracts. That’s it. In its most simple form, TVL is mostly just counting the reserve ratio of the bank (or lending protocol).
TVL is not a substitute for actual accounting, and people need to understand this.
A deposit on Aave/Morpho/SparkLend/Compound/Euler/Curvance is a liability to that protocol or pool. You could put $1 trillion in deposits onto one of those platforms and TVL would become $1 trillion. But that’s not an indication of economic activity!
Now imagine $999.999 billion of that got lent out. TVL has crashed from $1 trillion to $1 million. Looks bad on a chart, right? But now we’re seeing economic activity!
There is a reason why TVL is not used outside of crypto - it is a technical metric, not a financial one, and any overlap is coincidental and concentrated in very basic protocols like DEXes.