Whoever masters the storage of stablecoins holds the future of the banking industry.

Author: Decentralised.Co

Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow

Whoever masters the fundamentals of stablecoins will master the future of banking. For the past 200 years, banks have achieved scale expansion by absorbing deposits; fintech companies, on the other hand, have expanded their business by renting deposits. Now, stablecoins are making deposits portable, and this change is reshaping the landscape of global banking.

Every revolution in the banking industry begins with a change in the way funds are stored.

In the 19th century, banks issued private notes backed by gold, but trust was limited to local and very fragile.

In the 20th century, centralized trust through the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) gave rise to banking giants like JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup.

In the 2010s, fintech companies established new types of banks through digital means, such as Revolut and Nubank.

Today, stablecoins have completely pulled deposits out of banks, enabling them to achieve programmability, borderlessness, and high liquidity on an internet scale.

Fintech companies in the Web2 era have indeed redesigned the interface of banks, but the infrastructure remains unchanged.

For example, Revolut deposits customer funds at Lloyds Bank; Nubank's reserves are ultimately held at the Central Bank of Brazil; Wise still settles through SWIFT. These companies have changed the way people interact with money, but they haven't changed where the money is actually stored.

As a result, among the 15 largest new banks in the world, 9 still have an annual revenue of less than 100 dollars per user.

Web2 fintech companies have created better banking applications, while new types of banks in the crypto space (Crypto neobanks) are building better banking.

These banks operate by holding stablecoin deposits directly on the chain and using these balances as their funding base. Similar to traditional banks, they also deploy deposits, but unlike them, they do not lend through opaque balance sheets; instead, they direct liquidity to transparent on-chain markets, such as tokenized U.S. Treasuries or decentralized finance (DeFi) lending pools.

Users can see the flow of funds and, in some cases, can share the profits.

Programmable finance can achieve the fastest expansion in areas where traditional banks cannot provide services, as it does not require physical branches.

In many regions where banks cannot protect asset value, stablecoin-driven new banks have become the default way to store, pay, and transfer funds.

According to Chainalysis data, the total cryptocurrency inflow in Latin America exceeded $1.5 trillion last year, with Brazil alone reaching $319 billion, of which nearly 90% came from stablecoins used for savings, salaries, and remittances.

As stablecoins enter the mainstream, deposits are also beginning to accumulate outside of the banking system.

Today, over $300 billion flows between wallets and tokenized government bonds in the form of digital dollars. Although these flows have not yet been coordinated, the scale is already quite substantial.

A similar situation occurred in the 19th century: hundreds of “free banks” issued their own notes, each backed by different reserves. This led to frequent bank runs and a collapse of trust, until institutions like J.P. Morgan began to consolidate deposits to restore stability and unify the entire system.

A new type of bank in the crypto space is addressing the same issue by organizing decentralized digital dollar deposits to achieve systematization.

According to ARK Invest's “BIG IDEAS 2025” report, the settlement amount of stablecoins will exceed $15.6 trillion in 2024, which is more than the total of Mastercard and American Express combined.

Platforms that manage these cash flows, such as wallets, exchanges, and new types of crypto banks, are quietly becoming the new settlement layer of global finance.

Protocols like KAST, Tria, and Plasma are becoming the default hubs for stablecoin liquidity, similar to how JPMorgan centralized US dollar clearing or the role of Stripe in the online payment space.

KAST is a new type of payment bank; Tria builds self-custody accounts for users; Plasma provides on-chain infrastructure that drives capital flow.

As a result, giants like BNY Mellon and Visa are competing to integrate stablecoin payment networks, while Stripe is building its own Layer 1 blockchain. They are all chasing the same goal: to control the storage of the digital dollar, as all other businesses in the financial sector are built on this.

Traditional banks earn a few percentage points of profit by investing deposits in loans and securities, but they rarely pass on the profits to users.

By tokenizing the dollar, profits are no longer hidden beneath the bank's balance sheet. Users can see in real time the sources and destinations of profits, and even share profits directly.

The total amount of global commercial deposits is approximately 87 trillion USD.

As more and more funds migrate onto the blockchain, this capital will no longer require intermediaries to transfer or earn yields, but rather demand efficiency. And whoever can build these on-chain payment networks will dominate the next round of banking transformation.