Stablecoins in 2035: What Eleven Practitioners Actually Disagree About

Forecasting reports usually suffer from a consensus problem. Everyone invited shares a market, so everyone shares a thesis, and the result reads like one long press release with several bylines. That is not what happened here. Finery Markets assembled eleven contributors from market makers, custodians, data providers, and payments platforms and asked them what stablecoins look like in 2035. On the shape of the destination they mostly agree. On the single most consequential question, whether stablecoins are money or merely a faster way to move it, they split down the middle.

That disagreement is worth more than the consensus, because the two answers imply completely different strategies for anyone building in this space. This piece works through the report's data and its contributor essays, focusing on where the arguments diverge rather than where they line up.

Why this argument is live right now

The proximate reason is that the trading data has stopped being marginal. In the report's own H1 2026 numbers, stablecoins accounted for 81% of institutional OTC crypto trades, up from 26% in 2023, with OTC stablecoin volume growing 94% year over year. More striking is the directional split across venues: over the same period, top 20 centralized exchange volumes fell 38% and top 20 decentralized exchange volumes fell 13%, while OTC markets grew 76%. Institutional flow is going somewhere the retail-facing venues are not.

The second reason is that the dollar's grip, while overwhelming, is finally measurable at the edges. USD tokens held 99.87% of OTC stablecoin volumes in H1 2026, down fractionally from 99.99% a year earlier, with euro stablecoins growing 32 times over on spot OTC trading. That sounds like noise until you look outside the trading data. Forbes reported in March 2026 that non-dollar stablecoins had reached $1.2 billion in aggregate, with the euro segment more than doubling in twelve months after MiCA took effect, and Circle's EURC accounting for more than 90% of non-USD transfer volume according to Dune data. Small base, steep curve, regulatory tailwind. That combination is what makes the 2035 question contested rather than obvious.

The split: transport layer or new money?

The clearest statement of one position comes from Fiat Republic's Saumitra Dubey, who argues stablecoins aren't money at all. Money comes from banks and carries government approval; a stablecoin is a faster transport mechanism for money that already exists. Deposits move quicker, but the underlying assets still sit in the banking system, so banks don't get replaced, they get plugged in.

Finery Markets' own Sergey Klinkov takes the opposite view, framed as a letter written back from 2035 to a banker sitting at his desk in 2026. His argument turns on a single regulatory hinge: once centralized issuers are permitted to pay interest to token holders, USD-pegged tokens compete head-on with bank deposits. Sight deposits migrate, banks fall back on more expensive funding, and net interest margins compress. He reaches for the Bank of Amsterdam as the cautionary parallel, a fully reserved deposit institution from 1609 that eventually gave in to the temptation to lend against reserves it did not have, and failed in the 1780s for lack of sovereign backing. His read is that today's private issuers meet the same end, but not before permanently breaking the banking monopoly on deposits and lending.

Both cannot be right, and the gap between them is not rhetorical. If Dubey is correct, the strategic question for a bank is distribution. If Klinkov is correct, it is survival of the funding model.

Chainberg's Manan Vora offers a third framing that dissolves the question rather than answering it. His argument is that the friction in stablecoin payments was never the blockchain, it was the edges, the on-ramp and off-ramp where fiat converts. Once every significant currency has an onchain representation through CBDCs, regulated stablecoins, or bank-issued tokens, those edges don't get cheaper. They disappear. At that point the distinction between crypto money and real money stops carrying information.

Where the contributors do converge

Three points recur across essays from firms with otherwise different books.

Liquidity is not summonable. Flow Traders' Michael Lie makes the sharpest version of this: the euro versus dollar debate is the wrong frame, because stablecoins are not winning on currency merits but on ecosystem depth. A market maker can tighten spreads and commit capital, but cannot manufacture structural liquidity where the underlying system doesn't support it. USD stablecoins sit on deep capital markets, strong reserve economics, and established institutional workflows, and that compounding is the actual moat. His prescription for non-dollar tokens is not to replicate dollar scale but to become indispensable in narrow slots: regulated settlement, tokenized securities, treasury workflows, institutional collateral.

Distribution has replaced the asset as the competitive surface. Dune's Arnaud Simeray provides the structural map. The count of stablecoins went from roughly 30 in 2020 to 215 in 2025, yet USDT and USDC still hold about 85% of supply. More issuers produced no more competition at the top, because competition moved downstream into three separate markets: real-world payments split corridor by corridor, DeFi composability, and a long tail of branded coins whose logic is defensive rather than expansionary. Banks and fintechs issue their own tokens less to win new customers than to stop existing ones from leaving.

The winning infrastructure is the invisible kind. Mercuryo's Arthur Firstov expects the word stablecoin to fall out of the enterprise vocabulary entirely by 2035, not through failure but through absorption into ordinary financial applications. Hercle's Gabriele Sabbatini frames the same conclusion from the trading desk: a client relationship is won or lost on your weakest corridor, not your strongest, so completeness is the product. Fipto's Patrick Mollard locates the entry point precisely, arguing that treasury rather than trading pulls stablecoins into the institutional mainstream, and that the obstacle was never technology but the fact that stablecoins lived outside the systems treasury teams actually use.

The concentration paradox worth sitting with

Keyrock's Amir Hajian contributes the most counterintuitive piece of arithmetic in the report, and it deserves its own section because it resolves an apparent contradiction in the data.

Since the start of 2024, Tether grew from roughly $90 billion to $190 billion and USDC from $24 billion to $76 billion. Both are larger than ever. Yet their combined share slipped from nearly 89% to about 83%, while supply outside the two leaders more than tripled to $54 billion. The mechanism is simple once stated: of every net new dollar minted, the two captured between 76% and 79%. When your intake rate runs below your standing share, your share drifts toward your intake even as your absolute supply climbs. Neither company has to lose a single customer for this to happen.

Hajian's explanation for why the intake rate slipped is the more useful part. A bare token that pays nothing was a fine product at zero rates and is a weak one when short-term rates sit near four percent. If you build on someone else's stablecoin, you cannot pass yield to your depositors, cannot shape the reserve composition, and can be charged to redeem. Issuing your own removes all three constraints at once, which is why every exchange, wallet, and fintech with real balances is evaluating it. He adds a second pressure: tokenized treasuries do what a stablecoin does, settling instantly and posting as collateral, while paying the Treasury yield the entire time, and backed by government paper rather than issuer reserves.

What each group should take from this

Banks. Two contributors independently arrive at tokenized deposits as the answer to the deposit-migration threat, on the reasoning that bringing programmability inside the regulated perimeter preserves the funding base. Both also note that the client relationship is the asset banks still hold uncontested, which points toward being the trusted gateway to stablecoin services rather than competing on token issuance.

Corporate treasurers. The Fipto essay reports live production flows at two enterprises through the Kyriba treasury management system, with a Europe-to-Colombia corridor at roughly one percent all-in cost against three to five percent via correspondent banking. The report frames this as the wedge, on the argument that treasurers adopt what is regulated, reconciled, and invisible.

Regulators. The report's contributors expect fragmentation rather than convergence. Dubey sketches five postures: export, defend, substitute, channel, and assimilate, with different jurisdictions landing in different camps and many of the resulting rules conflicting.

Issuers and infrastructure firms. The consistent implication across essays is that the compensated position is coordination, not issuance. Market makers, corridor operators, and compliance translators appear in nearly every contributor's version of 2035.

The takeaway: the interesting question moved

There's a self-aware joke in the report about rebranding the 2027 edition as "RWAs in 2045," and it lands because it's half true. GSR's contributors make the case that stablecoins were the first instrument to deliver properties emerging-market savers couldn't get locally, and that the same demand pulls in each new asset class as it arrives onchain. Their supporting numbers are stark: tokenized US Treasuries passed $15 billion this year at roughly 150% annual growth, and tokenized equities sit near $1.5 billion, up around 400% from about $300 million a year earlier.

Which suggests the debate that opened this piece may resolve itself by becoming irrelevant. If stablecoins are the first tokenized asset class rather than the last, then arguing about whether they qualify as money is a bit like arguing in 1998 about whether email counts as mail. The category won and the question dissolved. What we take from this report is narrower and more actionable: the value in a multi-rail, multi-currency, multi-jurisdiction world accrues to whoever can move between the pieces cleanly, which is the same conclusion we reached looking at where regulated stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and fast payment systems each keep their money. Fragmentation is not a phase this market passes through. It is the terrain.

For teams tracking how the five regulatory postures are actually taking shape jurisdiction by jurisdiction, our free Stablecoin Regulation Tracker covers licensing regimes and supervisory guidance across 200+ markets.

Source: "Stablecoins 2035: Back to the Future," Finery Markets, with contributions from Flow Traders, Chainberg, Fiat Republic, GSR, Keyrock, Dune, Fipto, Mercuryo, StraitsX, Hercle, and Finery Markets, 2026. Non-dollar stablecoin market figures attributed to Forbes reporting on Dune and Decta data, March 2026. Methodology note: this analysis focuses on the points where contributors disagree and on the market-structure data underlying those disagreements, rather than summarizing each essay in the order presented.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or legal advice.