Over the past decade, stablecoins have been the winning horse for cryptocurrencies in trading and settling capital markets. They support liquidity in exchanges, facilitate decentralized finance protocols, enable cross-border payments, and allow market makers to move capital quickly. However, as the digital asset industry looks toward 2026, industry heavyweights increasingly argue that trading will not be the source of the next wave of sustainable cryptocurrency revenue.
In exclusive comments to Investing.com, executives from FS Vector and Stablecore say stablecoins like USDT and USDC, which are digital tokens typically designed to track the U.S. dollar and issued by private institutions on public blockchains, are evolving beyond their role as trading tools to become core financial infrastructure.
This shift will not be driven by the issuance of more stablecoins, but by what stablecoins enable: routing, coordinating, and settling transactions across on-chain and off-chain systems. If this migration accelerates, it could reshape how banks, fintechs, and infrastructure providers generate revenue as stablecoins move deeper into real economy flows.
From trading guarantees to real-world rails.
Nick Eilidg, co-founder and COO of Stablecore, says the initial pressure point is likely to be regional and mid-sized banks that have historically relied on money center banks and messaging networks to transfer dollars internationally.
"By 2026, I expect regional banks to stop relying on money center banks for cross-border transfers," Eilidg said. "They will use stablecoins to provide transfers that are 90% cheaper and settle in seconds, upending the traditional hierarchy of correspondent banking services."
In his view, the most disruptive element is not cost or speed, as stablecoins are already well understood, but availability. Stablecoin rails can settle around the clock, usually outside traditional banking hours, giving banks a liquidity advantage when legacy payment systems are closed.
"This may look like a consortium of regional banks launching a shared tokenized deposit or stablecoin to bypass the FedWire liquidity window over the weekend," he added.
While this reflects the real-world use case that stablecoins have long promised, it also creates a second-order effect. Once institutions start using stablecoins as railways, the ecosystem becomes more complex, creating new coordination challenges and new points through which value can be captured.
The bigger vision: the connectivity layer.
Emily Goodman, a partner at FS Vector, believes that while stablecoin issuance will remain core, the "greater strategic focus is likely to shift towards regulation" in 2026. This means more attention to routing, coordinating, and settling transactions across a fragmented hybrid financial system.
"The issuance of stablecoins will remain a key aspect of the digital asset ecosystem," Goodman said. "For 2026, however, the strategic focus will begin to shift towards regulating transactions built on stablecoin infrastructure."
In her view, the emerging opportunity is not just the issuance of stablecoins, but managing how stablecoin-based transactions move between blockchains, banks, payment networks, and legacy systems, especially when those systems do not natively communicate with each other.
"Market participants will seek to capitalize on the value of coordination, routing, and settlement across on-chain and off-chain environments," Goodman said. "We will see an increased focus on interoperability, which means platforms that span payment networks, decentralized finance protocols, and banking systems."
In other words, stablecoins provide the railways, but the revenue opportunity lies in the infrastructure that determines how transactions are routed, settled, and managed.
Why this might be a source of sustainable revenue.
If stablecoins continue to push into mainstream financial flows like bank transfers, treasury movement, and platform settlement, the ecosystem is likely to become more fragmented, with multiple blockchains, issuers, entry and exit points, and compliance systems coexisting.
This segmentation creates a demand for services that enable connectivity and support this organization: interoperability tools, routing layers, settlement coordination, monitoring, and compliance transaction management.
The companies best positioned for sustained revenue may not be those facilitating the largest volume of speculation, but those coordinating how value moves across an increasingly hybrid system.
Summary of 2026.
By 2026, the most important stablecoin story may not be the launch of a new token, but the infrastructure built around stablecoin rails that connect banks, blockchains, and payment networks into a single transaction fabric.
If Eilidg is correct, stablecoins will begin to impact the economics of correspondent banking. If Goodman is right, the biggest prize will be the layer above issuance, in regulating how money moves across on-chain and off-chain environments.
In that future, stablecoins will not be the product but the infrastructure, with revenues shifting to the companies that manage routing, settlement, and coordination.
