BNY Mellon just joined Citi, Bernstein and a chorus of Wall Street analysts calling for $3.6 trillion in digital money by 2030.
The bet is that stablecoins and tokenized deposits will become core markets, replacing friction between correspondent banks and lubricating corporate treasury operations.
The question: Does that world exist outside of a slide deck, and if it becomes a reality, will it increase the liquidity of Bitcoin and Ethereum or lock it into permissioned silos?
BNY Mellon’s November 10 report predicts a value of $3.6 trillion by 2030, divided between roughly $1.5 trillion in fiat stablecoins and $2.1 trillion in tokenized bank deposits and money market funds.
Citi assumed a base case of $1.6 trillion stablecoins, with a bull case of $3.7 trillion and a bear case that would collapse to $500 billion if regulation and integration stagnate.
Bernstein called for $2.8 trillion by 2028, driven by DeFi, payments and remittances.
JPMorgan reversed course in July, lowering projections and warning that mainstream adoption is overhyped, projecting a reach of less than $500 billion by 2028, without clearer use cases and regulatory clarity.
However, the global market capitalization for stablecoins at the time of writing is approximately $304 billion, with over 90% of the market pegged to the US dollar, dominated by USDT and USDC.
Usage remains heavily focused on crypto infrastructure and is applied to trading, perpetuals and as DeFi collateral. Payments and real-world settlements are still a minority share. Wall Street is effectively betting on a five- to twelvefold expansion in five years.
What needs to go right in terms of banking, compliance and user experience to get there, and what does that mean for the liquidity of Bitcoin and Ethereum?
What needs to be done in banking
Three ingredients are non-negotiable on a multi-trillion dollar scale.
First, regulated issuance at scale. The GENIUS Act, passed in 2025, establishes licensing requirements for stablecoin issuers, mandates 100% reserve backing in cash and short-term U.S. Treasury securities, and establishes audits and anti-money laundering compliance.
It is designed to allow banks and qualified non-banks to issue dollar stablecoins in large quantities. The EU’s MiCA framework, Hong Kong’s stablecoin regime and other jurisdictions now provide clear but sometimes restrictive rules that Citi and BNY cite as conditions for their operations.
Britain’s Bank of England has imposed caps on systemically important stablecoin holdings and reserve requirements, including a 40% central bank requirement.
The $3.6 trillion forecast assumes that the US framework scales rather than restricts issuers, and that at least a few G10 jurisdictions allow bank-grade stablecoins and tokenized deposits that can be held on corporate balance sheets, money market funds, and central counterparty clearinghouses.
If major jurisdictions copy the Bank of England’s caps model, the predictions will break.
Second: the participation of banks that goes beyond fintechs. What predictions like those from BNY and Citi implicitly assume is that major banks issue tokenized deposits that are used as collateral, for intraday liquidity, and for wholesale payments.
Stablecoins and tokenized cash are becoming the standard for repo and securities lending, clearing margins for derivatives and clearing corporate government bonds.
If banks remain on the sidelines and only a handful of crypto-native issuers scale up, the market will not reach its full trillion-dollar potential. Instead, it remains a larger, but still niche, market, valued at $400 billion to $800 billion.
Third, a seamless bridge to existing rails. BNY’s language makes this explicit: blockchains integrate with existing rails and do not replace them.
To justify $3.6 trillion, the market needs T+0 settlement between bank ledgers and public chains, interoperability standards, and tokenized cash on bank chains that can settle one-to-one with public stablecoins.
Without that plumbing, most tokenized cash remains experimental or in silos.
Compliance and UX are the silent kings.
To make the big numbers work, institutional money needs bank-grade Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) infrastructure, including allow lists, address screening, and detailed block lists for the major stablecoins.
GENIUS-like regimes, MiCA and Hong Kong’s framework should converge enough for a global company to use the same tokens across all regions.
Transparent reserves are also important. Citi and BNY’s forecasts both assume fully reserved, boring portfolios, with government bonds and repos, without Terra-style algorithmic experimentation.
Vulnerability risk arises when compliance design pushes everything into approved walled gardens. DeFi and crypto-native usage are becoming an afterthought, diluting the impact on Bitcoin and Ethereum’s liquidity.
The user experience should look frictionless. Retail and small business wallets require stablecoin payments within the same apps people already use, such as Cash App, PayPal, and neobanks, with self-custody options.
Enterprise tools require ERP and treasury systems that natively support stablecoins.
Rails shouldn’t suck: virtually free, sub-second layer-2 and high-throughput layer-1 like Solana and Base as standard issuance and payment rails.
Visa’s recent attempt to position stablecoins as invisible settlement media within card, credit and financing products is exactly this story.
If people still have to consider gas rates, chain IDs, and bridges in 2028, the $3.6 trillion appeal is a fantasy.
Three likely scenarios
Integration Max represents the BNY style bullish case. GENIUS is fully implemented, MiCA is working and Hong Kong and Singapore are friends.
Four to six global banks issue tokenized deposits and money market funds. The user experience is often invisible as stablecoins will be integrated into banks, payment service providers and card networks.
Digital cash and stablecoins reached roughly $1.5 trillion in public and permissioned stablecoins plus $2.1 trillion in tokenized bank money.
Much of it is wholesale activity and is in intraday settlement and collateral pools. The stress point is that the headlines seem huge, but a significant portion is not fungible with DeFi and only partially interacts with Bitcoin and Ethereum.
The rail fragmentation reflects Citi’s base case or JPMorgan’s caution. The US is friendly, the EU and UK are cautious, and many emerging markets are wary. Banks experiment but remain small. User experience and compliance issues remain non-trivial.
Stablecoins are expected to fall between $600 billion and $1.6 trillion by 2030. This is the range where the predictions are plausible and the impact on Bitcoin and Ethereum liquidity is tangible and visible; however, the “$3.6 trillion market revolution” is marketing.
A regulatory shock is a bear case for Citi. A major depeg or scandal leads to a regulatory overreaction. Hard ceilings such as the Bank of England model are imitated. Stablecoins remain below $500 billion and remain primarily a crypto trading tool.
What it means for the liquidity of Bitcoin and Ethereum
Today, with a stablecoin market cap of approximately $304 billion, most Bitcoin and Ethereum spots and derivatives are quoted in terms of USDT and USDC.
Stablecoins bankroll perpetuals, basic transactions and loans in centralized and decentralized finance.
If the market reaches BNY’s world and even 30% to 50% of stablecoins remain on open public chains and composable with decentralized exchanges, perpetuals and credit markets, then the open-crypto stablecoin float for Bitcoin and Ethereum could reach $450 billion to $750 billion.
That’s 1.5 to 2.5 times greater dollar liquidity, which tightens spreads, increases market depth and allows larger block flows with less slippage.
Smaller spreads and lower volatility at the micro level mean more capital for market makers and less friction entering and exiting Bitcoin and Ethereum.
More leverage follows; a larger pool of stablecoin collateral allows for more perpetuals and credits, which can amplify both rallies and liquidations.
However, much of the $3.6 trillion could bypass Bitcoin and Ethereum entirely. BNY explicitly counts tokenized deposits and money market funds that are on authorized chains, where assets cannot be freely exchanged into Bitcoin or Ethereum, and uses know-your-customer eligibility lists to gain access.
A world could emerge where digital cash worth over $2 trillion is tokenized. Yet there is only a few hundred billion dollars in the free-flowing stablecoins that actually provide liquidity for Bitcoin and Ethereum.
A digital cash figure of $3.6 trillion is bullish for Bitcoin and Ethereum liquidity to the extent that these tokens can be included in the same pools as perpetuals, decentralized exchanges and prime brokers.
If they are confined in walled gardens, they are plumbing, not fuel. Institutional agencies and on-chain credit markets may prefer fully backed stablecoins and tokenized treasuries over Bitcoin and Ethereum as collateral, reducing structural demand.
Conversely, smoother stablecoin rails reduce friction for new money flowing into stablecoins and then Bitcoin and Ethereum, and deep, regulated stablecoin pools make it easier for ETFs and funds to arbitrage and hedge.
The $3.6 trillion target is plausible, but only if banking infrastructure, compliance design and user experience are aligned across multiple jurisdictions.
For Bitcoin and Ethereum, the bullish value is not the size of digital dollars, but the number of them that can be in the same pool.
The prediction is based on integration and not disruption. If that integration shuts down the permissionless layer, Wall Street gets its digital money infrastructure and crypto gets a larger but still limited trading pool.
