This Week in Stablecoins: TradFi Doesn’t Want DeFi. It Wants Blockchain

The most important digital asset story this week was not the price of bitcoin, the launch of another cryptocurrency fund or even the continued expansion of stablecoins. It was the widening gap between the parts of crypto that traditional finance wants to preserve and the parts it intends to remove.

From product launches and partnership dreams spanning Visa to Stripe to T. Rowe Price, tokenization being talked about seriously during nearly all the major banks’ recent calls, and regulatory approvals pulling crypto firms closer inside the financial perimeter, the headlines this week were mostly all about one thing. The continued evolution of blockchain from “digital currency” toward “real-time settlement network.”

TradFi is not broadly embracing decentralized finance, with its open-ended governance, anonymous counterparties and dependence on self-custodied assets. It is taking selected components of blockchain such as programmability, shared ledgers, tokenized ownership and near-real-time settlement, and placing them inside regulated institutions, controlled networks and familiar commercial relationships.

Read also: Stablecoins Are Just Wildcat Banking With Better Wi-Fi

Crypto Is Moving From Retail Digital Currency to Institutional Settlement Instrument

Stablecoins initially entered the institutional conversation as digital versions of currency. That framing made them appear to be competitors to bank deposits, card networks and sovereign money.

The more consequential use case is now emerging elsewhere. A stablecoin can function as the cash leg of a transaction conducted on a blockchain, allowing money and assets to move within the same technical environment. That makes it useful not merely as something to hold or spend, but as a settlement instrument for tokenized securities, cross-border payments, merchant acquiring and corporate treasury activity.

Visa’s strategy illustrates the shift. The company’s growing stablecoin capabilities are designed less to persuade consumers to abandon cards than to let banks, fintechs and payment companies issue, manage and settle digital dollars through infrastructure connected to Visa’s network. Earlier pilots allowed participating issuers and acquirers to settle obligations to Visa using stablecoins over supported blockchains.

The same logic is reshaping capital markets. DTCC is working with nearly 40 financial and technology companies on a system for tokenizing stocks, exchange-traded funds and U.S. Treasurys. The initiative is notable because the tokens are intended to preserve the legal rights of the underlying securities, including dividends and voting rights, rather than exist as loosely connected digital representations. A formal launch is reportedly planned for October.

For banks and asset managers, the attraction is not primarily that tokenized securities can trade on weekends. It is that the record of ownership, the transfer instruction and potentially the payment can exist within a more unified architecture. In theory, that could compress settlement cycles, reduce reconciliation work and make collateral easier to identify and mobilize.

Read more: Crypto Stopped Fighting Banks and Started Copying Them

Banks Want Programmability Without Disintermediation

Bank executives are increasingly willing to discuss stablecoins and tokenization because the strategic question has changed. The issue is no longer whether blockchain will replace banks. It is whether banks can use blockchain without allowing nonbanks to take control of deposits, settlement activity and client relationships.

For a corporate client, the relevant question is not whether a token is sufficiently decentralized. It is whether funds can move at 11 p.m. on a Saturday, whether liquidity can be monitored in real time and whether a transaction can settle across jurisdictions without money becoming trapped in a chain of correspondent banks. This is why stablecoin conversations during bank earnings calls increasingly sit alongside discussions of payments, transaction banking and treasury services rather than speculative trading.

For enterprise software providers, the shift from digital currency to real-time settlement network creates a different adoption challenge. ERP platforms were designed around batches, cutoffs and delayed confirmation. A payment is initiated in one system, processed through another and reconciled later against a bank statement. Blockchain-based settlement can collapse those stages into a more continuous flow. But faster settlement creates little value if corporate systems cannot recognize it.

The industry is not choosing between traditional finance and decentralized finance. It is extracting blockchain from DeFi and rebuilding it around institutions. The July 2026 edition of the “Payments Innovation Tracker®,” a PYMNTS Intelligence collaboration with Paymentology, examines why demand for spendable digital assets is surging, what barriers remain and how modern issuer-processing infrastructure is turning ownership into everyday spending power.