Outlook

Three transitions shape the near future: from speculation to infrastructure, from the Wild West to regulation, and from isolation to convergence with AI and traditional finance.

This is the most likely trajectory: blockchain as market infrastructure, invisible to the end user. Larry Fink (BlackRock) argues that tokenisation is the next generation of financial markets. The building blocks are falling into place: tokenised funds, instant settlement, digital bonds, with a tipping point expected when the major stock exchanges move part of their settlement onto these rails.

The battleground of the next decade is monetary and geopolitical. The United States has turned dollar stablecoins into an instrument of power (GENIUS Act). Europe is responding on three fronts: regulation (MiCA, whose 1 July 2026 authorisation deadline is sorting the market), private euro stablecoins (Qivalis, EURCV), and the ECB's digital euro, whose legislation is under negotiation in the European Parliament in 2026.

More than 130 countries are exploring a central bank digital currency (CBDC) according to the Atlantic Council, with China already deploying its e-CNY at scale. The open question: programmable public money or regulated private money, which will define the currency of the 21st century?

After the ETFs (2024) and the wave of stock market listings (Circle, Bullish, Gemini, BitGo in 2025; Ledger expected in 2026), the boundary between "crypto" and traditional finance is fading. States themselves are becoming holders (the US strategic reserve, corporate treasuries). The central scenario is no longer the disappearance of blockchain, but its normalisation.

The most discussed crossover for what comes next: AI agents that pay and get paid in stablecoins (machine-to-machine micropayments), provenance registries to authenticate content in the age of deepfakes, decentralised physical infrastructure networks (DePIN: computing, storage and data shared in exchange for tokens). Blockchain could give the agent economy what it lacks: identity, payment and proof.

A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could break the elliptic-curve cryptography that protects today's keys. The horizon remains uncertain (probably not before the 2030s), but the post-quantum migration of blockchains has become a serious undertaking, an unprecedented coordination challenge for networks without a central authority.

Three futures coexist in the debate: normalisation (blockchain becomes regulated financial plumbing, far from cypherpunk ideals); relegation (outside stablecoins and bitcoin, the technology remains a niche); reinvention (a wave of non-financial uses (identity, certification, governance) finally gives it its "Internet moment"). The history of the sector calls for humility: almost no one foresaw the ETFs, the $320 billion of stablecoins, or FTX.