2026 represents the year that stablecoins and tokenized assets move beyond test builds and pilot programs, and start to represent a core foundational element of institutional finance. If 2025 represents the year of adoption and green lighting of the sector from key regulators, this year now represents the evolution and maturation period, where organizations will explore how these assets fit into their infrastructure.
For the past few years, stablecoin conversations have focused on how they allow better, faster movement of money, enabling cheaper remittances, reduced transaction fees, and removing the need for intermediaries to send transactions across borders. While these represent significant improvements to today’s financial framework, enterprises are now asking a different question: “What do stablecoins actually unlock for my platform and users?”
This represents the broader inflection point that the crypto industry is in as it relates to stablecoins and tokenized assets in 2026. What happens to money after it arrives on a platform? How does the asset behave on that platform? How does it support new products and offerings rather than passing on to the next destination? These questions underscore a growing idea for the asset class; stablecoins represent an entirely new financial layer of programmable money that will enable institutions and enterprise-level businesses to capture value that simply was not possible before.
Stablecoins as the Economic Engine of the Future
Since mid-2025, it was clear that stablecoins were on a trajectory to become a lasting component of global finance. The landmark passage of the GENIUS Act paved the way for regulatory clarity, in turn driving major institutional integrations from players like Blackrock and Goldman Sachs . However, the most sophisticated and future-looking platforms are beginning to recognize stablecoins are more than a feature that is simply bolted onto their existing stacks.
Stablecoins and tokenized assets unlock the ability for platforms to finally monetize capital that sits idle on their books, or alternatively translate user engagement into real revenue, extending brand ownership far beyond the assets flowing through their ecosystems. By utilizing branded stablecoins, organizations can transform every dollar within their ecosystems into a profit-driving mechanism for the platforms themselves.
Additionally, branded assets also address the once-feared capital leakage of off-platform usage of these assets. Instead of becoming a point where liquidity flows out of the platform, these assets become an extension of brands themselves, and a continued source of revenue even after they leave their platforms.
Activating the Onchain Financial Gateway
Today’s financial institutions operate with the engineering and technical equivalent of duct tape, whether it be batch processing, cutoff times, FX delays, idle cash pools, or complex asset flows. Most of today’s “modern” financial solutions are merely patches designed to keep the system operational without addressing the core underlying issues.
Programmable stablecoins remove these issues from the equation entirely, allowing treasury management, borrowing, lending, and even credit markets to be accessed easily, all through the same underlying infrastructure that powers digital payments. Cash management can happen in real time across all connected entities and jurisdictions.
The potential economic impact of this shift is immense. Credit markets have historically underserved smaller and lower net worth borrowers not for lack of demand, but because servicing them is not economically viable for traditional banks or lenders. High operational overhead and compliance requirements have effectively priced out a segment of the market, all due to the constraints of legacy financial infrastructure.
Stablecoin networks offer low-cost automation, real-time collateral management, and instant settlement, all of which drastically reduce the overhead cost for lenders, while also opening the door for new entrants to the sector. A fintech provider that issues their own stablecoin could generate yield on reserves, own the brand and the user relationship, and offer both credit products and treasury management services for customers at a fraction of the cost of traditional credit offerings. This illustrates how the value of stablecoins compounds as more layers are added, representing a vastly upgraded financial stack with global availability.
Closing Window for Enterprises to Capitalize On
As it stands, most of the foundational work for stablecoins is largely in place. Regulatory frameworks have either been passed or are currently in the works , and the technology itself has proven its ability to effectively scale for enterprise needs. In turn, financial platforms are starting to view stablecoins beyond just another crypto add-on, and more as a tool to restructure value capture for their organizations.
This ultimately poses one of the most significant upgrades to how value is transferred for banks, fintechs, and institutions, where dollar economics becomes native to the platforms they originate from. It enables brand ownership to extend even deeper into financial infrastructure, and allows new products to be layered directly on top of the stack seamlessly without major restructuring.
Now, it’s time to see which organizations will capitalize on this moment. While demand has accelerated, education and infrastructure are still catching up, and institutions still need to develop organizational awareness to understand the benefits driven by tokenized assets paired with the on and off ramps that meet their compliance and infrastructure standards. Delaying this transition will likely result in direct competition with other platforms that already operate using this new financial model, making for a steep uphill battle for those in the space. For fintechs, neobanks, marketplaces, and beyond, the new strategic question of 2026 is: will they capture the value these assets enable, or continue to leave them on the table?
Bhaumik (“Bhau”) Kotecha is the co-founder and head of Paxos Labs, a startup spun out from Paxos in 2025 to empower institutions and developers with enterprise-grade infrastructure for on-chain financial products. At Paxos Labs, he leads the mission to remove the complexity of decentralized finance so partners can seamlessly embed trusted products – such as custom stablecoins, DeFi yield strategies, and tokenized assets – into their platforms.
