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Stablecoins have become crypto’s most fundamental story: a roughly $300 billion market that has decoupled from the boom-and-bust cycles of the early crypto era.
A new Finery Markets special report, Stablecoins 2035, draws on the firm’s proprietary trading data and interviews with ten leading industry firms such as Flow Traders, Chainberg, Fiat Republic, GSR, Keyrock, Dune, Fipto, Mercuryo, StraitsX, and Hercle to map where digital money goes next.
Key Findings - H1 2026
- Stablecoins hit an all-time-high 81% share of total OTC trades.
- OTC volumes nearly doubled year-over-year (+94%), the only growing segment, as CEX fell 38% and DEX fell 13%.
- USD tokens dominate at 99.87% of volume, while euro-pegged stablecoins grew 32x year-over-year.
- Tokenization is accelerating alongside: total tokenized stock supply has climbed roughly 400% in a year, to around $1.5 billion.
Five National Paths to 2035
The report goes further, mapping five national approaches to stablecoins by 2035.
The US is expected to “export” its dollar tokens abroad, since every dollar spent overseas extends its influence.
Europe, and, increasingly, Brazil will “defend” their own currencies, as MiCA’s limits on non-euro tokens already signal. China and India will “substitute” private tokens with state-issued CBDCs, citing the rise of dollar stablecoins as justification.
The UK, UAE, and Singapore will offer neutrality as “channels,” serving as exchange hubs between regions. And countries such as Australia will simply “assimilate” stablecoins into existing FX rules, treating USDC like regular dollars.
It also tackles the question every non-US issuer is asking: how to compete with the dollar.
USD stablecoins sit on top of deep capital markets and established institutional workflows, the report notes, so the path forward is not to replicate that dominance overnight, but to become indispensable in specific use cases such as regulated settlement, tokenized securities, and institutional collateral, where non-USD tokens solve real problems.
Insights from the report:
"In general, people are terrible at second-guessing the future. If it were otherwise, the prediction markets business would fail. People often miss the big thing in plain sight. Even if they won the Nobel Prize". - Sergey Klinkov, Managing Director at Finery Markets
The Prize: an Invisible, Tokenized Economy
Looking ahead, the report argues the word “stablecoin” may quietly disappear from the enterprise vocabulary altogether, not because the technology fails, but because it succeeds, becoming invisible infrastructure embedded behind AI agents, merchant systems, and payment interfaces.
In that world, users could hand AI agents permissioned wallets with built-in spending rules, letting machines transact safely on their behalf while higher-risk payments trigger human approval or compliance review.
Then there is the bigger prize: how the rails built for stablecoins could bring up to $400 trillion in bonds, equities, commodities, real estate, and private credit onchain.
The infrastructure to custody and trade these assets has largely been built; the remaining bottleneck, the report concludes, is liquidity the deep, continuous, round-the-clock markets that only professional liquidity providers and market makers can furnish.
Together, the industry’s answers map out what 2035 could look like, and who stands to win a multi-trillion-dollar transition.
About Finery Markets
Finery Markets is an institutional crypto ECN and trading-SaaS provider, offering non-custodial infrastructure that aggregates liquidity across 200+ crypto and fiat pairs for payment providers, banks, brokers, OTC desks, hedge funds, and market makers.
About StablecoinInsider.org
Stablecoin Insider is the leading source for news, data, and expert insights on stablecoins, digital dollars, and the future of blockchain-based finance.
