Stablecoins 2035 (Special Report)

Perhaps, stablecoins are crypto's most fundamental story. A $300B worth market that finally decoupled from boom and bust cycles, an infamous inheritance of the early crypto days.

Will they rewire existing banking rails? Or, instead, will digital money firms overthrow banks in deposits and lending? If so, can the story of The Bank of Amsterdam in the 18th century be of any help?

Is this simply the dollarization of the emerging markets? Or, in fact, has crypto brought the tech to rebuild decades-old infrastructure that holds up to $400T worth of bonds, equities, commodities, real estate, private credit, and other assets

First, we looked at our proprietary data to see how things are today. Second, we weighed where it leads in the long run. Third, we reached out to the industry: Flow Traders, Chainberg, Fiat Republic, GSR, Keyrock, Dune, Fipto, Mercuryo, StraitsX, Herc

Their answers map out what 2035 could look like.

Key data in H1 2026

• Stablecoins' share reached ATH in H1 '26, holding 81% of the total OTC trades
• EUR accelerates, yet poses no threat to USD dominance. USD-denominated tokens account for 99.87% of total OTC stablecoin volumes. EUR-pegged stables grew at 32x YoY
• OTC absorbs institutional flows, remaining the only growing segment in H1 '26 – up by 76% YoY, while CEX fell by 38% and DEX by 13%
• Stablecoin volumes nearly double YoY in the first 6 months of 2026 – +94% in total OTC volume

Frequently asked questions

What can be done to make non-USD stablecoins more competitive?

USD stablecoins benefit from exactly these structural conditions: they sit on top of deep capital markets, strong reserve economics, and established institutional workflows.

The path forward, therefore, is not to replicate USD dominance overnight, but to focus on becoming indispensable in specific use cases such as regulated settlement, tokenized securities, treasury workflows, and institutional collateral, where non-USD stablecoins solve real problems.

What are the most likely scenarios for stablecoins in 2035 across different countries?

By 2035, countries will likely settle into one of five main approaches:

• Export: The US will strongly promote its tokens, since every dollar spent abroad gives it greater influence.
• Defend: Europe will protect the euro, as evidenced by the current MiCA limit on non-euro EMT activity. Brazil looks to be heading the same way.
• Substitute: China and India will reject private tokens and create their own CBDCs, citing the rise of dollar stablecoins as a reason.
• Channel: The UK, UAE, and Singapore will offer neutrality, serving as exchange hubs between regions.
• Assimilate: Countries like Australia won’t create new systems. Instead, they’ll include stablecoins in their current FX rules, treating USDC like regular USD.

Will stablecoins' success and already-built infrastructure drive growth in the tokenized asset market?

According to rwa.xyz, total tokenized stock supply now sits around $1.5 billion, up around 400% from $300 million around June of last year. This pattern extends to commodities, private credit, corporate credit, and beyond as more and more assets come onchain. The onchain infrastructure to custody, trade, and manage assets has largely been built.

For this vision to work, however, one more piece of infrastructure is essential, and that is liquidity. That requires deep, continuous, two-sided markets, not just in stablecoins and major assets but across the growing long tail of tokenized treasuries, equities, funds, and whatever comes onchain next. However, liquidity of that breadth does not appear on its own. It is furnished by professional liquidity providers and market makers willing to quote prices around the clock, warehouse risk across venues, and connect onchain markets with the traditional markets where the underlying assets trade.

Will 'stablecoin' still be a term in 2035?

By 2035, the word stablecoin will likely disappear from the mainstream enterprise lexicon because the infrastructure will have become embedded in mainstream financial applications. The ultimate victory for this sector will be when global money movement runs seamlessly on blockchain rails without the end-user ever needing to know it. The winners of this multi-trillion-dollar transition will be the infrastructure platforms focused on engineering the compliance-first, frictionless connective bridge.

What happens when AI agents and stablecoins converge?

Regulated stablecoins and Purpose Bound Money can become foundational to this model. Instead of giving an AI agent open-ended spending power, users could allocate funds into permissioned wallets with embedded rules. Routine low-value transactions could execute automatically, while higher-risk payments could trigger additional checks, human approval, or compliance review.

By 2035, the most important stablecoin infrastructure may be invisible, sitting behind AI agents, merchant systems, and payment interfaces. The future of commerce will not simply be humans paying faster. It will be machines transacting safely on our behalf.

What might the infrastructure behind stablecoin rails look like in 2035?

The real infrastructure will be the one offering the full suite of products: mastering payment rails in every currency in the world while optimizing liquidity and real-time pricing across fragmented markets. It abstracts away the complexity of moving from fiat to stablecoin, stablecoin to stablecoin, and chain to chain, all while preserving institutional-grade reliability, compliance, and execution quality. A single flow can touch fiat on-ramps, several blockchains, and multiple stablecoins, each carrying its own friction. The platform that wins absorbs every layer of that and presents one clean surface.