(Smarter) Infrastructure Powers (Smarter) Economies
The trends shaping the next phase of stablecoin growth—and how we build on them.
Every major economic expansion in history has followed the same pattern: New technologies and new infrastructure unlock new industries and greater production, leading to a bigger, faster, more connected economy. And ultimately to changing societal behavior.
Railroads didn’t just move goods more efficiently over long distances—they created national markets. Highways didn’t just speed up travel—they reshaped commerce and labor, and allowed cities to expand. Electricity didn’t just power machines at home—it enabled entirely new industries. Dams and ports don’t just reroute waterways—they multiply food production and enable global trade.
Infrastructure, visible or not, is what translates new technology into economic growth.
This year, we’ve seen early signs of a similar shift taking shape with another technology: money. Monetary technology doesn’t evolve quickly, but when it does, it goes in step functions. And another one is now underway.
This post explains why it’s just the beginning, with early trends that point to much larger shifts ahead.
Stablecoins in 2025: An Evolutionary Step
This year marked a clear inflection point for stablecoins. They are no longer niche instruments used primarily by traders or crypto-native users. Stablecoins are now settlement assets, payment rails, treasury tools, and liquidity primitives for a rapidly growing share of the global financial system.
In 2025, we saw:
- Explosive growth in stablecoin supply and usage, driven by both crypto-native applications and real-world financial demand.
- Accelerating institutional adoption, with major enterprises, financial services firms, and even banks integrating stablecoins for payments, treasury management, and cross-border transfers.
- Stablecoins becoming infrastructure, rather than just assets—connecting financial markets, protocols and assets more seamlessly in both B2B products and consumer applications.
These trends were largely enabled by regulatory clarity and ongoing technology improvements that scaled the performance of underlying blockchains—opening the floodgates for new digital dollars that have 24/7 uptime, faster settlement and lower transaction fees, anywhere on the planet.
The takeaway is clear: stablecoins are proving their value as digital dollars.
But what we’ve seen in 2025 has been, at best, an early proof point. Many people are still wrapping their heads around stablecoins as a new technology. We have more infrastructure for making stablecoins more accessible and useful—stablecoin issuance platforms, stablecoin-focused blockchains and protocols, increasing support by major payment and fintech products—but it’s still very early stage, and the market is very inefficient.
Early infrastructure development often takes off before a technology is really mature, and inevitably there’s early fragmentation and market confusion (consider early railroads with different gauges, or broadband internet options 25 years ago) before consolidation around winning standards.
This is where stablecoins are today. And these problem statements will define stablecoin trends next year, with the most valuable protocols and solutions yet to come.
What Comes Next: Interoperability and Programmability
If 2025 was about (still very early) mainstream adoption, 2026 will be about capability and scale.
Two themes will define the missing infrastructure that truly unlocks the stablecoin economy:
1. Better Interoperability
Today, stablecoin liquidity is terribly fragmented across blockchains, protocols, custodians, and applications. These dollars exist everywhere onchain, but they do not move freely or seamlessly. In spite of their obvious benefits, using stablecoins today can often feel very clunky and confusing, especially across different protocols and blockchains.
In 2026, that will change.
We will see infrastructure that treats stablecoins as networked liquidity, not siloed balances. Capital will route across chains, platforms, and use cases automatically. Liquidity will be accessed where it is most efficient, not where it happens to be sitting.
Interoperability is not about bridges. It is about turning fragmented dollars into a unified onchain liquidity network.
What Visa has done to enable seamless payments between merchants and countries, someone will do for stablecoins as well.
2. More Powerful Programmability and Automation
DeFi is programmable finance. Stablecoins will finally be truly programmable money.
When dollars move onchain, they gain a new property: they can be instructed to think as they go.
Transactions can encode conditions, responding to market signals and liquidity availability in real time. Payments, rebalancing, settlement, and risk management can be automated at the infrastructure level, encoded into transactions at runtime to ensure perfect execution against specified constraints.
This superpower remains underdeveloped today. But not much longer. Stablecoins will increasingly behave less like static balances and more like active financial agents—capable of executing complex logic without human intervention.
This is not an incremental improvement. It is a structural shift and an evolutionary step in how money works.
An Economy, Not a Technology
We must anticipate something much larger than better payments or faster settlement: the formation of an entirely new economy.
When fiat currency moves onchain, it gains reach, speed, composability, and global accessibility by default. Financial services become modular. Markets become continuous. Capital flows become programmable.
And from these new possibilities, new demand emerges:
- From global users seeking stable access to dollars
- From applications that require always-on liquidity
- From financial systems that operate across borders by default
- From autonomous actors that transact at extremely high frequency
The addressable market for stablecoins is not the market for payments today; it is the demand for reliable monetary flows globally, expanding with the new use cases this technology unlocks.
The result is an economy that is larger, higher velocity, more liquid, and more interconnected than anything that has existed before.
But, like every economy that’s ever come before it, this one needs its own new infrastructure.
Smarter Money Requires Smarter Infrastructure
“Stablecoin infrastructure” comprises many categories, but whether we’re talking about settlement layers, liquidity layers or issuance layers, they must anticipate money moving in new ways. Without truly new and intelligent infrastructure—built for unified and programmable liquidity, automated and higher frequency money movement, and unprecedented scale—the promise of programmable money will remain underutilized.
This is the moment the stablecoin economy is entering.
Smarter money is emerging. Now, it needs smarter infrastructure to match.
The Stablecoin Economy Grows With Eco
Eco is built for this next phase.
Not as a blockchain. Not as a bridge. Not as a single application.
Eco is infrastructure—designed to make stablecoins interoperable, programmable, and efficient at scale. With Eco, stablecoins flow seamlessly and intelligently across networks, applications, and markets.
Because when money becomes smarter, infrastructure must evolve with it.
And when infrastructure evolves, economies grow.
Here’s to 2026 👀
About Eco
Eco powers real-time money movement across every major stablecoin and blockchain, ensuring dollars flow seamlessly across today's fragmented multichain landscape. Leading apps and protocols integrate Eco to power stablecoin flows where best-in-class execution is required — upgrading stablecoin UX throughout their ecosystems and unifying them all in a thriving Stablecoin Economy.
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About Eco Inc.
Eco Inc. is a blockchain company building software that maximizes money’s value. The company is a founding contributor to the Eco Protocol and the builder of Bend. We expect better from our money, and we want you to as well. That’s what drives us every day.