my stablecoin predictions for 2026
growth & commoditisation
- on/offramps and cards continue to grow 100x YoY in volume
- despite 100x growth, take rates go down as on/offramps continue to commoditize (as bridges did throughout 2022-23). with clear reg, licensing cost is legal capex LP, just as building a bridge was engineering capex LP
- another 100 'onchain banks' are launched as privy bridge rain aave get bundled
- at least least two 10m seed rounds into a new OBaaS "onchain banking as a service" (bundled privy bridge rain aave offered at $500/mo)
- first major 'onchain bank' disaster happens with some risky 'high yield' self-custodial account goes to zero. thousands lose savings, company will blame users for not reading asterisks
reg
- more pressure on circle and tether to freeze assets as stablecoins move from pmf with cross-exchange arbitrage to payments and real-world usage which includes crime, hacking, sanctioned entities
- first 50m lawsuit re freezing
- more scrutiny about custodial and centralized solutions (CEXes, on/offramps)
- no increased attention to self-custodial and decentralized solutions unless privacy-related
- previously niche academic debates about shoehorning self-custody and decentralized solutions into dominant jurisprudential paradigms get attention in ivory towers
- privacy solutions mostly positioned as super compliant corporate and clean.
- cypherpunks continue to fight and get increased attention in europe after some major snowden-style leak, US is too jaded at this point and has given up on its constitution
culture
- more payment-related ERCs as EF wakes up to tempo, backend-centric ivory towers big brain thinking starts matter less than devex and product strategy
- we stop comparing ourselves to solana
- base continues to lose credibility as it leans into more insider trading extraction and gambling
- AR and ARR become important metrics but projects learn to game them equally fast as they did with mcap and fdv
- more teams on slack than on discord
- more and more business happens on linkedin and email threads