H1 2026 was one of the toughest six-month periods for crypto in recent memory. The total crypto market cap fell from $3.32 trillion in January to $2.28 trillion by June, while Bitcoin dropped 31.5% and Ethereum lost roughly 32%–40%. Yet even in this broad market decline, a few crypto categories still generated outsized gains and created the strongest wealth-building opportunities.
The key question is not which sector had the biggest market cap, but which category delivered the highest concentration of high-return opportunities. Based on the data, Real World Assets (RWA) emerged as the strongest overall category in H1 2026, while AI tokens and select meme coins produced the most explosive individual token returns.
The first half of 2026 was defined by a sharp contraction across the crypto market. Bitcoin dominance climbed from 57%–58% in January to 63% by June, showing that capital rotated away from many altcoins and back into Bitcoin during the downturn.
RWA was the clear category winner because it combined positive market-cap growth, the largest capital inflows, and strong institutional demand. AI and meme coins still produced massive individual token gains, but as categories they did not outperform RWA overall.
RWA benefited from a different type of demand than most crypto narratives. While meme coins and AI tokens relied heavily on retail speculation, RWA attracted institutional capital through tokenized treasuries, equities, and real-world yield products.
The sector saw +$9.4 billion in capital inflows, +66% TVL growth, and trading volume growth of +115%. Its market size expanded from roughly $52 billion to $60–63.6 billion, making it one of the few crypto categories to grow during a broader market downturn.
This matters for the millionaire-making narrative because RWA created wealth through sustained capital appreciation and institutional adoption, not just short-lived speculation. Investors who positioned early in RWA-related projects benefited from both rising valuations and a growing narrative around tokenized real-world assets.
AI tokens were one of the most exciting narratives of H1 2026, even though the category’s overall market cap declined from $29.5 billion to $25 billion. The sector attracted $340 million in capital inflows and saw +45% trading-volume growth, driven by AI-agent perpetuals and meme-style speculation around AI projects.
The reason AI still matters in this article is simple: individual AI-related tokens delivered some of the highest returns in the market. Even if the category as a whole was down, select AI tokens created outsized wealth for early investors.
MUMU was the standout performer, surging +123,407.72% from January to June. That type of return is exactly why meme coins remain part of the millionaire-making conversation, even when the broader meme category was down overall.
Meme coins had a mixed H1 2026. The category’s market cap fell from roughly $47 billion to $24.48–30.6 billion, and capital inflows turned negative as money rotated back into blue-chip assets. Trading volume also dropped 22% after the hype peak of 2024 and 2025.
However, meme coins still produced the single largest individual token gain through MUMU. This shows the difference between category performance and individual token performance. The meme sector was weak overall, but a few speculative tokens created life-changing returns for early holders.
Capital flow data confirms that RWA attracted the strongest conviction from investors. Layer-1 and Layer-2 ecosystems also received positive inflows, but they did not match the scale of RWA’s institutional demand.
By contrast, DeFi suffered the largest outflow at -$45 billion, with TVL dropping 39.1% from $115 billion to $70 billion. Gaming also struggled, with -$180 million in outflows and a 50.77% decline in market cap.
No public dataset can verify the exact number of millionaires created by each crypto category. But the available data strongly suggests that RWA created the most sustainable wealth opportunities, while AI and meme coins created the most explosive short-term gains.
RWA stands out because it combined positive category growth, the largest capital inflows, and institutional adoption. AI tokens stand out because they produced several triple-digit returns, even in a declining category. Meme coins stand out because they produced the single most extreme gain through MUMU.
RWA was the strongest crypto category in H1 2026 when measured by category growth, capital inflows, and institutional demand. It offered the clearest path to sustainable wealth creation during a difficult market period.
However, if the question is about which category produced the most explosive millionaire-making returns, then AI tokens and meme coins deserve the spotlight. AI delivered strong speculative momentum, while meme coins produced the extraordinary MUMU rally.
The safest conclusion is this: RWA won on overall category strength, while AI and meme coins produced the highest-risk, highest-reward opportunities in H1 2026.
Which Crypto Category Created the Most Millionaires in H1 2026? was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Welcome back, aspiring investigators!
Let’s talk about something that has become one of the biggest problems in the crypto world. It’s drainers. If you haven’t heard the word before, don’t worry, you’re about to become very familiar with it. Drainers are a type of phishing attack, and they have swept through the cryptocurrency world at a truly striking pace. In fact, they are now growing so fast that they have already overtaken ransomware, both in how widespread they are and in the sheer amount of money they steal. To understand exactly how this works, we dug into the mechanics of drainers as well as the whole shadowy little market that has grown up around them. That’s what we are going to explore together today.
The basic idea behind any phishing campaign is to catch you making a mistake. Hackers want you to hand over information or access that should never leave your hands. In the specific case of drainers, the goal is a little different from classic phishing. The hacker wants to trick you into granting a smart contract permission to interact with your funds. Once you give that permission, the damage is already done. Drainers mostly go after blockchains that support smart contracts. That means they target users on Ethereum and Ethereum-like networks, such as Base, Polygon, and Optimism. But don’t think Ethereum is the only battlefield. Drainers built for Solana exist too, and a drainer aimed at Bitcoin has already made an appearance.
Imagine you want to connect your MetaMask wallet to some project’s website because you’re hoping to grab a little free crypto. Maybe you want to buy a brand-new token while it’s still cheap, before the price shoots up. You click Connect, you type in your password, and you sign a transaction that approves access to your wallet. And that, right there, is exactly the moment a drainer catches you. Instead of a legitimate contract that would let you receive tokens, the hacker gets you to sign a malicious smart contract. In doing so, you unknowingly grant permission for your funds to be transferred out. In effect, you agree, with your own hand, to give away all your money.
So how does a hacker actually pull this off? It works best with something called an airdrop, which is simply a giveaway of new tokens. Airdrops attract a swarm of people who are hoping to get a little bit of crypto that might grow tens of times in value down the road. These giveaways do genuinely happen sometimes, as a real way to promote a new token. So people have learned to trust them. In that exact moment, the user is driven by something we call FOMO, the fear of missing out on a gain.
In their rush to grab the airdrop, a person often doesn’t stop to check who actually created the page they are interacting with, or what the smart contract they are approving actually does under the hood. The website itself might be a perfect copy of the real one, built by the hacker down to the smallest detail, while the smart contract underneath does the opposite of what it promises. Instead of giving you money, it takes it.
In 2024, drainers overtook ordinary ransomware, both in how far they spread and in how much money they brought in. Now, don’t get it wrong, ransomware is still very much the scourge of large businesses. But scammers, being the opportunists they are, have rushed into this new and still relatively uncrowded niche. The very first drainers spread quietly, as scripts traded on darknet marketplaces. Back in 2022 there were 55 unique forums where you could find drainers being sold or discussed. By 2024, that number had jumped to 129 such places, more than double in just two years.
And keep in mind, that count only covers a place as niche and honestly as sparse as the dark web. Most of the real action these days happens on Telegram and Discord.
The biggest drainers active in 2024 had names like Angel, Inferno, Ping, Ace, Cerberus, Nova, Medusa, MS, CryptoGrab, and Venom. Of that whole list, mainly Angel and Ace are still active today, but a new player has stepped onto the stage, one called Vanilla. It hasn’t been studied very closely yet, because it runs on a private model that is difficult for the average scammer to even get access to.
According to Scam Sniffer, a company that closely analyzes different types of crypto fraud, total losses from drainers in 2024 added up to $494.000.000.
That figure only counts the large-scale hacks that could actually be tallied and confirmed. Since drainers mostly target ordinary, everyday users, small thefts of just a few thousand dollars here and there don’t even make it into that statistic. So the real number is almost certainly much higher.
Among the large-scale cases recorded in 2024, there were more than three hundred thirty thousand victims. The single biggest theft that year came to $55.000.000. All together, there were roughly thirty major fraudulent campaigns, which is one and a half times more than the year before, in 2023. In the first quarter of 2024 alone, drainers showed almost sixfold growth. Compare that to ransomware, which only doubled over that same stretch of time.
So what do all these numbers really mean? Well, because the barrier to entry into this line of work is so remarkably low, it has started attracting scammers who used to work in more old-fashioned territory, like email phishing, luring victims to fake bank login pages and other traditional scam types. A couple of months of this kind of work could buy an apartment, a car, and regular vacations somewhere warm like Thailand. Take one risk, and you can just walk away, or so the thinking goes. But of course, once someone gets a real taste of easy money like that, nobody actually walks away after two months. The business pulls them back in.
Think about the contrast here. A ransomware group has to negotiate with a company, arrange for payment, and handle the whole business of decryption afterward. That’s a lot of hassle and a lot of steps where things can go wrong. A drainer, on the other hand, just steals the money immediately. No negotiation needed.
Like plenty of other kinds of scams out there, drainers are distributed under what’s called a SaaS model, short for Software-as-a-Service. In this criminal corner of the internet, they’re called DaaS, meaning Drainer-as-a-Service.
There’s also a very characteristic division of labor inside these operations. You’ve got developers, who build the actual malware. You’ve got workers, the rank-and-file operatives out doing the scamming day to day. And alongside them you’ve got recruiters, traffic-generation specialists, and providers of various supporting services that keep the whole machine running. The main job, naturally, falls to the developers. They are the ones who create the malicious software and work to make it more convenient to use, easier to deploy, and easier to scale up.
So what does a hacker actually need in order to pull off a phishing campaign like this?
First, they need domains for their future sites, and these domains are usually spelled just similarly enough to the name of the real project they’re impersonating, so a distracted eye won’t catch the difference. Then they need hosting, which is simply a place to put the site once it’s built. Naturally, they also need a landing page, one designed to closely resemble the legitimate project’s real page. Underneath that landing page sits the drainer code itself, which is typically JavaScript code hosted directly on the site. On top of all that, they’ll usually build a control panel that shows them how many users have been lured in and tracks how those users are behaving on the page. And finally, hackers take their own security seriously too, relying on VPNs, proxies, and fake sockpuppet accounts to cover their tracks.
Professional hackers usually go a step further and set up a full command-and-control server, which lets them manage the drainer’s behavior remotely and adjust it on the fly.
Once all of that infrastructure is in place, all that’s left is bringing in people, actual victims to walk through the trap. That job falls to traffic arbitrage specialists, sometimes called traffic drivers. Their whole task is to funnel users toward the phishing page. They accomplish this in all sorts of ways, everything from buying Google ads to jumping directly into comment sections and posts to engage with real users. Some scammers even go so far as to clone the official support channels of legitimate projects, so a victim reaching out for help ends up talking to the scammer instead.
Put it all together, and what you get is a genuine sales funnel, a designed path that walks victims toward the trap, just like any legitimate marketing funnel would walk a customer toward a purchase.
Here’s how the profits typically get divided up. Operators, the people running the overall scheme, take home twenty to thirty percent of whatever gets stolen. The rest goes to the workers, the people directly out there scamming victims day to day. A worker’s exact cut depends on their skill level. Beginners give up thirty percent of their take to the operators, while the most experienced workers only give up ten to fifteen percent.
And how is a worker’s skill level judged? Simply by how much they have already managed to steal over time. If you’ve stolen up to $10.000 total, you’re considered a beginner. Between $25.000 and $30.000 puts you at mid-level. And starting from $100.000, usually climbing toward a million or more, you’re considered a true professional in this dark little trade.
Knowledge in this underground world gets passed around among workers through tutorials. A tutorial itself becomes an item that gets bought, sold, and traded, almost like a piece of merchandise. Entire communities have formed just to gain access to these tutorials, treating them like valuable trade secrets. The writing style of these tutorials makes it fairly clear that AI tools were used to help put them together.
Broadly speaking, the same traffic-driving scheme used in ordinary, everyday phishing applies here too, just adapted for the world of crypto. A worker is essentially doing the same job as any online advertising specialist would. Their goal is simply to increase the number of people clicking through to the phishing page. That means hunting for users who are genuinely interested in Web3 and DeFi projects, people who hold crypto wallets and who are drawn to airdrops, token swaps, and exchanges.
This whole process involves demographic analysis and geolocation analysis, essentially the same ordinary targeting techniques that any advertiser in any industry would recognize. Workers also handle what they call “site design,” which really just means cloning the pages of existing, trusted projects. They’ll even use classic marketing techniques like A/B testing to see which fake page tricks more people.
Now let’s walk through a few high-profile examples of drainer thefts.
Arkham is a company that provides on-chain analytics, and it’s a genuinely popular tool for tracking transactions. Traders rely on it, for instance, to check an asset’s price and see exactly where it’s trading across different platforms.
Back in 2023, Arkham’s owners launched their own token along with an airdrop of coins to celebrate. But hackers saw an opportunity and created numerous fake profiles on X specifically to redirect users toward phishing pages containing a drainer. Remarkably, these bot accounts proved quite resilient and managed to avoid being banned for a long stretch of time. They mimicked Arkham’s real activity closely and spread malicious links far and wide.
A huge number of these fake sites were created during the campaign, and each one typically had a lifespan of just weeks, or a couple of months at most. Angel’s software allowed a hacker to copy landing pages quickly and place them on brand-new domains almost instantly. The whole process has been simplified so much that a worker only needs to type a few commands into a conversation with a Telegram bot in order to deploy an entirely new phishing site.
An even bigger impact can be achieved by a hacker hijacking the real, verified account of some authoritative company, or even a government organization.
And that’s what happened with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, or the SEC. On January 9, 2024, its account on X was compromised through a technique called SIM swapping, which basically means reissuing a SIM card tied to the phone number linked to that account. Officials, unfortunately forgetting about basic security hygiene, hadn’t even enabled multi-factor authentication on the account.
Lately, the SIM-swapping community and the drainer community have grown noticeably closer, almost like two neighboring criminal industries starting to collaborate. Swappers now routinely supply drainers with freshly hijacked accounts to use.
The hackers behind this attack posted that the SEC had officially approved investing in Bitcoin without needing to buy crypto directly on an exchange like Binance or Coinbase. This caused an immediate stir, because investors had been waiting a long time for exactly this kind of decision from the SEC, and many expected it to be announced any day. Following the fake post, the hackers urged people to claim an “official SEC airdrop” on a special site that contained a drainer.
That single fake post even caused a real spike in Bitcoin’s price. It rose by a full thousand dollars, just from a fake tweet.
Scammers, as it turns out, wouldn’t really be scammers if they didn’t also scam each other. At one point, the developer behind the Pink Drainer felt like he was getting close to being unmasked, so he decided to get out of the game entirely and cash out his loot. Here’s the catch, though. You can’t just sell crypto obtained through a scam outright. To actually withdraw the funds, a scammer first has to launder the money, or else an exchange might get suspicious and freeze it before it ever reaches a real bank account.
To avoid enabling things like terrorism financing, or simply to stay within the law, exchanges use a system of scoring and refuse to accept “dirty” crypto. This scoring system is called an AML score, short for anti-money-laundering. There are plenty of laundering methods out there, and while trying one of them, Pink Drainer’s own developer ended up getting scammed himself. He fell for one of the simplest kinds of fraud imaginable called address poisoning.
Here’s how it works. Hackers generate crypto addresses that closely resemble a victim’s real address, and then they send that victim a tiny amount of crypto, just enough so that the lookalike address shows up in the victim’s transaction history.
From the user’s side, here’s what it looks like in practice. You send, say, one hundred dollars to some other wallet, maybe an exchange you use regularly. Then, five or ten minutes later, you receive a few tiny transfers that appear to come from that very same wallet. But in reality, they only come from a similar-looking address, one that might share, say, an identical start and end to the real address, while the middle is different.
The hacker is betting that on your next transfer, you’ll simply scroll through your history, pick the most recent address you see, and send your money not back to yourself, but straight into the hacker’s pocket. And that’s exactly how Pink Drainer got caught in his own kind of trap. He picked what looked like the last transaction in his history and sent ten ETH, worth about $15.000 at the time, straight to some unknown “colleague” who was never really his colleague at all.
Because draining is so easy and profitable, this type of scam is not going away anytime soon. If anything, the ways malicious payloads get delivered will only keep getting more sophisticated from here. Drainers are increasingly setting their sights on younger blockchains too. On Ethereum-based networks, it’s steadily getting harder for hackers to operate, since protective measures keep appearing that they have to find new ways to bypass. On Solana, though, no such protections really exist yet, which makes it a much softer target. New kinds of drainers will keep emerging as well. Some scammers have already started building actual apps for Google Play and the App Store, moving beyond simple websites and into places millions of people trust by default. So stay alert out there, and think twice before you click any button, especially one promising you free money. If it feels too good to be true, in crypto more than almost anywhere else, it usually is.
If you’re interested in cryptocurrency forensics, we have a dedicated training called Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Forensics. You will get to dive into blockchain analysis and cryptocurrency investigations, learning the skills needed to become a cryptocurrency forensic analyst. You can buy the training separately or attend it live on September 15-17 at 3 PM UTC.
The post Cryptocurrency Drainers: How Hackers Steal Cryptocurrency first appeared on Hackers Arise.
Why programmable rails are quietly replacing the plumbing of global finance
TL;DR
In 2024, a small remittance company processing payments between the UK and Lagos noticed something odd in its ledger. A transaction that used to take three days to settle through a chain of correspondent banks, each taking a cut and adding a delay was now clearing in under a minute. No SWIFT message. No batch cutoff. No reconciliation team manually matching line items the next morning.
The money hadn’t gotten faster because the banks got better. It had gotten faster because it stopped being “bank money” for a few seconds. It became a token moved, verified, and settled on a programmable ledger before becoming spendable cash again on the other end.
That small, almost invisible substitution is the entire stablecoin and tokenization story in miniature. It’s not about replacing currency. It’s about replacing the rails currency travels on.
Traditional finance runs on infrastructure built for a pre-internet world. Money moves through fragmented ledgers held by different banks, each updated on its own schedule, often only during business hours, often only after a batch process runs overnight. Cross-border payments are worse: they pass through a chain of correspondent banks, each one a separate ledger, each one a separate point of delay, cost, and potential failure.
This isn’t a minor inefficiency it’s the default condition of global finance. A wire from Singapore to São Paulo might pass through three or four intermediary banks before it lands, with fees and delays compounding at every hop. Securities settlement has its own version of the same problem: trades, custody records, and cash movements are tracked on separate systems that have to be reconciled after the fact, which is why settlement still routinely takes one to two business days even for liquid public securities.
Stablecoins and tokenized assets attack this problem at the structural level. Instead of multiple parties maintaining separate records that need to be reconciled, everyone references the same programmable ledger. The Bank for International Settlements has been explicit about this framing, describing the appeal of a “tokenised unified ledger” as a way to integrate messaging, reconciliation, and settlement into one system rather than three.
It helps to separate the two ideas, because they solve overlapping but distinct problems.
Stablecoins are digital tokens engineered to hold a stable value, typically pegged to a fiat currency like the U.S. dollar. A basic transaction flow looks like this: a user acquires tokens from an issuer or exchange, holds them in a digital wallet, sends them across a blockchain network, and the recipient sees near-instant settlement. Behind the scenes, the issuer maintains reserves cash, short-term government securities, or similar low-risk assets and handles redemption when someone wants to convert tokens back into traditional currency.
Tokenized finance applies the same logic to a broader category of assets: deposits, bonds, fund shares, even real estate or trade receivables. An asset is issued on-chain, ownership and transfer rules are embedded directly into smart contracts, and settlement can be automated using delivery-versus-payment logic meaning the asset and the cash move simultaneously, atomically, with no gap where one party could be left holding a partial trade.
The distinction matters because stablecoins solve a payments problem, while tokenization solves a capital-markets and asset-ownership problem. Together, they form a stack: programmable money (stablecoins) moving programmable assets (tokenized securities) on the same underlying rails.
The mechanics are simpler than the hype suggests, but the implications are larger than most people assume.
Take a tokenized money market fund. In the old model, an investor’s fund shares are recorded by a transfer agent, custody is handled by a separate custodian, and if the investor wants to use those shares as collateral for a loan, that requires yet another set of agreements and reconciliations between institutions. In a tokenized model, the fund share is itself a digital asset. It can be transferred, pledged as collateral, or settled against payment instantly, because ownership and the rules governing it live in the same place as the transaction itself.
This is why major institutions have started running tokenized money-market funds and tokenized government bonds as proofs of concept not because tokenization makes the underlying asset more valuable, but because it makes the operational layer around that asset dramatically cheaper to run.
The same logic applies to cross-border payments, which is where Project Agorá comes in. This is a BIS-led collaboration involving seven central banks and 43 private-sector institutions, aimed specifically at testing whether a shared, tokenized infrastructure can make cross-border payments faster and cheaper without abandoning the regulatory and legal protections that come with central bank money. It’s a meaningful signal: this isn’t fringe crypto experimentation, it’s central banks asking whether programmable ledgers belong in the core of the financial system.
What’s easy to miss is that none of this requires “crypto” in the cultural sense most people imagine no speculative trading, no anonymous wallets, no volatility. The technology underneath stablecoins and tokenized assets is being deliberately separated from the speculative crypto market and re-applied as plumbing.
The scale of stablecoin activity is large enough that the range of estimates itself tells a story. Reported transaction volume for 2024 ranges from about $15.6 trillion to $27.6 trillion, with some estimates reaching as high as $35 trillion, depending on the dataset and methodology used. That spread matters it reflects genuine disagreement about how much of this volume is real economic activity versus automated trading and bot-driven transfers.
On the supply side, one widely cited figure puts total stablecoin supply at roughly $214 billion, with active addresses climbing from 19.6 million to 30 million a 53% increase. That growth in active addresses is arguably a more honest signal of adoption than raw transaction volume, since it reflects more distinct users and wallets actually engaging with the system rather than high-frequency trading inflating the totals.
The operational risks are the ones people usually think about first: smart contract bugs, bridge failures between different blockchain networks, wallet compromises, and outright chain outages. These are real, and they’ve caused real losses in the broader crypto ecosystem.
But the more structurally important risk is monetary, and it’s the one regulators are most focused on. The BIS has warned that widespread stablecoin adoption can undermine what it calls the “singleness of money” the principle that a dollar should be a dollar regardless of which institution is holding it. If stablecoins issued by different private companies start trading at slightly different effective values, or if redemption isn’t always guaranteed at par, that principle breaks down. The BIS has also raised the possibility of “stablecoin dollarisation” in smaller economies, where local currency gets displaced by dollar-pegged tokens, potentially destabilizing local monetary policy.
There’s a banking-specific version of this risk too: if deposits move out of traditional banks and into stablecoins, banks lose a cheap and stable funding source, which directly affects their capacity to lend. This is one reason banks themselves are increasingly interested in issuing their own tokenized deposits rather than ceding the space to private stablecoin issuers.
Finally, there’s a compliance gap that’s easy to overlook. A 2023 BIS bulletin flagged the issue of bearer-style stablecoins crossing KYC boundaries — meaning tokens can circulate freely beyond the identity checks performed by the original issuer, since anyone can hold and transfer them without re-verification at each step.
The bull case holds that stablecoins and tokenization represent the most significant change to financial infrastructure since electronic payments themselves. Settlement that used to take days now takes seconds. Reconciliation that used to require entire back-office teams becomes largely automatic. Cross-border payments, historically the most expensive and slowest part of the system, become a software problem rather than a correspondent-banking problem. In this view, the institutions that build compliant, well-governed tokenized rails early will own the next generation of financial infrastructure, the way Visa and Mastercard owned the card-payment rails of the last generation.
The bear case is that most of the current activity is not what it appears to be. A large share of reported transaction volume is inflated by automated trading rather than genuine payments or commerce. Tokenization doesn’t automatically create efficiency — without trusted issuers, shared technical standards, and clear legal finality (meaning a transaction, once settled, is truly final and can’t be reversed or disputed), tokenized assets just become faster versions of the same bottlenecks, dressed up in new technology. And the regulatory risk is real: a system built around private stablecoin issuers competing with central bank money is, almost by definition, a system regulators will eventually move to constrain.
Base case: Regulated stablecoins and tokenized deposits coexist, with banks issuing their own tokenized money alongside a smaller number of heavily regulated private stablecoin issuers. Cross-border payments and securities settlement gradually migrate to tokenized rails over the next five to ten years, largely invisible to end users.
Bull case: Central bank initiatives like Project Agorá succeed in building genuinely interoperable, bank-grade tokenized infrastructure. Settlement times across both payments and capital markets compress from days to seconds as the default, and tokenization becomes the standard operating layer for institutional finance, not a niche feature.
Bear case: Regulatory fragmentation across jurisdictions slows adoption, high-profile stablecoin failures or de-pegging events erode trust, and the technology gets pushed back into a crypto-native niche rather than becoming mainstream infrastructure similar to how some earlier fintech innovations stalled out after early hype.
The most common misconception is treating stablecoins as primarily a crypto-trading tool or a way to access dollars outside the traditional banking system. In practice, the more important and durable use case is as a payments and settlement primitive the boring, infrastructural layer that most users will never directly interact with, the same way most people don’t think about the ACH network when their paycheck deposits.
The second misconception is assuming tokenization is inherently more efficient. It isn’t, by default. Efficiency only emerges when there are trusted issuers, shared technical standards across platforms, and clear legal finality. Without those three things, tokenized assets can simply replicate the fragmentation of traditional finance, just on a blockchain instead of a mainframe.
The third, and perhaps most contrarian point, is this: the long-term winners may not be the stablecoins everyone already knows. USDT and USDC currently dominate issuance and transfer activity, which has shaped the public narrative that private stablecoins are the future. But the more durable infrastructure may end up being tokenized bank deposits money that retains the legal and regulatory protections of the traditional banking system while gaining the programmability of a blockchain. That’s a much less exciting headline, but it’s arguably the more likely long-term outcome.
A few factors will determine which scenario plays out. Regulatory clarity is the biggest one whether major jurisdictions converge on consistent rules for stablecoin reserves, redemption guarantees, and KYC requirements, or whether fragmented rules force issuers to operate differently in every market. Issuer trust and transparency matter just as much: whether reserve backing is independently verified and redemption is reliably honored at par, especially under stress.
Interoperability is the quieter but equally important variable whether tokenized assets and stablecoins on different blockchain networks can move seamlessly between each other, or whether the ecosystem fragments into incompatible silos the way early internet protocols once did. And finally, bank participation: whether traditional banks build their own tokenized deposit products fast enough to remain central to the system, or whether they cede ground to private issuers.
For fintechs and payment companies, this shift changes the competitive landscape. Companies that build compliant infrastructure around stablecoin settlement and tokenized assets early gain a structural cost advantage over those still routing payments through traditional correspondent banking chains. For banks, the strategic imperative is defensive and offensive at once: defend deposit bases by offering their own tokenized products, while also building the compliance and custody infrastructure that institutional clients will eventually demand.
For treasury teams and institutional investors, tokenized money-market funds and bonds offer a preview of what capital markets infrastructure could look like with near-instant settlement and built-in collateral mobility assets that can be pledged, transferred, or repurposed in real time rather than locked in multi-day settlement cycles.
For policymakers, the strategic question isn’t whether to allow this technology, but how to shape it before private issuers shape it for them. Initiatives like Project Agorá suggest central banks are choosing to participate directly rather than simply regulate from the outside.
The headline framing stablecoins as a crypto product has always undersold what’s actually happening. What’s underway is a re-architecting of the operational layer of finance: the messaging, reconciliation, and settlement processes that have run on fragmented, batch-based systems for decades are being consolidated onto programmable, shared infrastructure. The dollar isn’t being replaced. The pipes carrying it are.
Whether the eventual winners are private stablecoin issuers, bank-issued tokenized deposits, or some hybrid of both, the direction is consistent: finance is becoming software, and the institutions that understand this early banks, fintechs, and regulators alike will be the ones shaping how that software gets written.
What struck me most while researching this piece wasn’t the trillion-dollar volume figures it was how unglamorous the actual winning use case looks. Nobody gets excited about reconciliation. Nobody writes headlines about settlement finality. But that’s exactly where the real value is being created, quietly, in the parts of finance that were never designed to be fast in the first place. The most important infrastructure shifts rarely look exciting while they’re happening they just show up, years later, as the thing nobody remembers having to wait three days for.
The Shopify of Money: How Stablecoins and Tokenized Finance Are Becoming the New Settlement Layer was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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