Last week, JPMorgan, one of Wall Street’s longtime crypto skeptics, filed to launch a money market fund on Ethereum. Days later, BlackRock did the same. Within weeks, Goldman Sachs and BNY Mellon announced plans to tokenize money market funds, SoFi issued a stablecoin, and Deutsche Börse poured $200 million into Kraken.
After a decade of dismissing digital markets as a fringe experiment, the world’s most powerful financial institutions suddenly began racing toward the same blockchain rails. What sparked this sudden shift?
They’ve all reached the same conclusion at the same time: Whoever builds the financial infrastructure first gets to set the rules, and owns the future of capital markets.The efficiency and transparency gains of blockchain-based infrastructure are massive. And the operational overhead of the legacy system is costing the industry billions, an estimated $120 billion a year in crossborder payments alone.
Consider a 401k retirement account that sits idle on the weekends. Geopolitical events and earnings news all accumulate and reprice underlying assets when markets open Monday morning. Simply put, that gap and volatility is a structural inefficiency of a system established around business hours. It produces a competitive liability.
Always-on markets, however, eliminate that gap. Someone in Dhaka or Cairo could hold the same treasury exposure as institutional investors in New York. Money that moves faster and more directly means improved capital mobility, reduced fees, and lower friction in the payments system. Wall Street has realized that whoever offers this first gets to dominate the flows.
For a century, the underlying infrastructure powering financial markets ran on stringent institutional controls at every layer of capital flow, with fund amount and geography dictating who could participate. To this day, domestic transfers take days to finalize, and crossborder payments involve multiple banks and fees at each step.
Crypto emerged in opposition to that system, promising to democratize finance through decentralization and disintermediation. Transactions that previously required multiple intermediaries and reconciliation costs can now settle seamlessly.
Most notably, programmable infrastructure enables around the clock trading, and can be accessible to anyone with reliable internet connection. Because onchain systems are inherently global and continuous, over time, they can reduce the gap between sending money locally and internationally.
Today, sending money across borders with a traditional wire transfer takes up to 5 business days to process. The global average cost of a $200 remittance constitutes 6.49% in fees which is over double the UN's 3% target. But sending money with stablecoins costs cents and settles within seconds.
Crossborder payments running efficiently can extend financial inclusion to 1.4 billion unbanked adults. It could also lower costs for hundreds of millions of households that rely on over $685 billion in remittances sent across borders annually. Stablecoins have grown into a major global payments rail, with approximately $280 billion in circulating supply and 40% of crypto transaction volume in 2025.
In emerging economies, like Argentina and Turkey, that have currency instability and limited banking access, stablecoins are primarily used for remittances and dollar access.
Nigeria has emerged as the engine of Sub Saharan Africa's crypto economy, receiving over $205 billion in onchain value between 2024 and 2025, with activity surging after a sharp naira devaluation that pushed inflation above 30%. Stablecoins account for roughly 40% of Nigerian crypto volume and now drive a substantial chunk of retail flows. The demand for dollar denominated alternatives is soaring in high inflation zones.
The advantages of onchain infrastructure are also beginning to extend into equity markets. Traditional equities markets rely on centralized exchanges like the NYSE or Nasdaq, and settle on a T+1 cycle where trades finalize one business day after execution.
But in a tokenized model, ownership is recorded on shared digital infrastructure, allowing for a transparent transaction record, and faster settlement latency, often within seconds. Under the traditional system, billions of dollars stay obstructed in settlement float. This capital could be released for more productive usability through blockchain-based settlements, which Wall Street is attempting to unlock.
The inefficiencies of a century old financial system are being engineered away. As traditional intermediary layers get replaced by code — and as trading hours begin to move around the clock — the core market structure that shaped Wall Street will begin expanding its reach and operational efficiency.
The first institutions to integrate blockchain rails will have the leverage to set the standards for how the next era of finance operates — and who gets to participate.
