Main Takeaways

  • Stablecoins are no longer a crypto niche, with $33 trillion in 2024 transactions marking their arrival as legitimate financial infrastructure.

  • Emerging markets like Africa lead stablecoins adoption, surpassing traditional banking infrastructure. 

  • Industry leaders predict billions of AI agents will need a payment system within 3-5 years, and stablecoins are positioned to become the "invisible rails" for autonomous economic activity

At the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos stablecoins took center stage as a legitimate, transformative force in global finance. With over 3,000 leaders from 125+ countries convening under the theme "Collaboration for the Intelligent Age," the consensus was clear: stablecoins have evolved from experimental technology to essential infrastructure.

What captured attention at Davos was the fundamental shift in conversation: from whether stablecoins would succeed to how they would reshape payments, cross-border finance, and the very architecture of money.

Stablecoins Come of Age: From Crypto Niche to Financial Infrastructure

Perhaps the most symbolic moment was WEF's first-ever official panel dedicated entirely to stablecoins: "Where Are We on Stablecoins?" – a main-stage discussion featuring heavyweight voices from traditional finance, international organizations, and the crypto industry.

Dan Katz, First Deputy Managing Director of the IMF, while acknowledging that the $300 billion stablecoin market remains "very, very tiny" in the context of global finance, emphasized the importance of remaining "balanced" and "open-minded" about both benefits and risks. The IMF’s perspective reflects a growing institutional acceptance: stablecoins aren't going away, so the focus must shift to establishing clear frameworks that harness their potential while managing their risks.

The regulatory landscape has transformed dramatically. The passage of the U.S. GENIUS Act in 2025, Europe's MiCA framework, and similar legislation in Japan, UAE, Hong Kong, and Singapore has created areas of regulatory clarity that's giving traditional financial institutions confidence to engage. As Katz noted, the next frontier is "effective interoperability:" ensuring these national frameworks can work together to realize stablecoins' cross-border potential.

Explosive Growth Meets Mainstream Adoption

Jeremy Allaire, CEO and co-founder of Circle (issuer of USDC, the second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization), pushed back against suggestions that stablecoin adoption has been slow. 

"It depends on your definition of fast," he said, pointing to USDC's 80%+ annual growth rate over multiple years and a 580% year-over-year increase in transaction volume in Q3 of the most recent quarter.

More importantly, Allaire highlighted the breadth of use case proliferation, noting how stablecoins are being integrated across the entire economic system. Cross-border trade settlement, trade finance, and remittances are all experiencing rapid stablecoin integration.

Allaire also noted the role of leading platforms like Binance: "With over 300 million users, 20% of their users are in Africa – far higher penetration than the banking system in Africa. People are using it primarily as a dollar substitution mechanism, as a way to store value, make peer-to-peer payments."

The Africa Story: Financial Inclusion at Scale

Vera Songwe, co-founder of the Liquidity and Sustainability Facility and former UN Under-Secretary-General, brought the discussion back to stablecoins' most immediate impact: financial inclusion in emerging markets, particularly Africa.

For every $100 sent in remittances to Africa, $6 disappears in transaction costs and processing delays. Remittances now triple official development assistance to the continent, making these costs a significant economic drain. Stablecoins reduce that cost to approximately $1 and settle in minutes rather than days.

Songwe also emphasized stablecoins' role as a hedge in countries where annual inflation regularly exceeds 20%. "The fastest way poverty increases is inflation," she stated. "With a smartphone, you have access to a stablecoin. So you can actually save in a currency that is not exposed to the fluctuations of inflation."

Interestingly, Songwe and others are working on an African stablecoin platform backed by Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) rather than solely the U.S. dollar. This would mirror Africa's diverse trading relationships while maintaining the stability benefits, potentially addressing concerns about dollar dominance while improving fiscal and monetary discipline across the continent.

The AI-Stablecoin Convergence: Money for the Intelligent Age

If there was a single unifying theme at Davos 2026, it was the intersection of artificial intelligence and digital finance. Jeremy Allaire articulated this clearly, describing stablecoins as "money as a native data type on the internet:" fully programmable, cryptographically verifiable, and capable of scaling from 25-cent microtransactions between AI agents to billion-dollar international bond settlements.

"Three years, five years from now, one can reasonably expect that there will be billions, literally billions of AI agents conducting economic activity in the world continuously," Allaire predicted. "They need an economic system. They need a financial system. They need a payment system. There is no other alternative in my view other than stablecoins to do that right now."

Yat Siu of Animoca Brands drew a parallel to media consumption in the 1990s: "The growth is rapid, but in relative terms it seems very low. I think with stablecoins and digital assets we're at that stage." Just as the internet democratized content creation, programmable money is democratizing financial innovation, bringing creativity from outside traditional finance into the space.

The Great Debate: Interest-Bearing Stablecoins and Banking Concerns

One of Davos's liveliest controversies centered on whether stablecoins should pay interest. Traditional banks, including Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, expressed concern that interest-bearing stablecoins could trigger massive deposit flight, undermining banks' lending capacity and potentially destabilizing the economy during stress periods.

Allaire responded by saying that under the GENIUS Act, MiCA, and similar laws globally, stablecoins are defined as "cash instruments" – payment tokens used for settlement, not investment vehicles. This classification, he argued, is correct and should be preserved. However, he distinguished between issuers paying interest and partners offering rewards. He also pointed to money market funds as historical precedent, which grew to $11 trillion without destroying bank lending. 

Rethinking Money: Velocity, Monetary Policy, and the New Physics of Value

A fascinating technical discussion emerged around stablecoins' impact on monetary policy. Pierre Gramegna, Managing Director of the European Stability Mechanism, raised a critical question: If stablecoins dramatically increase payment velocity, could this expand effective money supply and trigger inflation?

Allaire offered a counterintuitive response, describing what he calls "the new physics of money." Just as the marginal cost of storing and transmitting data has collapsed to near-zero, blockchain enables value transfer at similar economics. This suggests that hypervelocity might actually reduce the required monetary base rather than expand it. 

Dan Katz agreed that the impact is likely supply-driven rather than demand-driven, meaning that traditional inflationary pressures may not materialize. He also noted that central banks regularly update their operational frameworks, so "we shouldn't wed ourselves to a particular framework frozen in time."

For emerging markets, Songwe added, the question is fundamentally about efficiency. "Africa has been at 5 days of settlements whereas Europe is 1 hour. We're hurrying to efficiency." The stablecoin efficiency gains matter more for markets still operating with significant friction.

CZ's Vision: Beyond Payments to Programmable Infrastructure

Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) brought a pragmatic, forward-looking perspective to Davos discussions. In his assessment, two parts of crypto have definitively "proved themselves at scale": crypto exchanges and stablecoins.

CZ was refreshingly candid about current limitations: "We've tried crypto payments, but we haven't really conquered it yet. Nobody really pays in crypto yet." This honesty underscores that despite progress, mainstream transactional use remains an ongoing challenge rather than a solved problem.

However, CZ's most compelling insights focused on future infrastructure. He revealed ongoing discussions with approximately a dozen governments about tokenizing state-owned assets, from infrastructure and real estate to commodities and natural resources. This represents a fundamental reimagining of how sovereign balance sheets could function, enabling fractional ownership, broader participation, and new capital formation without traditional bond markets.

CZ also highlighted the convergence of AI and crypto: "As autonomous software becomes more common, crypto might be used as their native currency."

Richard Teng: The “Killer App” Thesis

Co-CEO Richard Teng, representing Binance at Davos, brought a practitioner's perspective that grounded the high-level discussions in operational reality. In a CNBC interview, he stated: "Stablecoins are one of the killer apps within the crypto space."

Traditional financial infrastructure, built decades ago, is "very archaic, very slow, costly," Teng explained. Cross-border fund transfers take two to three days at high cost. Stablecoins solve this instantly at a fraction of the price – a value proposition retail users have long understood.

What's changed, according to Teng, is institutional adoption. "Now with the GENIUS Act coming through in the US, the institutions, the banks are embracing it, saying 'look, these are superior technology and superior architecture that can solve a lot of problems.'" The numbers support this shift: stablecoin market cap grew over 50%, while transaction volume more than tripled.

Particularly notable was Teng's emphasis on corporate treasury adoption, a use case that flies under the radar but may prove transformative. Companies managing global operations face constant friction with traditional banking: settlement delays, weekend closures, uncertain arrival times, high fees. Stablecoins eliminate these pain points while reducing capital requirements.

Richard's perspective reinforces a theme running through all the Davos discussions: stablecoins succeed by being demonstrably better solutions to existing problems and eliminating friction that costs businesses time and money every single day.

Final Thoughts: The Stablecoin Decade

Davos 2026 made it clear that the debate about whether stablecoins will matter is over. The new questions are about how they'll evolve, how traditional finance will adapt, and how regulators will balance innovation with stability.

The consensus emerging from Davos suggests several likely trajectories:

  • Stablecoins will continue serving as essential infrastructure for cross-border payments and emerging market financial inclusion, with the most dramatic impacts in regions underserved by traditional banking. 

  • The convergence with AI will accelerate, with stablecoins becoming the native payment layer for autonomous economic agents. Regulatory frameworks will continue maturing toward interoperability, enabling cross-border flows. 

  • Traditional financial institutions will increasingly integrate stablecoin rails rather than compete against them, recognizing the efficiency gains. Alternative models, such as Africa's SDR-backed stablecoin platform, will emerge to address legitimate concerns about dollar dominance while maintaining stability benefits.

But perhaps the most important insight from Davos is one that applies beyond stablecoins – the democratization of financial innovation. As Yat Siu observed, programmable money is doing for finance what the internet did for media: opening it to creativity and innovation from outside the traditional expert class.

Further Reading

  • Binance at Goals House Davos 2026 — Blockchain Use Cases for Financial Inclusion

  • Binance at the Historic UN Convention Against Cybercrime in Hanoi

  • 4 Simple Strategies to Earn Income with Stablecoins on Binance Earn (2025 Guide)