Every year, trillions of dollars move through infrastructure built for a different era. Payments batch overnight. Wire transfers cut off at weekday closing times.
Cross-border payments pass through chains of institutions that each maintain separate records. The delays are so built-in that entire professions exist to manage them.
That infrastructure is being replaced. Not visibly, not all at once. But the systems that settle transactions, verify ownership and move value between institutions are changing in ways that could eventually make much of today’s financial plumbing unnecessary.
A Visa survey of more than 2,000 U.S. consumers found that digital financial products with bank-level fraud protection and deposit insurance raised willingness to use them from 36 to 56 percent. Tether co-founder Reeve Collins has described a future in which digital money reserves could be made continuously verifiable rather than disclosed through periodic reports.
The Bank for International Settlements, through its Project Agorá initiative, is testing settlement infrastructure that could run around the clock without the chain of intermediaries the current system depends on.
The scale of movement is becoming harder to ignore. The aggregate market for these instruments grew from around $170 billion in September 2024 to more than $301 billion by September 2026. Assets held in digital form expanded from under $6 billion to roughly $30 billion over the same period, with major asset managers including BlackRock, Franklin Templeton and Fidelity now running live products at real transaction volumes.
The rails underneath finance are starting to change
For roughly a century, a cross-border payment has worked as a chain of messages. A bank sends word that money should move. Another bank receives it and updates its ledger.
The actual value crawls through correspondent institutions, each one reconciling and taking a cut, operating only during business hours.
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Dave Sutter, chief executive and co-founder of OpenTrade, told TheStreet in an interview the mechanics of that shift are more fundamental than they appear. “Stablecoin-based settlement collapses the message and value transfer into one near-instant transaction. The transfer is the settlement.”
The shift is already running through existing payment networks. SoFi became the first national bank to go live with digital settlement across Mastercard’s network, covering a card program expected to exceed $25 billion in annualized volume.
The customer swipes the same card. The merchant receives payment the same way. Nothing about the transaction looks different to either of them.
Mastercard closed its $1.8 billion acquisition of payment infrastructure company BVNK in August, a sign that major networks are building this into their own plumbing rather than waiting to see where it lands.
“That’s what an architectural shift looks like in reality,” Sutter added. “Nothing on the surface changes, and everything underneath does, invisibly.”
Trust is proving harder to solve than the technology
The Visa research points to something the financial industry has not always acknowledged. The technology works well enough. Getting people to use it is a different problem. Wish Wu, chief executive of Pharos Network, told TheStreet the industry has had the relationship between users and technology backward. “It tells us that technology alone is no longer the main barrier. Trust is.”
The Visa data makes that concrete. Willingness rose from 36 to 45 percent when digital financial products were offered through a familiar financial provider, with no new protections added at all.
The product was the same. The front door was different. That gap between 36 and 45 percent is not about the technology. It is about who is standing behind it.
Growth numbers tell a similar story. The market for these instruments expanded 80 percent over two years, then slowed to 6 percent in the twelve months that followed. Regulatory frameworks have addressed whether the backing is there.
What they have not yet answered is what happens when something goes wrong: a mistaken transfer, a hacked wallet, a dispute that needs resolving.
Iliya Kalchev, analyst at Nexo, told TheStreet the Visa findings point to a gap that traditional banks are well placed to fill. “That reads as a consumer-protection gap more than a product gap.”
Institutions that pair faster digital infrastructure with the compliance, custody and dispute resolution consumers already expect may be better positioned than those offering either alone.
What real-time verification could mean for digital money
The trust question also extends to how institutions assess the instruments they hold.
Collins has described a model in which reserves backing digital money could be independently verified at any time, rather than disclosed through a scheduled report or audit. Continuous visibility, he argued, creates a different kind of accountability than a monthly attestation published after the fact.
Frank Hepworth, chief executive and founder of New Market Trading, told TheStreet the value of real-time transparency is not that it makes money safer on its own. “Transparency doesn’t make money safe. It makes the truth arrive faster.”
He described watching a digital currency’s backing fall below its trading price in real time, while there was still time to act. A periodic audit would have surfaced the same problem weeks later.
The distinction is not about whether the money is sound. It is about how quickly the answer arrives when it is not. On-ledger verification and traditional safeguards, in that reading, look more complementary than competing.
“A blend of the two seems most likely,” Kalchev said. “On-chain verifiability for the fluidity this technology enables, alongside the validation and protection frameworks traditional finance already has in place. The two look complementary rather than competing.”
Banks are running out of time to adapt
For banks, the shift creates a specific problem. Much of their back-office infrastructure was built around money moving in batches, during business hours, with delays factored into every stage.
An always-on financial system changes those assumptions at the foundation.
“In a world of always-on digital markets, waiting days for assets or cross-border payments to settle will increasingly feel like an artifact of an earlier financial system,” Wu said.
AI is adding pressure from a different direction. As software becomes capable of paying suppliers, moving collateral and executing transactions on its own, it needs infrastructure that settles without waiting for human approval. The current system was not built for that.
The institutions that treat digital settlement and programmable finance as core infrastructure will navigate that shift differently from those still running experiments at the edge of the organization. That choice will not announce itself when it becomes urgent.
“What changes most is everything that exists because money moves slowly: batch processing, weekend closures, wire cutoffs, correspondent banks and the back office that reconciles it all,” Hepworth said. “Banks don’t disappear. The ones that adapt become issuers, custodians and compliance layers.”
The consumer may not notice any of it
A bank account could still look like a bank account. A card payment could still feel like a card payment. What changes is what happens behind the interface.
Some of those changes are already in the market. Several money market funds now operating on digital rails distribute yield daily, adding new units directly into holders’ accounts throughout the year. A conventional money market fund distributes monthly. The product looks familiar. The mechanics underneath it do not.
The transition will not be instant or uniform. Traditional infrastructure and newer digital systems will run alongside each other for years. But the direction is clear enough that central banks, payment networks and major asset managers have already moved beyond testing toward live products at real transaction volumes.
The more important question may no longer be whether digital financial infrastructure reaches the mainstream. It is how much of what exists today will still be recognizable when it does.
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