If you told me five years ago that the most exciting conversation in fintech would be about “settlement finality,” I would have laughed. In 2021, the industry was drunk on yield farming, NFTs, and the promise of decentralized everything.
But here we are, approaching 2026, and the flash-in-the-pan crypto hype has been replaced by something far more powerful, albeit far less flashy: boring, reliable, regulatory-grade utility with stablecoins. And that’s, actually, very exciting!
For the past three years, corporate treasurers looked at stablecoins and saw “risk.” Today, thanks to the passage of the GENIUS Act (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins) in July 2025, they see “working capital.” Just a few months ago, the only thing anyone was talking about at Money2020 were stablecoins and how they could get started.
By clarifying that payment stablecoins are banking instruments—fully backed and supervised—Washington did more than just regulate the industry. They’re giving enterprise fintechs permission to enter it.
As we forecast the Money Mobility trends for 2026 (our second year doing this series), my forecast is the “Digital USD” is the death of the T+2 settlement cycle and the birth of “Programmable Settlement.”
The End of “Trapped Liquidity”
The defining friction of the legacy financial system has always been trapped liquidity. When a U.S. manufacturing firm pays a supplier in Southeast Asia via Swift, that money effectively vanishes for days. It is debited from the sender but not credited to the receiver.
In the zero-interest rate era of the 2010s, this float was annoying. But manageable. In the high-interest-rate environment that has defined the mid-2020s, having millions of dollars floating in the ether (and I don’t mean Ethereum) for 72 hours is an expensive inefficiency.
The data supports this urgency. The global cross-border B2B payments market is projected to hit $42 trillion by 2026, yet nearly half of corporate finance teams still cite “lack of visibility” and “slow settlement” as their primary pain points.
In 2026, we are finally seeing the solution scale: Programmable Settlement.
We are moving past simple transfers to smart-contract-enabled workflows. I’ve already talked to quite a few teams imagining a logistics payment that triggers automatically the moment a digital bill of lading is verified on-chain. Ones where the funds move in seconds—via PayPal USD (PYUSD) or USDC—and settle instantly. There is no float. There is no “check is in the mail.” There is only immediate, irrevocable value transfer.
For example: PayPal’s expansion of PYUSD into cross-border B2B payments and Visa’s integration of stablecoin settlement for merchant acquirers are not experiments. They are the new rails more and more enterprise business will be operating on.
The “Clean Hands” Doctrine: Compliance as a Moat
All that said, this speed comes with a new requirement: radical transparency. The “wild west” era of using stablecoins to bypass compliance is over. The GENIUS Act made sure of that.
The trend we are forecasting for 2026 is the market splitting into two parts: “Compliant Rails” and “Grey Market Rails.” Enterprises will only touch the former. The GENIUS Act explicitly prohibits the payment of interest on stablecoins to prevent them from competing with bank deposits, and it mandates 1:1 reserves in high-quality liquid assets like Treasury bills. This has effectively killed the “algorithmic” stablecoin models that caused so much destruction in 2022.
This means that the infrastructure powering these payments must be what I call “Glass House” architecture. It is not enough to move the token; you must be able to prove to a regulator, in real-time, exactly who owns it. We are seeing a massive shift away from “wrapper” fintechs—who obscured the ledger—toward vertically integrated platforms that offer sub-ledger visibility down to the individual transaction. We’ve heard countless times from our own banking partners the same ethos: If we can’t see the risk, we can’t bank it.
This “Clean Hands” doctrine is why we are seeing major financial institutions finally launch their own tokenized deposit pilots. They needed the regulatory air cover of the GENIUS Act to move forward. Now that they have it, they are looking for infrastructure partners who can bridge the gap between their legacy cores and public (or permissioned) blockchains.
The “Bridge” Economy: Fiat is Not Dead
Despite the excitement, let’s be realistic about 2026: The world is not going to switch to crypto overnight. Suppliers in Vietnam or Mexico still need local fiat currency to pay their workers and their rent.
This is why the most valuable companies in 2026 will be the Bridges. These are the payment orchestration platforms that can take a stablecoin payment from a US buyer, instantly convert it (off-ramp), and push it into the local banking rail (RTP, ACH, Push-to-Card) of the receiver.
We are already seeing this with Visa’s expansion of its settlement capabilities. By supporting settlement in USDC and other stablecoins, they are allowing issuers and acquirers to settle obligations without waiting for the traditional banking window to open. In my view, this hybrid model (e.g. crypto speed with fiat utility) will be the “killer app” for B2B payments.
My Forecast: The Rise of the “Digital Treasury”
My prediction for 2026 is we’ll see the first Fortune 500 companies retire their “International Wires” desk in favor of a “Digital Treasury” function.
These teams won’t be holding Bitcoin on their balance sheets; that remains too volatile for most corporate governance policies. Instead, they will be utilizing stablecoins as a “pass-through” rail. They will hold dollars, convert to stablecoins for the 3 seconds it takes to move value across the world, and settle in fiat. They will effectively bypass the correspondent banking network, saving 2-3% in FX and fees per transaction.
For the executive reading this, the question is no longer:
“Should we have a crypto strategy?”
It is “What is our settlement strategy?”
If your answer relies on 40-year-old messaging standards and 3-day wait times, you are bleeding capital. Fortunately, the technology to stop the bleeding is here. 2026 is the year you simply have to turn it on.
