Stablecoins are a first step toward global, on-chain financial markets

The next major disruption in global finance isn’t coming from a new app or user interface. It’s not coming from a new kind of derivative or shaving a millisecond off of trading speeds. It’s coming from the seismic shift in how we define and transfer value, starting with money itself.

Congress recently passed the bipartisan GENIUS Act, which provides regulatory oversight and clarity for stablecoins — digital dollars backed 1:1 by fiat that will be issued under the oversight of U.S. financial regulators. This is a genuine step change in how value is transferred. 

Stablecoins won’t just challenge the dominance of PayPal or Venmo. They are poised to transform the global financial system, competing with networks like SWIFT and SEPA. Because the vast majority of stablecoins will be backed by U.S. Treasury bills, they will have the full faith and credit behind them — essentially making them narrow banks. Fintech firms are building tech that will offer faster, cheaper and more accessible cross-border transactions enabled by stablecoins. And while that alone would be revolutionary, it’s just the beginning.

This is the starting gun for a generational shift in how financial systems operate, and it’s essential that banks take note. Once you tokenize money, you open the door to tokenizing everything else. Equities, bonds, real estate, invoices, art. This changes not only how assets move, but how they’re traded, collateralized and valued. Suddenly, we’re talking about global, 24/7 markets for any asset class imaginable — something the current system isn’t built for, but desperately needs.

Once real-world assets are tokenized, it opens the door to long-overdue structural changes to public capital markets in the United States. In just the last 50 years, the value of labor has only decreased — making it harder to convert labor into capital — while the upside of capital markets is increasingly limited to the very wealthy and well connected. 

IPOs allow companies to access cheap capital and market feedback, while everyday Americans benefit in the upside of accessing the next generation of valuable companies in their early days. 

Despite these benefits, IPOs have continued to drop over the last 20 years — with almost 700 IPOs in 1996 to less than 100 in 2024. High-profile companies postpone listings even as they mature well beyond the stage when firms once went public, turning what might have been a Series C milestone a decade ago into a Series G moment or later.

Private capital is overtaking IPOs because the traditional process is broken. Listing costs remain high, despite a huge decline in the cost of trading in the age of online exchanges, and the process is slow. The existing underwriting process has an increasingly difficult time pricing assets — with two perfect recent examples of this in Circle’s IPO leaving $1.76 billion on the table and Figma’s IPO leaving $3 billion behind — and investor access is largely limited to the biggest institutions. That leaves fewer companies raising public capital and fewer investors participating in early stage growth.

Tokenization doesn’t just offer a workaround; it offers a fix. By putting capital formation and equity issuance on-chain, companies could raise funds from a global pool of investors and dramatically reduce the friction and cost of going public. It’s an opportunity to revive public markets with the transparency, efficiency and inclusivity they once promised. It also allows us to reset the potential economic upsides, both to those who want to launch new assets and to those who want to invest, Even SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce has acknowledged the gap and floated a safe-harbor exemption to let companies pilot tokenized offerings under clear guardrails, and the agency has convened roundtables on on-chain equity. 

This also isn’t just theory. Superstate recently launched a new platform that allows regulated public shares to trade directly on widely used blockchain capital markets. The Opening Bell platform operates through a registered SEC transfer agent, making it fully compliant with existing securities law. 

For the first time, the technology is in place, companies are ready and regulators appear poised to chart a path that adapts market rules to this new reality. We are on the cusp of offering companies a programmable, transparent and globally accessible route to raise funds without relying on underwriters, lengthy roadshows or high-cost intermediaries. At the same time, we can enable investors to access regulated equity using the same digital tools that now power much of today’s financial activity. Which is why it’s no surprise that traditional institutions — BlackRock, JPMorgan and others — are already paying close attention.

Of course, this won’t happen overnight. Regulation, infrastructure and market trust all need to mature. But the pieces are rapidly coming together. Regulated stablecoins are one of the most promising developments in crypto today precisely because they’re usable, scalable, and close to being integrated into the systems people and businesses already use. If we get them right, everything else becomes possible.

The stakes are high not just for innovation, but for U.S. economic competitiveness. If the U.S. falls behind in establishing a regulated framework for stablecoins, other jurisdictions will move faster — and define the rules. That would be a mistake. The U.S. has the chance to lead, to build the foundation for a more open and interoperable financial system, and to bring the best of blockchain into the mainstream economy.

Stablecoins are not the end — they are the entry point. It’s just the first step in creating global, on-chain public financial markets that are faster, fairer and more inclusive than anything we’ve seen before.