Written by: imToken

To speak realistically, most narratives in the cryptocurrency industry over the past few years can be summarized by an almost obsessive question:

“What is the next asset that will rise?”

Since the DeFi Summer, NFTs, public chains/L2, re-staking, memes, and even AI tokens have taken turns appearing. The technical logic and market background of different narratives vary, but they ultimately revolve around how price performs. Even though stablecoins, wallets, and cross-chain bridges have clear utility attributes, the market's attention to them is often limited to how many transactions and speculative activities they can support.

However, entering 2026, a series of changes distributed across different tracks began to emerge intensively within the same time window:

• The total market value of stablecoins reached approximately $300 billion, entering a high plateau period in penetrating the global payment network;
• DTCC completed the initial asset tokenization conversion in a production environment and plans to officially launch related services in October;
• The prediction market is transitioning from crypto-native products to broker-dealers and regulated exchanges;
• AI Agents have begun autonomously purchasing data, model calls, and digital services using stablecoins;

On the surface, these changes seem unrelated, but if we put them together, we will find a more complete thread: the issuance, custody, trading, payment, and settlement capabilities accumulated by the cryptocurrency industry over the past decade are gradually opening up from serving crypto assets themselves to a broader range of financial activities and the machine economy.

In other words, crypto has not yet escaped speculation, but it is growing an increasingly complete infrastructure beneath the speculative market.

1. Why are these breakthroughs happening almost simultaneously?

Objectively speaking, RWA, stablecoins, prediction markets, and AI Agents are not receiving attention at the same stage because of the sudden emergence of a hot narrative.

The real reason is that the different components needed for a new financial infrastructure, after years of independent development, have finally begun to connect with each other.

1. Stablecoins turn currency into callable interfaces.

First of all, stablecoins are no longer a new thing, but the role they play is changing.

As we all know, early stablecoins primarily undertook tasks such as exchange pricing, on-chain hedging, and cryptocurrency trading settlement, with overwhelming majority of funds still circulating around the crypto ecosystem. Now, more and more issuers, banks, payment institutions, and fintech companies are starting to use stablecoins for merchant payments, global payroll, corporate payments, fund aggregation, and cross-border settlements.

According to data disclosed by Circle in the first quarter of 2026, the network had an annualized transaction volume of approximately $8.3 billion based on nearly 30 days of trading at that time, and partner Nium's payment network covers over 190 countries and regions. This also means that stablecoins are no longer merely "on-chain dollars," but a form of currency that can be called directly by software.

It can be transferred 24/7, can be embedded in programs, can be automatically released based on certain conditions, and can directly become settlement assets after a transaction is completed. For internet applications, sending a stablecoin is increasingly resembling calling a payment API, without the need to understand intermediary banks, clearing times, and cross-border account systems, just needing to confirm the amount, address, and execution conditions.

This is also a key change for stablecoins from a crypto trading tool to payment infrastructure.

2. RWAs turn assets into programmable objects.

If stablecoins solve the problem of "what money to use for settlement," RWA addresses the issue of "what assets can be traded and settled."

Past RWA products were mostly concentrated in areas like U.S. Treasuries, money market funds, and private credit, and the core value was mainly to allow crypto users to earn returns on off-chain assets. However, since last year, TradFi infrastructure has visibly begun to bring security registration, custody, trading, and settlement processes on-chain.

On July 15, DTCC completed tokenized asset trading testing in an actual production environment, with over 30 traditional financial institutions and digital asset companies participating, and plans to officially launch related services in October. Unlike typical asset mapping, DTCC plans to allow tokenized securities to retain all ownership, investor protection, and rights arrangements corresponding to traditional securities.

Previously, in March, the U.S. SEC had approved Nasdaq to allow eligible listed securities to be traded in tokenized form. Tokenized stocks use the same CUSIP as traditional stocks, have the same substantive rights, and continue to trade under the existing market system and securities rules.

This differs fundamentally from simply issuing a "stock-mapped token"; it signifies that on-chain assets are beginning to attempt to connect with real ownership, custody relationships, corporate actions, and legal rights, starting to carry part of the lifecycle of traditional assets.

Thus, as this layer of connection gradually establishes, blockchains are not just creating new assets, but also beginning to carry part of the operational process of traditional assets.

3. Prediction markets turn future information into prices.

The prediction market addresses the layer of information and price discovery.

Stocks trade a company's future cash flow, bonds trade credit and interest rates, while prediction markets trade the probability of an event occurring. Election results, interest rate resolutions, sports events, corporate events, and even product release times can all be compressed into a continuously changing market price.

Robinhood disclosed that its prediction market business saw over 1 million users participating in its first year, with a cumulative trading volume of about 9 billion contracts, and has acquired a CFTC-regulated exchange and clearing infrastructure. From an infrastructure perspective, prediction markets provide a capability that is difficult for traditional financial markets to cover on a large scale, which is to synthesize dispersed information into a probability that can be read in real-time.

4. AI Agents are becoming new economic actors.

Stablecoins and RWAs solve the issues of assets and funds, while the new variable brought by AI Agents is who initiates economic activities.

Traditional software can only execute operations according to preset processes, whereas Agents can understand objectives, seek services, compare prices, and make decisions within a certain authority. When Agents can autonomously purchase APIs, they cease to be merely information tools and begin to become new economic actors.

The challenge lies in that the payment amounts of many Agents may only be a few cents or even lower, making it challenging for traditional credit card fixed fees to cover them. Their fixed fees, settlement cycles, and identity verification processes are not inherently suitable for high-frequency, low-value, and automated machine payments.

This happens to be a scenario where stablecoins and low-cost blockchains can play a role.

Coinbase has integrated x402 and stablecoin wallets into AWS Bedrock AgentCore, allowing enterprises to set budgets and governance rules for Agents; Google’s Agent Payments Protocol uses cryptographic signatures to authorize credentials, recording what users permit Agents to purchase, the maximum amounts, and who initiated the operations.

2. What does the next generation of financial infrastructure have?

Overall, the reason these lines happen simultaneously is precisely because they are parts of the same system.

Stablecoins turn currency into APIs, RWAs turn assets into programmable objects, prediction markets turn future information into prices, and AI Agents allow software to directly participate in asset exchanges for the first time.

However, it is worth noting that determining whether crypto has started to become infrastructure does not mean judging whether speculation still exists in the market. Just like there exist numerous speculative trades in stock, forex, and commodities markets, all the more important standard is whether external businesses and users have started to rely on a set of technologies to complete tasks that were previously difficult to achieve, too costly, or inefficient.

According to this standard, crypto and Web3 as the next generation of financial infrastructure have preliminarily formed multi-layer capabilities.

The first layer is asset issuance and mapping.

Now, the assets that can enter the blockchain are no longer just native tokens. Stablecoins, government bonds, money market funds, private credit, gold, fund shares, and stocks have all emerged in different forms of on-chain products, and the significance of various asset on-chain does not merely involve placing a certificate into a wallet.

When assets can be recognized by smart contracts, they can directly enter mortgage, lending, trading, fund management, and automated investment processes. Operations originally dispersed among registration agencies, custodians, brokers, and clearing systems have the opportunity to be condensed into a more unified execution environment.

The second layer is 24/7 payment and settlement.

Traditional cross-border payments usually require multiple intermediary banks and are subject to operating hours, account systems, and regional network restrictions, while stablecoins can achieve near real-time 24/7 value transfer under a unified asset standard.

J.P. Morgan stated that Kinexys has processed over $4 trillion in total since its launch, with a daily average trading volume of over $7 billion, and has expanded its blockchain deposit accounts to include multiple currencies including USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, HKD, SGD, and CNY.

In short, on-chain settlement does not necessarily require all funds to be converted into publicly issued stablecoins; in the future, there may exist bank deposit tokens, regulated stablecoins, central bank digital currencies, and on-chain commercial bank currencies simultaneously. Their commonality is that funds can be read, scheduled by programs, and completed simultaneously with asset delivery.

The third layer is continuous trading and price discovery.

Crypto has already proven that markets can operate around the clock and can automatically match and manage liquidity through smart contracts.

This capability is being extended to more asset classes. Tokenized securities can shorten the time between trading and settlement, while prediction markets can provide probabilities for events that traditional finance cannot directly price.

In the future, a business can not only hold an on-chain money market fund but also automatically adjust its cash positions based on changes in interest rate prediction markets; AI Agents may also read asset prices, event probabilities, and liquidity conditions and then decide whether to execute trades.

At that point, the market will provide not just prices for human observation, but a set of real-time signals that can be called directly by software.

The fourth layer is identity, permissions, and authorization.

Financial activities not only involve asset transfer but must also address a series of questions: Who initiated the transaction? Who has permission? How long will this authorization last? What is the upper limit of the amount? Who is responsible in case of an issue?

Early crypto primarily addressed these questions through private keys. Holding a private key meant having total control. However, once businesses, institutions, and AI Agents enter the blockchain, a single private key clearly cannot meet the complex permissions management needs.

Google AP2 uses verifiable authorization records to capture user intentions; Visa is establishing directories, credentials, and scoring mechanisms for Agent identities; Mastercard's Agent Pay for Machines seeks to provide identity verification, permission settings, trading, and settlement capabilities for machines.

Account abstraction, Passkeys, multi-signature wallets, session keys, and spending policies also allow users to grant limited permissions to an application or Agent rather than directly handing over full account control.

This means the role of wallets may also change. Future wallets will not only store assets and private keys but will also need to manage user identities, institutional credentials, Agent permissions, spending budgets, and authorization records, becoming a control interface for users to enter the on-chain economy.

The fifth layer connects to real legal and regulatory systems.

Whether a financial system can become true infrastructure not only depends on whether the technology can operate but also on whether real laws recognize the outcomes of transactions.

In January 2026, the U.S. SEC released a statement regarding tokenized securities, clearly distinguishing between tokenized securities directly issued by issuers, tokenized interests formed by third parties depositing underlying assets, and on-chain products that merely offer synthetic price exposure. This distinction is very important because several products may all appear as “on-chain stocks,” but the legal rights actually owned by the holders may be completely different.

The CLARITY Act attempts to further delineate the regulatory scope between the SEC and CFTC and establish clearer rules around digital asset issuance, trading platforms, software developers, DeFi, and investor protection. The bill is still controversial and has not yet completed legislation, but the regulatory focus has gradually shifted from “Should crypto exist?” to “Who can issue, who is responsible for custody, and what rules apply to what assets?”

This shift itself is an important signal of infrastructure construction because only when participants can roughly judge their legal responsibilities, banks, brokerages, asset management institutions, and payment companies are likely to make long-term investments rather than just conduct isolated experimental projects.

3. The necessary path from “speculation market” to “infrastructure.”

Is crypto moving from a speculative market to infrastructure?

The answer is affirmative, and this process is irreversible, but it is not an either-or replacement process.

Crypto will not suddenly lose its speculative attributes due to the growth of stablecoin payments and RWAs; more accurately, it is building a set of executable systems that can be utilized by real assets, traditional institutions, and intelligent software beneath the original trading market.

This change is first reflected in the expansion of the sources of funding in the industry. In the past, a significant amount of protocol revenue came from leveraged trading, asset issuance, clearing, and on-chain capital circulation. Now, on-chain is beginning to see a second category of cash flow from external economic activities, with businesses using stablecoins for cross-border settlements, funds distributing and managing assets through on-chain channels, software purchasing APIs per use, and Agents making automated payments for data and model fees.

Secondly, the participants in the on-chain economy are also expanding. The typical users of the past were human traders sitting in front of screens clicking “confirm” and “sign.” In the future, many on-chain interactions may be initiated by business systems, payment programs, and AI Agents, with humans responsible for setting objectives, boundaries, and permissions, while software completes specific executions.

Regulatory discussions are also changing. Past debates centered primarily around whether crypto should be integrated into the existing financial system; now the questions are gradually transforming into how to delineate regulatory boundaries, protect investors, restrain intermediaries, while preserving space for self-custody and open software.

However, from “can operate” to “worth relying on in the long term,” crypto infrastructure still has a long way to go.

First, on-chain confirmation does not equate to legal finality. Who holds the assets behind the tokens, whether investors can recover assets after the issuer's bankruptcy, whether different judicial jurisdictions recognize ownership transfers on-chain, and what rights token holders actually possess regarding dividends, voting rights, or price exposure—these issues cannot rely solely on smart contracts for resolution.

Agentic payments similarly face boundaries of accountability. When an AI Agent executes a wrong transaction due to incorrect information, prompt injection, or model hallucination, who bears the responsibility—users, model providers, wallets, or merchants—currently lacks a mature handling mechanism. In the future, wallets will need to address not just how to make Agents pay, but how to restrict what assets they can use, who they can pay, how much, and how to suspend and revoke permissions in case of anomalies.

Meanwhile, the more assets and networks there are, the more prominent the issue of liquidity fragmentation might become. The same stablecoin, fund, or security can be distributed across different public chains, bank ledgers, and permissioned networks, yet may not be able to circulate freely. The next step, more important than continuing to issue more assets, is to establish unified asset standards, cross-network communication, and secure settlement mechanisms.

Privacy is also an aspect that institutions cannot avoid. Public blockchains facilitate verification and auditing, but enterprises would not want to disclose all customer, vendor, payroll, and fund flow information. How to leverage zero-knowledge proofs, selective disclosure, and on-chain credentials to retain necessary privacy while meeting compliance requirements will directly determine how far on-chain finance can go.

The more fundamental question is that while blockchains can improve transaction and settlement efficiency, they cannot automatically create credit. Real financial systems’ credit loans, insurance, accounts receivable, default handling, and liquidity support all require complex risk control, legal, and accountability systems. Prediction markets will not naturally resolve insider information, liquidity insufficiency, and outcome adjudication issues simply because of public pricing.

Therefore, today’s crypto is more like a foundational framework of assets, currency, trading, and settlement that has been set up, but credit, privacy, accountability, and legal finality have yet to form a complete closed loop.

It is becoming infrastructure, but it is still far from being a set of infrastructure that can be unconditionally trusted by everyone.

Final Thoughts

Looking back, what is most attention-worthy in 2026 is not a sudden explosion in a single track but the gradual connection of several previously independently developed pieces of the puzzle.

Assets have taken on an on-chain form, currencies have become programmable carriers, markets have started providing 24/7 pricing, software is gradually gaining payment and trading permissions, and regulation has moved from vague gray areas to more specific boundary delineations.

These changes are not sufficient to prove that a "completely new financial system" has been established, but they are enough to demonstrate that the role of crypto is changing. It has not departed from the speculative market but is gradually building a set of executable systems that can be used by real assets, traditional institutions, and intelligent software beneath the speculative market.

Regardless, the crypto industry has undergone 15 years of evolution, finally taking the most crucial step from "a sociological experiment of digital gold," to "a high-frequency speculative casino," and then to "a frictionless global financial infrastructure."

In the next 15 years, let’s continue to witness.

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