According to Fixygen, the cryptocurrency market is gradually expanding far beyond Bitcoin and traditional digital currencies. One of the most notable trends of 2026 is the rapid development of stablecoins and tokenized traditional assets, according to CoinDesk Data.
In September, the market capitalization of stablecoins rose to $313 billion. Trading volume for stablecoin pairs on centralized crypto exchanges increased by nearly 25% and exceeded $1 trillion for the first time since March.
Tether’s USDT remains the largest stablecoin, with a market capitalization of about $184 billion and a market share of approximately 59%. USDC ranks second with approximately $74 billion.
Stablecoins are gradually evolving from a crypto-trading tool into a standalone global payment infrastructure. They are used for international transfers, business settlements, storing dollar-denominated savings, and moving capital between various financial platforms.
The market for the tokenization of traditional assets is growing even faster. The value of tokenized stocks reached a record $4.87 billion at the end of September, while their trading volume directly on the blockchain rose to $15.6 billion over the month.
Overall, trading volume for tokenized stocks reached approximately $44.9 billion in the third quarter, an almost sevenfold increase compared to the second quarter.
Robinhood became the largest platform in September, accounting for about 42% of the total trading volume of tokenized stocks. The volume of transactions on its platform grew more than fivefold over the month—to $6.57 billion.
In addition to stocks, bonds, money-market funds, private loans, and commodity assets are gradually moving onto blockchains. The volume of tokenized bonds and money-market funds is estimated at approximately $17.3 billion, private loans at $5.6 billion, and commodity assets at over $6.4 billion.
According to an estimate by Experts Club, it is this segment of the digital market that may have more long-term significance than yet another growth cycle for individual cryptocurrencies.
While Bitcoin remains primarily a digital investment asset, stablecoins and tokenization are beginning to compete directly with bank transfers, depositories, brokers, and traditional stock market infrastructure.
In fact, a parallel financial system is gradually taking shape, in which dollars, stocks, bonds, and other assets can be traded on the blockchain around the clock, bypassing the traditional settlement cycle that takes several business days.
According to Fixygen, Citi, one of the largest U.S. banks, and the cryptocurrency platform Coinbase have expanded their partnership in the areas of corporate payments and stablecoins.
Coinbase announced this on September 28.
As part of the partnership, Coinbase has selected Citi’s Virtual Account Wallet technology for its Coinbase Virtual Accounts system. This will allow clients to receive traditional funds into virtual accounts, with the proceeds then automatically converted into stablecoins.
At the same time, Coinbase’s payment infrastructure is being integrated with Citi’s corporate service, Spring by Citi.
This will enable Citi’s institutional clients to accept payments in stablecoins, using Coinbase’s infrastructure for processing digital assets and Citi’s banking infrastructure for traditional settlements.
This partnership signals a further convergence of traditional banking payments and public blockchain infrastructure.
For businesses, this model allows them to use stablecoins as a payment instrument without having to build their own infrastructure for storage, conversion, and interaction between bank accounts and the blockchain.
At the same time, Citi is developing its own tokenized payments infrastructure. In September, the bank also announced that it had conducted real dollar transactions via the Swift blockchain ledger in collaboration with First Abu Dhabi Bank and OCBC.
The expansion of the partnership between Citi and Coinbase is taking place as the U.S. is developing a separate regulatory framework for payment stablecoins and the Federal Reserve is drafting detailed requirements for their issuers.
The U.S. exchange group Nasdaq has agreed to invest $100 million in Payward, the parent company of the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken.
The investment will be made through Nasdaq Ventures and is intended to deepen the companies’ collaboration in the areas of tokenized stocks, 24/7 trading, and the integration of traditional financial infrastructure with blockchain.
Nasdaq and Payward are working on the Nasdaq Equity Tokens (NETs) system. The idea is to create a digital representation of traditional stocks while preserving ownership rights, transparency, and corporate governance.
The project demonstrates that tokenization is no longer an experiment limited to cryptocurrency companies. Major traditional exchanges are gradually beginning to build their own blockchain infrastructure.
Almost simultaneously, the London Stock Exchange Group announced a partnership with Payward. As part of the project, the plan is to tokenize the 100 largest companies traded on the London Stock Exchange.
In the future, tokenized shares are expected to be admitted to trading on the LSE 24 platform, which is designed to provide significantly longer trading hours compared to a traditional trading session.
According to Reuters Breakingviews, the global market for tokenized shares currently stands at only about $3 billion, with monthly turnover of less than $30 billion—a figure that remains insignificant compared to traditional markets.
Nevertheless, the involvement of Nasdaq, the LSE, and other major operators marks the transition of tokenization to the next phase—the integration of blockchain infrastructure directly into regulated stock markets.
The main advantages of the technology include the ability to settle transactions almost instantly, fractional ownership, expanded trading options, and the use of tokenized securities as collateral in digital financial systems.
The main unresolved issue remains the rights of token holders: not all existing digital equivalents of stocks automatically grant investors voting rights or dividends. This is precisely why traditional exchanges are striving to create models in which a digital token is as legally similar as possible to a conventional stock.
The share of Ethereum held in staking has exceeded 35% of the cryptocurrency’s total supply, and the queue of users waiting to add new funds to the validator network has stretched to nearly 33 days, according to Fixygen.
According to Ethereum Validator Queue data as of September 10, approximately 42.9 million ETH, or 35.19% of the Ethereum supply, is in staking. The network has about 909,700 active validators.
At the same time, approximately 1.895 million ETH was in the queue to join the network. The estimated wait time for a new validator to join was 32 days and 22 hours.
The situation with withdrawals is the opposite: only about 25,300 ETH was in the withdrawal queue, and the wait time was about 10.5 hours. After a validator withdrew, the additional delay until the funds were actually received was estimated at approximately 7.9 days.
This ratio of queues indicates a significantly higher current demand for entering staking than for exiting it.
The yield on Ethereum staking is approximately 2.59% per annum. It varies depending on the amount of ETH used to support the network’s operation and other protocol parameters.
The increase in the amount of ETH locked in Ethereum validators potentially reduces the supply of coins directly available on the market. However, it would be incorrect to consider all 42.9 million ETH as completely removed from circulation: some staking is conducted through liquid protocols that issue derivative tokens circulating on the market.
An additional factor is the growing interest in Ethereum among public companies. The largest corporate holder of ETH, BitMine Immersion Technologies, announced on September 8 that of the 5.93 million ETH it owns, 5.067 million are already staked.
Amid the rise in staking, Ethereum is trading at around $2,470. As of September 10, the price of ETH stands at approximately $2,468, down from $2,485 the previous day.
Ethereum transitioned to the Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism in September 2022. Validators lock up ETH to validate transactions and secure the network, receiving rewards in return.
Data source: Ethereum Validator Queue
According to Fixygen, the European Central Bank must begin working with blockchain infrastructure itself in order to preserve the role of central bank money in the new financial system, said ECB Executive Board member Isabel Schnabel.
According to her, central banks must effectively “go on-chain” by providing tokenized central bank money for settlements involving assets on distributed ledgers.
The ECB is already developing the Pontes and Appia projects.
Pontes is intended to connect the existing European payment infrastructure with blockchain platforms, while Appia is exploring a longer-term architecture for a tokenized financial market.
This is a separate project from the retail digital euro.
The main target audience consists of banks, funds, and financial companies that need to settle transactions involving tokenized bonds, funds, and other assets using real central bank money.
If such an infrastructure becomes operational, blockchain will cease to be exclusively a cryptocurrency technology and will, in fact, become one of the settlement layers of the traditional capital market.
According to Fixygen, the standoff between traditional banks and cryptocurrencies is gradually changing in nature: the largest financial institutions are no longer trying to prove that they don’t need blockchain; instead, they are beginning to migrate bank deposits and payments to the very same technological infrastructure on which stablecoins operate.
One of the most significant developments in August was the creation of the BankChain Alliance in the U.S., which brought together banking associations from 39 states. The project aims to create a banking blockchain network by 2027 that will be capable of supporting tokenized deposits, stablecoins, automated settlements, and programmable payments.
In effect, small and regional U.S. banks are trying to develop their own alternative to cryptocurrency payment infrastructure, rather than ceding this market to Circle, Coinbase, and tech companies.
Major banks are moving in the same direction.
On August 4, Wells Fargo announced the launch of tokenized deposits for corporate clients. These funds are bank money recorded on the blockchain and enable round-the-clock settlements, including on weekends. The first phase involves transactions between the U.S. dollar and the British pound, and by 2027, the bank intends to expand its geographic reach and list of currencies.
The fundamental difference between a tokenized deposit and USDC or USDT lies in who the issuer is.
In the case of a traditional stablecoin, the customer holds a digital claim against a specialized issuer. In the case of a tokenized deposit, the customer still holds a bank deposit, but the infrastructure for managing it is blockchain-based.
Therefore, banks are essentially telling the crypto industry: we accept the technology, but we want to keep the money within the banking system.
Payment systems have gone even further.
Visa reported that its annual volume of transactions in stablecoins reached approximately $7 billion, and in the Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa (CEE) region, the volume of such transactions increased nearly 60-fold over the year. The company is already developing more than 160 card programs linked to stablecoins.
In July, Visa launched a dedicated platform, the Visa Stablecoin Platform, through which banks, fintech companies, and payment providers will be able to work with stablecoins within a unified infrastructure. In August, the company also expanded Visa Direct to include the ability to make payments and provide pre-funding using stablecoins.
At the same time, the use of stablecoins directly by consumers is growing rapidly.
According to an estimate by the payment company RedotPay, cited by Reuters, spending via cards linked to stablecoins could rise to approximately $50 billion per year by 2028. As early as July 2026, the monthly volume of such card payments exceeded $1 billion for the first time.
The most important factor driving changes in the market is regulation in the U.S.
On August 17, the U.S. Department of the Treasury published a new draft rule for implementing the GENIUS Act. Starting January 18, 2027, the issuance of payment stablecoins in the U.S. will generally be permitted only to licensed issuers. Starting in July 2028, U.S. service providers will also face restrictions on offering users stablecoins issued without the appropriate license.
As a result, the market is entering a completely new phase.
Just a few years ago, the question went something like this: Will cryptocurrencies replace banks?
Now the question has changed: Who will control the digital dollar—crypto companies, banks, or payment systems?
This is precisely where one of the major financial competitive battles of the next few years may unfold.
Circle and Tether have created a model of dollar-backed money that can be transferred around the clock and almost instantly. Banks have realized that customers truly want this functionality, but they are unwilling to hand over the deposits—on which the traditional banking model is based—to tech companies.
As a result, the market is gradually moving toward the coexistence of three forms of the digital dollar.
The first is traditional bank money.
The second is tokenized bank deposits, which Wells Fargo and other banks are transferring to the blockchain.
The third is stablecoins, which exist outside the traditional deposit account system but are becoming increasingly integrated into the financial system under new regulatory conditions.
The winner here has not yet been determined. But one conclusion is already clear: the blockchain infrastructure itself is no longer just an experiment in the cryptocurrency sector.
If the largest banks and Visa begin to process payments 24/7 via blockchain, the major technological debate of the past decade will effectively come to an end.
Blockchain hasn’t destroyed banks—banks have begun to embrace blockchain.
Sources: U.S. Treasury, Wells Fargo, Visa, Reuters, publications from August 4–26, 2026.
