Bank Rails vs DeFi: Wall Street Sees $3.6T of Digital Cash by 2030
BNY Mellon has added its voice to a Wall Street chorus — including Citi and Bernstein — projecting as much as $3.6 trillion in stablecoins and tokenized deposits within the next decade. The banks argue that programmable, bank-issued digital cash will cut correspondent banking costs, speed cross-border flows and become core market plumbing for corporate treasuries and institutional settlement.
If that outlook materializes, it represents a structural challenge for permissionless networks: large volumes of value could move onto regulated bank rails and permissioned token platforms rather than settling on public chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. That shift would reduce on-chain settlement activity and liquidity for DeFi protocols while concentrating counterparty and regulatory risks with financial incumbents — a key development for traders, custodians and regulators to monitor as firms balance efficiency gains against decentralization concerns.