For the first time since the SWIFT network went live in 1977, the underlying infrastructure of finance is being rewritten — not patched, not extended, but rebuilt from first principles on public networks. We call the result the Internet Financial System.
The shift is already visible in the numbers. Onchain dollar volume crossed $32 trillion in 2025, settled through programmable rails with no correspondent banks, no cut-off times, and no T+2 ceremonies. The dollar got there first — but the dollar is only the beginning.
What follows is a working sketch of where this is going, what's already built, and what still has to happen for the system to mature. We've spent the last seven years building one part of it. This essay is a map of the rest.
1. The unbundling of the bank.
A traditional bank performs four distinct functions, sold as a package: custody of money, movement of money, creation of credit, and denomination in a sovereign unit. The unbundling of that package is the central story of this decade.
Custody now happens onchain — in audited smart contracts and qualified institutional custodians. Movement happens at network speed, atomically, with cryptographic finality instead of paper netting. Credit is increasingly issued by protocols whose risk parameters are transparent and adjustable by token-holders rather than by committee. And denomination — the unit of account itself — is no longer the bank's prerogative.
The bank, as we have known it, is a bundle that exists for historical reasons. Each layer of that bundle can now be supplied competitively, on open rails, at a fraction of the cost. — Internal note, VNX Research, March 2026
2. Non-USD stablecoins are no longer optional.
In 2024, more than 99% of stablecoin supply was denominated in dollars. By the end of 2025, that share had fallen to 96%. The change is small in percentage terms but enormous in absolute terms: the non-USD supply grew by an order of magnitude in eighteen months, and the rate is still accelerating.
Non-USD stablecoin supply across EUR, CHF, GBP and JPY denominations — up from $640M at the start of 2024.
The reasons are structural. European corporates cannot run their treasuries in foreign-currency tokens without taking on FX risk that has no business being there. Regulated institutions in jurisdictions outside the dollar zone need instruments denominated in their own unit of account. And cross-border payments — the application where stablecoins offer the most obvious gain — only work at scale if both legs of every transaction can be settled in the native currency of each counterparty.
What "regulated" actually means here.
The word has been stretched past usefulness. For our purposes, a regulated stablecoin issuer is one that:
- holds its reserves 1:1 in segregated accounts with named, licensed banks;
- publishes monthly attestations from an independent auditor;
- operates under an explicit authorisation from a financial regulator (TVTG, DABA, MiCA, etc.);
- and reports reserve composition in a form that can be reconciled against onchain supply by any third party.
Anything less is marketing.
3. The settlement primitive matters more than the currency.
Stablecoins get the headlines, but the more durable innovation is settlement itself. Onchain settlement is atomic: either both legs of an exchange happen, or neither does. There is no T+2 window in which one party is owed money by another. There is no Herstatt risk. The settlement guarantee is encoded in the protocol, not promised by a clearing house.
Once you have an atomic settlement primitive, you get a long list of things almost for free: 24/7 markets, instant FX, programmable conditional payments, on-the-fly liquidity netting, and — most importantly — composability with everything else that runs on the same rails.
4. What still has to happen.
We are not finished. The Internet Financial System is real but incomplete. Three things are missing, and the next two years will be defined by who builds them:
4.1 Real onchain credit, denominated in non-USD currencies.
Lending markets exist, but they are dominated by USD collateral and USD borrowing. A European corporate that wants to draw a working-capital line in CHF, secured by tokenized treasuries, cannot do that today at any meaningful scale. This is solvable. It is also a precondition for the system to absorb real-economy demand.
4.2 Reserve transparency that is verifiable, not merely audited.
Monthly attestation reports are necessary but not sufficient. The endgame is an onchain reserve oracle — a feed that any contract or explorer can read, in real time, and reconcile against issued supply without trusting the issuer's own dashboard. We are building one. So are others. It will be table stakes within twelve months.
4.3 A regulatory framework that grants reciprocity.
MiCA in Europe, the GENIUS Act in the US, the DABA in Bermuda, the MAS framework in Singapore — the legal scaffolding is in place. What is still missing is reciprocal recognition between regimes, so that an issuer licensed in one jurisdiction can serve users in another without re-papering the whole business. This is a political problem, not a technical one, and it is the bottleneck.
The next ten years.
Predictions are unfashionable for good reason, but the direction of travel is no longer ambiguous. By 2035, a meaningful share of global commercial and corporate payments will settle on public rails. The unit of account will be the user's choice, not the bank's. FX between regulated stablecoins will be a commodity service, priced like an API call. And the institutions that have been built to intermediate yesterday's rails will have to find a new role, or be replaced by ones that fit the new rails better.
The Internet did not destroy publishing; it rebuilt the economics of publishing around new primitives. The Internet Financial System will do the same to finance. We expect to lose some battles along the way. We do not expect to be wrong about the direction.
— The VNX team