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What It Takes to Build a Secure, Scalable eWallet: Key Considerations for Fintechs & Banks

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What It Takes to Build a Secure, Scalable eWallet: Key Considerations for Fintechs & Banks

eWallets are now a core part of how financial services are delivered, not an add-on feature.

Plus, industry data shows that digital wallets are expected to account for over 50% of global e-commerce payment transactions, thereby highlighting how quickly customers are shifting toward mobile-first financial experiences.

For financial businesses like yours, this evolution brings both opportunity and responsibility.

Launching an eWallet today goes beyond enabling digital payments. You must handle increasing transaction volumes, safeguard sensitive financial data, meet regulatory requirements, and ensure consistent performance as their platforms scale.

And any gaps in security or system design can affect operational stability, regulatory compliance, and customer confidence.

That’s where this blog comes in.

This blog explores what it takes to build secure and scalable eWallet mobile money solutions. It covers the role of security architecture, compliance considerations, and the essential functional features financial institutions should plan for to support long-term growth and reliability.

Explore now!

You manage a digital ecosystem where speed and security define customer satisfaction. You must stay ahead of rising customer expectations and growing transaction volumes. And here’s why you need to stay ahead:

The rising demand for faster and safer digital transactions

You deal with customers who demand instant results. They expect every transaction to move in real-time, whether they send money locally, pay a merchant, or top up their account.

You also see how the rise in fraud pushes you to build stronger security walls. Lastly, you need security that protects your users without slowing them down.

How customer trust shapes your digital ecosystem

You build trust through transparency, reliability, and consistent performance. But you could lose that trust with a single failed transaction or a small delay.

And you cannot risk that. You must deliver an eWallet that stays fast even during peak hours. Also, you must show users that their money and data stay safe.

Core security foundations you must build into your eWallet

You need a strong foundation before you add features or scale your digital payment software. So, let’s look at those security measures:

Multi-layer authentication and access control

You must protect every user account with multiple security layers. And for that, you can use PINs, biometrics, passwords, and device verification to reduce risks. You can also manage role-based access control for your internal teams.

This way, you can give access only where necessary. You prevent breaches by limiting who can reach sensitive data.

End-to-end data encryption across all touchpoints

You safeguard every piece of data that moves across your system. You encrypt information end-to-end, from the moment a user opens the app to the moment a transaction settles.

Plus, you can ensure no third party can access or alter your data. Moreover, encryption protects your system and strengthens customer trust.

Fraud detection, risk scoring, and real-time monitoring

You can fight fraud with real-time intelligence in your white label mobile Wallet. You use AI models, risk scoring mechanisms, and monitoring tools to identify suspicious behavior. So now, you can flag unusual transactions instantly.

Also, you can stop fraud attempts before they cause damage. You protect revenue, compliance, and customer confidence.

Regulatory compliance (KYC, AML, PCI-DSS, GDPR)

You must follow strict rules to operate legally and responsibly. And you must meet KYC and AML requirements to verify identities and track suspicious activity. You follow PCI-DSS standards to secure card payments.

This way, you can show your customers that you respect their data privacy through GDPR. On the other hand, compliance helps you avoid penalties and maintain trust with regulators and customers.

Key functional features of an eWallet to consider for your business

You must offer features that solve real customer needs while supporting your long-term roadmap. Here are the features that a top-notch eWallet should have:

Seamless onboarding with automated KYC

You can shorten the onboarding journey for your customers with automated eKYC. This way, you can allow your customers to sign up, submit documents, and complete verification within minutes.

This further reduces your team’s manual work and speeds up account activation.

Real-time payments, transfers, and settlements

You can control your customer satisfaction by controlling transaction speed. In your ewallet, you can offer instant wallet-to-wallet, wallet-to-bank, and peer-to-peer transfers.

This way, you keep settlements fast and accurate. You reduce downtimes and delays that frustrate customers.

Merchant payments and QR-based transactions

You can support merchants and customers with simple payment methods. You have to offer QR scans, tap-and-pay, and direct merchant payments. You support small and large businesses with equal efficiency.

Furthermore, you can help your merchants operate smoothly and accept payments without friction.

Bill payments, airtime, and value-added services

You help customers manage daily tasks inside your eWallet. You allow them to pay utility bills, recharge mobiles, buy subscriptions, or access local services. You improve retention by offering value beyond money transfer.

Wallet-to-bank and bank-to-wallet interoperability

You give your users flexibility by offering this feature. Here’s how: You allow them to move funds between wallets and bank accounts with ease. You support interoperable payments across networks, operators, and banking partners. You create a seamless and open digital ecosystem.

Conclusion

Building an eWallet that can grow sustainably requires a clear focus on security, scalability, and operational readiness from the very beginning.

As digital payments continue to expand, institutions must support higher transaction volumes while maintaining strong controls around data protection, fraud prevention, and regulatory compliance.

Plus, industry forecasts indicate that digital wallets will handle a significant share of global payment volumes in the coming years, thereby making platform reliability and resilience increasingly important.

For your business, the real challenge lies in balancing speed to market with long-term stability. Decisions made during the design phase, around architecture, compliance workflows, and core functionality, directly influence how well an eWallet performs as user adoption grows.

By prioritizing robust security frameworks, scalable infrastructure, and well-integrated payment capabilities, you can build eWallet platforms that earn customer trust, adapt to regulatory change, and support future business growth with confidence.

Crypto’s political power supercharged with $193 million in Fairshake, thanks to new cash

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Crypto’s political power supercharged with $193 million in Fairshake, thanks to new cash

With another $25 million from Ripple and $24 million from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the crypto industry’s chief campaign-finance fund, the Fairshake political action committee, is amassing unprecedented firepower for this year’s midterm congressional elections.

The crypto super PAC that exploded onto the scene in the last political cycle is set to report it has $193 million on-hand, according to a Wednesday statement. If it were to spend that money this year, it would likely stand among the top five PACs in the country, rivaling the 2024 tallies of the parties’ own top campaign-finance organizations. It was already ranked as the sixth biggest money-raiser among PACs in the previous cycle.

Since 2024, the levels of cash Fairshake and its affiliated PACs devoted to the election of pro-crypto members of Congress has been an undeniable element in the level of political support the industry has been able to muster. The lawmakers who are deciding the legislative fate of the industry are well aware that those supporting friendly legislation will probably benefit from considerable campaign help while those opposing will face potentially millions of dollars in opposition ads.

“With the midterms approaching, we are united behind our mission, with Fairshake continuing to oppose anti-crypto politics and support pro-crypto leaders,” Fairshake spokesman Josh Vlasto said in a statement. “The time is now to protect consumers, cultivate American innovation and open up the financial system to more Americans.”

As Fairshake announces this war chest that outpaces the amounts it gathered in the last elections, members of the Senate are preparing for a Thursday hearing over the industry’s most important legislative initiative. The Senate Agriculture Committee is set to consider amendments and potentially advance the crypto market structure bill, but industry insiders are expecting it to proceed only along partisan lines, without Democratic support.

The negotiations on the bill had so far been unable to find compromise over a number of points that Democrats had requested. Two of them — a ban on senior government officials (including the U.S. president) profiting from the crypto industry and a requirement that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission be fully staffed with commissioners before policy moves forward — have received pushback from the White House.

Fairshake aided more than 50 candidates’ wins in the previous congressional cycle, sometimes devoting tens of millions in the most pivotal Senate battles. In one of those, former Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who’d led the Senate Banking Committee and never allowed crypto legislation to advance, was defeated.

After those elections, in which the PAC straddled a fairly even line between the numbers it supported in each party, it continued to engage in special elections as they emerged, adding a handful of further crypto supporters to the congressional roster. As a super PAC, it spends only on outside ads that aren’t directly affiliated with the candidates’ campaigns, and Fairshake’s ads rarely mention crypto at all.

Even without Fairshake spending money, yet, Washington is aware of the cash stockpile. Apart from the major new additions from Ripple and a16z, Coinbase had also contributed an additional $25 million last year. Those three companies have been the primary drivers of this effort, which isn’t the only one from the industry.

In September, the new Fellowship PAC announced it had $100 million in commitments for contributing to pro-crypto candidates that will aid President Donald Trump’s digital assets agenda, declaring the super PAC’s “mission is defined by transparency and trust.” But it has declined to identify its supporters or to respond to requests for information about its plans, and nothing has yet been made public about its finances other than its federal registration.

The brothers behind Gemini, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, also announced $21 million last year for another super PAC, the Digital Freedom Fund, to support Republican candidates and combat the expectations that Democrats will win a majority in at least one of the chambers of Congress this year.

In current betting on Polymarket, the prediction markets give Democrats a 79% chance to get the majority in the House of Representatives, which would mean they’d control the committee chairmanships and the floor agenda.

The online bets put the Democrats at a 36% chance of winning the Senate. But the party only needs one chamber to get leverage over crypto legislation next year, including the market structure bill, if it hasn’t yet passed.

Read More: Fairshake: Crypto Titans Use Old-School Dollars to Turn Tide in Congress

BTC stuck at $89,000 as gold surges to fresh record

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BTC stuck at $89,000 as gold surges to fresh record

The bull market in gold ratcheted into a higher gear on Wednesday, with the yellow metal soaring 6% to above $5,400 per ounce for the first time.

Silver and platinum posted even larger percentage gains, but gold, with a market capitalization somewhere in the $40 trillion area, was surely the standout asset.

A sizable chunk of gold’s gains came following comments from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell at a press conference following the central bank’s universally expected decision to hold its benchmark fed funds rate range steady at 3.50%.3.75%.

Asked directly about the rapid ascent in gold and silver prices, Powell cautioned against over-interpreting the rally as a macro signal. “Don’t take too much message into [that] macroeconomically,” he said, adding that while some may argue the Fed is losing credibility, “it is simply not the case.”

“If you look at where inflation expectations are, our credibility is right where it needs to be,” Powell said. Gold bulls apparently thought otherwise.

Whither bitcoin?

Bitcoin BTC$88,841.00 bulls, meanwhile, continued to watch from the sidelines as real gold yet again vastly outperformed its digital counterpart. Prices traded in an excruciatingly tight range throughout the day, edging lower following the Fed decision and recently trading at $89,000, flat over the past 24 hours.

Prices across the rest of the major cryptos followed similar action.

U.S. stocks were also little changed on Wednesday as investors awaited earnings from the likes of Microsoft, Meta and Tesla.

Is bitcoin losing its digital gold edge?

Despite the macro tailwinds often touted as benefiting bitcoin as “digital gold” — including a weaker U.S. dollar and rising geopolitical risk — BTC has been struggling recently, while gold is now up more than 90% over the past 12 months.

The contrast casts a shadow over bitcoin’s supposed role as a macro hedge, especially as the assets it was designed to rival are outperforming, James Harris, CEO of yield platform Tesseract Group, argued.

“We’re clearly in a market regime where crypto is underperforming some of the very assets it was designed to supplant,” said Harris in a note. “Part of that outperformance is almost certainly a repricing of geopolitical and fiscal risk, but it also reflects gold clawing back some relative market share from bitcoin.”

Robert Kiyosaki Regrets Selling Bitcoin, Says Window Open to Buy More BTC

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Robert Kiyosaki Regrets Selling Bitcoin, Says Window Open to Buy More BTC

Robert Kiyosaki expressed regret over selling bitcoin, calling it a mistake as he reaffirmed plans to accumulate more BTC and hard assets amid currency debasement concerns and long-term distrust of fiat money. Robert Kiyosaki Confirms Bitcoin Conviction After Calling Sale a Mistake Rich Dad Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki shared on social media platform X […]

Ripple Sees Bullish Path to $1 Trillion in Institutional Crypto Holdings

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Ripple Sees Bullish Path to $1 Trillion in Institutional Crypto Holdings

Ripple sees regulated stablecoins anchoring trillion-dollar digital asset markets as institutions accelerate adoption, pushing crypto from speculation into core financial infrastructure and setting the stage for widespread enterprise integration. Ripple Anticipates Trillion-Dollar Digital Asset Markets Anchored by Regulated Stablecoins Momentum across digital assets is intensifying as institutions rush toward full-scale deployment. Ripple President Monica Long […]

Maximise Return on Equity Through Data Mediation

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Maximise Return on Equity Through Data Mediation

Digital banking technology provider audax Financial Technology is challenging traditional financial institutions to look beyond the balance sheet to secure their future in an increasingly integrated global economy. As banks struggle with low return on equity (ROE) and the weight of legacy systems, the evolution from being simple providers of capital to active mediators of data is becoming a commercial necessity.

Kelvin Tan, CEO of audax Financial Technology, believes that while embedded finance has been a topic of discussion for several years, the industry is still in the early stages of a long-term transition. Although high-growth markets like China and Korea have demonstrated execution at scale, much of the global banking sector is only beginning to understand the model’s true potential for customer acquisition and servicing efficiency.

“The reality of the matter is it’s only been about five years where you have some level of embedded finance execution globally,” explained Tan. “If this was a child, we are talking about year two, where the baby has learned to jog a little bit and move a little bit faster than stumbling around as a toddler.”

For most retail and SME banking operations, the primary driver behind adopting embedded finance is the urgent need to address ROE. Investors increasingly compare banking returns to those of technology companies, placing pressure on executives to acquire and service customers at a fraction of traditional costs. By plugging into external ecosystems—ranging from ride-hailing apps to social media platforms—banks can scale their reach without the overhead of physical infrastructure or expensive direct marketing.

However, the next frontier of digital growth lies in what happens after a bank successfully integrates into these ecosystems. As financial institutions gain access to vast streams of data from non-banking partners, the opportunity shifts from simple underwriting to the creation of entirely new asset classes.

Tan suggests that the ultimate role for a modern bank is as a trusted custodian of identity and a mediator of information. “What happens when you have access to all that data in your own infrastructure? Could you not create data as a product set in and of itself?” he asked. “I see banks evolving from being a provider of balance sheet and services to a mediator of data, if done well. They have the security, they have the trust element, and they have access to data if they run embedded finance at scale.”

This transition requires more than just a surface-level digital transformation. Many institutions remain held together by aging infrastructure and programming languages like COBOL, which present significant risks as the pool of developers capable of maintaining them continues to shrink. Furthermore, traditional incentive structures often prioritise short-term returns over the decade-long investment required for true modernisation.

The industry is now reaching a point where the window for change is narrowing. Financial institutions that fail to modernise their cloud and data infrastructure within the next few years risk operational failure. This sense of urgency is particularly visible in Singapore, where government policy and a high concentration of talent have fostered a progressive fintech ecosystem.

Regional interoperability is also accelerating, particularly across Southeast Asia. Projects like Project Nexus are pushing for interoperable payment rails, while private enterprises are already creating cross-border wallet connectivity. Tan noted that while requirements still vary by country due to fragmented data sets and rails, the move toward full interoperability for payments and eventually credit is inevitable.

As the industry looks toward 2026, the focus is shifting away from the initial hype of artificial intelligence toward practical tools that drive productivity. While AI is already making development and marketing teams leaner, its role in secure production environments remains complex. Instead, the rise of stablecoins as alternative payment rails is emerging as a more immediate topic for global schemes.

The potential for stablecoins to settle transactions in real time provides a viable alternative to traditional global payment rails, forcing a fundamental discussion about how money moves across borders. While these changes may take years to fully mature, the groundwork is being laid today through the integration of banking services into every facet of the digital experience.

Ultimately, the success of a bank will depend on its ability to move beyond its traditional boundaries. By embracing the role of a data mediator and leveraging embedded finance to solve the ROE challenge, financial institutions can remain relevant in an economy where they are often the invisible infrastructure behind a third-party user interface.

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Coinbase Backs Trump Accounts, Explores Bitcoin For Kids

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Coinbase Backs Trump Accounts, Explores Bitcoin For Kids

Coinbase announced plans to participate in President Donald Trump’s newly launched Trump Accounts program — and is exploring delivering its matching contribution in Bitcoin rather than traditional financial assets. 

In a social media post today, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong indicated the company intends to support the initiative within Coinbase and with its employees. Armstrong wants to match the federal government’s $1,000 seed money for eligible children and wants to do it in Bitcoin. 

“Starting to invest early is more important than ever. Trump Accounts  is a great move to kick-start financial security + literacy for children,” Armstrong posted. “We’re proud to join @POTUS’s initiative by matching the $1k from the U.S. Treasury for all eligible children of Coinbase employees. Hopefully we can pay the $1k in Bitcoin.”

What are Trump Accounts?

Trump Accounts are one of the provisions that came out of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a major legislative package championed by President Trump. 

The initiative automatically qualifies U.S. citizen babies born between January 1, 2025, and December 31, 2028 for a $1,000 government deposit into a tax-advantaged investment account in their name.

Unlike traditional savings vehicles, these accounts must be invested in low-fee, diversified U.S. stock index funds managed by private financial firms and are locked until the beneficiary turns 18. 

At that point, the funds can be used for education, home purchases, or starting a business, with parents, employers, friends, and charities able to make additional contributions — subject to annual limits — to enhance long-term growth, the administration said. 

Corporate support and match programs

Coinbase follows other major financial institutions that are already lining up behind the policy. Both Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase have committed to matching the government’s $1,000 contribution for eligible children of employees, with additional perks like pretax payroll deductions to ease participation.

Philanthropists and cultural figures are also joining the effort. Rapper Nicki Minaj pledged contributions to support Trump Accounts for children in underserved communities, emphasizing financial literacy and generational opportunity.

Parents will be able to open Trump Accounts starting July 2026, with sign-ups and documentation processes opening in the spring. 

Meanwhile, participation from firms like Coinbase and traditional banks signals that private industry is ready to embed the program into their own company benefits.

World token jumps as Sam Altman reportedly eyes a biometric social network to kill off bots

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World token jumps as Sam Altman reportedly eyes a biometric social network to kill off bots

World Network (formerly Worldcoin) WLD token surged more than 27% on Wednesday after a Forbes report linked the controversial crypto project to OpenAI’s broader effort to fight bots online.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants to build a “biometric social network” to help online platforms verify users and weed out AI-generated accounts, Forbes reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Sources familiar with the project’s development told Forbes that the OpenAI team has considered using Apple’s Face ID or the World Orb, which scans a person’s iris to provide a unique identity.

World is the crypto project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and raised $135 million in a token sale to a16z and Bain Capital Crypto last year. The core premise of the project is World ID, a decentralised and privacy-focused identity system that uses the orb, a custom-built biometric device that scans users’ irises and generates unique identifiers in compliance with privacy standards.

WLD token price surge (CoinDesk data)

The token spiked shortly after the report, briefly outperforming most major cryptocurrencies, even though it didn’t confirm any formal collaboration between OpenAI and World.

The World Network has drawn both curiosity and criticism since its launch. While the project claims to have verified millions of people worldwide, it has also faced regulatory pushback, including a temporary suspension in Kenya and inquiries in U.K. on how it processes personal data.

Still, the idea of tying biometric verification to online identity continues to gain traction, especially as generative AI tools flood social media with spam and misinformation.

Read more: The Untold Story of Worldcoin’s Launch: Inside the Orb

Meta stock jumps 10% after earnings beat and massive AI spending plan

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Meta stock jumps 10% after earnings beat and massive AI spending plan

Meta shares jumped 10% in post-market trading on Wednesday after the company reported stronger-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings and outlined plans to sharply increase spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Meta reported fourth quarter revenue of $59.89 billion up 24% year over year and net income of $22.77 billion up 9%. Earnings came in at $8.88 per diluted share for the quarter. Both revenue and profit marked quarterly records for the company.

Meta said it plans to increase capital expenditures in 2026 to between $115 billion and $135 billion, compared with $72.2 billion in 2025. Chief Financial Officer Susan Li said the increase would be driven by investments supporting Meta Superintelligence Labs and the company’s core advertising business.

Despite the jump in spending, Meta expects operating income in 2026 to exceed 2025 levels. The company forecast first-quarter 2026 revenue of $53.5 billion to $56.5 billion, with infrastructure costs and technical hiring as the main drivers of expense growth.

Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said Meta delivered strong business performance in 2025 and is focused on advancing personal superintelligence globally in 2026.

Meta stock was trading near $738 in post-market action following the release.

The Next Alpha Is Onchain

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The Next Alpha Is Onchain

Opinion by: Annabelle Huang, co-founder and CEO of Altius Labs

For centuries, the world’s traders and speculators have pursued one thing above all else: alpha. Not just returns, but an edge — a structural advantage that lets them capture value before everyone else. In modern times, they’ve achieved this through speed and precision, often beating the competition by mere nanoseconds.

As markets migrate to blockchain rails, however, the nature of alpha itself is shifting. Future alpha won’t come from co-locating servers next to an exchange or shaving nanoseconds off fiber routes. Rather, it will emerge from using onchain infrastructure in unique ways.

High-frequency trading (HFT) firms built empires out of physical ingenuity. Jump bought real estate near the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s data center in Aurora so it could receive and transmit faster than its competitors. Beyond location, FPGA chips, custom hardware and private fiber networks have all served the same purpose: to give trading firms as many extra advantages as possible.

In that world, alpha was a hardware arms race. The companies that engineered faster connections and smarter routing dominated. As trading increasingly moves into blockchain-based environments, physical constraints dissolve. There is no co-location in decentralized finance, given the decentralized setup. You can’t build your firm right next to, say, a Uniswap server, and even if you could, it wouldn’t matter.

Mastering the digital infrastructure

Today’s validators, sequencers and block producers are the blockchain equivalents of the old matching engines at the CME or Nasdaq. The firms that can influence or optimize this layer will gain the kind of structural edge that once came from owning customized trading hardware.

Mastering the new onchain mechanics can take various forms. For example, using the same HFT tricks on a centralized exchange (CEX) and running validators for a decentralized exchange (DEX) enables you to take advantage of price gaps between the two platforms before the public even has a chance to spot them.

Latency arbitrage also has its blockchain analogue in the form of maximal extractable value (MEV), meaning the profit opportunity created by reordering, including or excluding transactions within a block. We’re speaking, in both cases, about a kind of front-running, but the methods rely on completely different infrastructures. Protocols like Flashbots and Skip have formalized MEV into structured, auction-based systems that look eerily similar to the smart order routers of equities trading.

One kind of MEV strategy is the sandwich attack (explained here). Source: Cowswap

The upshot is that high-frequency trading firms have the opportunity to own the rails themselves. In traditional markets, they had to rent access to exchanges, paying fees for co-location and data feeds. Onchain, they can upgrade the entire system’s mechanics by running validators, designing low-latency remote procedure call nodes, participating in governance or creating sequencers for rollups, to name a few ideas.

Related: Institutional adoption faces blockchain bottleneck

The alpha comes from building and optimizing the infrastructure that everyone else depends on, rather than just exploiting it.

In many ways, this could blur the old boundary between market maker, exchange and infrastructure provider. The firms that understand how to operate across all three layers will shape onchain market microstructure for decades to come. This is an area where high-frequency trading firms really do have an advantage because they already possess the engineering culture, the capital and the risk frameworks to navigate this kind of terrain.

Early movers are experimenting

The bridge between high-frequency trading and blockchain infrastructure is already forming, and the names involved are familiar.

Jump has already leveraged its HFT expertise to build a high-performance validator client for Solana called Firedancer. Another project backed by Jump, DoubleZero, is aiming to monetize a global private fiber-optic and subsea cable network that Jump has built in-house to reduce latency and increase blockchain bandwidth beyond what the public internet offers.

Meanwhile, Cumberland is contributing real-time crypto market data for the Pyth Network, a decentralized oracle network. The firm also supports crypto infrastructure projects through its Web3 incubator, Cumberland Labs.

Jane Street recently hired crypto unicorn Copper’s former head of infrastructure architecture, Paul Smith. This may be a hint that the HFT firm — which purchased and sold more than $110 billion in cryptocurrencies (including stablecoins) in 2024 — is interested in developing its own blockchain infrastructure capabilities.

It may look like HFT firms are tip-toeing around the edges, but these efforts hint at a profound shift: Instead of waiting for the blockchain space to “grow up,” Wall Street’s most technically sophisticated firms are actively helping it mature.

Why go through the effort?

Of course, there’s still one major obstacle: size. For all of crypto’s innovation, its markets remain small compared to traditional finance. Nasdaq alone regularly processes over $500 billion in daily volume. The entire crypto spot market, at its October peak, touched $230 billion. For a trading firm that turns over tens of billions daily, the economics of redeploying significant capital into onchain markets is hard to justify…at least for now.

Crypto’s market size compared to other sectors in finance in 2023. Even though crypto’s market capitalization has grown to 3.2 trillion since then, it’s still a drop in the bucket. Source: LSEG

That limitation is temporary. Stablecoins are steadily injecting real liquidity into blockchain systems, and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) promise to bring much more. Bond settlements, cross-border payments and corporate cash management — when real financial activity moves onchain, the liquidity ceiling disappears. We could be looking at trillions in daily value transfer within the decade.

Skeptics will argue that blockchain still lacks the maturity, compliance and reliability that institutional finance demands. They said the same thing about electronic trading in the 1990s. Back then, floor traders mocked early algorithmic systems as toys. Two decades later, nearly all trading is electronic, and the firms that dismissed the shift no longer exist.

You know what they say about history rhyming. The smartest players on Wall Street recognize the tune already. The next frontier of alpha isn’t hidden inside a data center in Chicago or a cable running under the Atlantic. It’s embedded in blockspace — in how it’s produced, ordered and monetized.

Opinion by: Annabelle Huang, co-founder and CEO of Altius Labs.

This opinion article presents the contributor’s expert view and it may not reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. This content has undergone editorial review to ensure clarity and relevance, Cointelegraph remains committed to transparent reporting and upholding the highest standards of journalism. Readers are encouraged to conduct their own research before taking any actions related to the company.