Evidence of that change is mounting. Visa’s stablecoin tracker recorded a trading volume of $6.6 billion with 132.4 million retail-sized transactions (value less than $250) in the last 30 days. Standard Chartered predicts that the volume of stablecoins in circulation will increase nearly sevenfold to around $2 trillion by 2028, and agent-initiated purchases could rise from 1% of e-commerce transactions in 2025 to 12% in 2029. Neobanks account for almost 40% of new bank accounts worldwide and boast more than 1.4 billion users.
One step further
Naveen Marella, head of global payments at Standard Chartered, also expects the traditional account-based model to change. He believes people will eventually use wallets tied to their identities instead of separate bank or brokerage accounts.
“Instead of having bank accounts at individual banks or having separate brokerage accounts, you will have a wallet where you can have cash, some tokenized deposits issued by different banks, stablecoins, tokenized money market funds, cryptocurrencies and funds all in one app, one wallet,” he said, clarifying that this is his personal opinion and not Standard Chartered’s official position.
His predictions do not exclude banks from the system. The wallets he described can store deposits and tokens issued by multiple banks, and those banks will continue to provide much of the funding, infrastructure and control behind the service.
