BNY Mellon just joined Citi, Bernstein and a chorus of Wall Street analysts calling for up to $3.6 trillion in digital liquidity by 2030.
The bet is that stablecoins and tokenized deposits will become the core of the market, replacing corresponding banking frictions and lubricating corporate treasury operations.
The question: Does this world exist outside of a slideshow, and if it materializes, will it increase the liquidity of Bitcoin and Ethereum or lock them into permissioned silos?
BNY Mellon’s November 10 report forecasts $3.6 trillion by 2030, split between approximately $1.5 trillion in fiat stablecoins and $2.1 trillion in tokenized bank deposits and money market funds.
Citi has set a base case of $1.6 trillion stable with a bull case reaching $3.7 trillion and a bear case collapsing to $500 billion if regulation and integration stops.
Bernstein called for $2.8 trillion by 2028, driven by DeFi, payments and remittances.
JPMorgan reversed course in July, reducing its projections and warning that mainstream adoption was overblown, setting a lower range at $500 billion by 2028 in the absence of clearer use cases and regulatory clarity.
However, the global market capitalization of stablecoins stands at approximately $304 billion at press time, with over 90% of the market pegged to the US dollar, dominated by USDT and USDC.
Usage remains heavily focused on crypto infrastructure, applied to trading, perpetuals, and as DeFi collateral. Actual payments and settlements still represent a minority share. Wall Street is effectively betting on a five to twelvefold increase in five years.
What does banking, compliance, and user experience need to do to achieve this, and what does this mean for Bitcoin and Ethereum liquidity?
What needs to happen in the banking sector
Three ingredients are non-negotiable on a multi-billion dollar scale.
First, regulated emission on a large scale. The GENIUS Act, passed in 2025, establishes licensing requirements for issuers of payment stablecoins, requires 100% reserve support in cash and short-term U.S. Treasury securities, and stipulates anti-money laundering audits and compliance.
It is designed to enable banks and qualified non-banks to issue dollar stablecoins in large quantities. The EU’s MiCA framework, Hong Kong’s stablecoin regime and other jurisdictions now provide clear but sometimes restrictive rules that Citi and BNY cite as prerequisites for their operations.
The UK’s Bank of England has imposed caps on systemic stablecoin holdings and reserve requirements, including a 40% requirement held at the central bank.
The $3.6 trillion forecast assumes that the U.S. framework reduces issuers instead of capping them, and that at least some G10 jurisdictions allow bank-grade stablecoins and tokenized deposits that can be held in corporate balance sheets, money market funds, and central counterparty clearinghouses.
If major jurisdictions copy the Bank of England’s capitalization model, the forecast falls apart.
Second, the participation of banks beyond fintechs. Implicit in forecasts like those from BNY and Citi is that large banks issue token deposits used as collateral, for intraday liquidity and for wholesale payments.
Stablecoins and tokenized cash are becoming the norm in repurchase and securities lending operations, margining for derivatives clearing, and corporate cash sweeping.
If banks stay on the sidelines and only a handful of crypto-native issuers scale, the market will not reach its full trillion-dollar potential. Instead, it’s still a larger niche market, valued at between $400 billion and $800 billion.
Third, seamless bridging to existing rails. BNY’s language frames this explicitly: blockchains integrate with existing rails, without replacing them.
To justify $3.6 trillion, the market requires T+0 settlement between bank ledgers and public chains, interoperability standards, and tokenized cash on bank chains that can be settled individually with public stablecoins.
Without this plumbing, most symbolic species remain experimental or compartmentalized.
Compliance and UX are the quiet kingmakers.
To make the big numbers work, institutional money requires bank-grade Know Your Customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) infrastructure, which includes allowlists, address screening, and granular blocklisting, for major stablecoins.
GENIUS, MiCA, and the Hong Kong framework must converge sufficiently so that a global company can use the same tokens across all regions.
Transparent reserves are also important. Both Citi’s and BNY’s forecasts assume boring, fully-reserved portfolios, with Treasuries and repos, without Terra-like algorithmic experiments.
The risk of fragility arises when compliant design pushes everything into permitted walled gardens. DeFi and crypto-native usage becomes a sideshow, mitigating the liquidity impact of Bitcoin and Ethereum.
The user experience should be seamless. Retail and small business wallets require stable payments within the same apps people already use, such as Cash App, PayPal and neobanks, with self-custody options available.
Enterprise tools require ERP and treasury systems that natively support stablecoins.
The rails don’t have to suck: near-free, sub-second Layer 2 and high-speed Layer 1 like Solana and Base as the default issuance and payment rails.
Visa’s recent push to position stablecoins as an invisible settlement medium within card, credit and finance products is precisely this story.
If by 2028 people still have to factor in gas fees, channel IDs, and bridges, the $3.6 trillion call is a fantasy.
Three probable scenarios
Integration Max represents the BNY style bull case. GENIUS is fully implemented, MiCA is working, and Hong Kong and Singapore are friendly.
Four to six global banks issue token deposits and money market funds. The user experience is often invisible, as stablecoins will be integrated with banks, payment service providers and card networks.
Digital cash and stablecoins have reached approximately $1.5 trillion in public and permissioned stablecoins, plus $2.1 trillion in tokenized bank currency.
A significant part consists of wholesale transactions, placed in intraday settlement and collateral pools. The important point is that the numbers seem huge, but a significant portion is not fungible with DeFi and only partially interacts with Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Rails’ fragmentation reflects Citi’s base case or JPMorgan’s caution. The US is friendly, the EU and UK are cautious, and many emerging markets are wary. Banks are experimenting but remain small. User experience and compliance friction remain non-trivial.
Stablecoins are expected to be between $600 and $1.6 trillion by 2030. This is the range where the predictions are plausible and the impact on the liquidity of Bitcoin and Ethereum is tangible and visible; However, the “$3.6 trillion market revolution” is marketing.
The regulatory shock represents Citi’s bear case. A major deregulation or scandal triggers a regulatory overreaction. Hard caps, like the Bank of England model, are replicated. Stablecoins are stagnating below $500 billion, remaining primarily a cryptocurrency trading tool.
What this means for Bitcoin and Ethereum liquidity
Today, with a stable market capitalization of around $304 billion, most Bitcoin and Ethereum spots and derivatives are listed in USDT and USDC.
Stablecoins finance perpetuals, base transactions, and loans under centralized and decentralized finance.
If the market reaches the world of BNY and even 30-50% of stablecoins remain on open public chains and are composable with decentralized exchanges, perpetuals, and lending markets, then the open cryptocurrency stablecoin float for Bitcoin and Ethereum could reach $450-750 billion.
This represents 1.5 to 2.5 times greater dollar liquidity, which tightens spreads, increases market depth, and enables larger block flows with less slippage.
Tighter spreads and lower volatility at the micro level mean more capital for market makers and less friction when entering and exiting Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Greater leverage ensues; a larger stable collateral pool allows for more perpetuals and credit, which can amplify both rallies and liquidations.
However, much of the $3.6 trillion could bypass Bitcoin and Ethereum entirely. BNY explicitly counts tokenized deposits and money market funds that can reside on permissioned chains, where assets cannot be freely exchanged for Bitcoin or Ethereum, and uses know-your-customer allowlists to control access.
You can have a world where over $2 trillion of digital money is tokenized. Yet only a few hundred billion dollars are in the fluid stablecoins that actually provide liquidity for Bitcoin and Ethereum.
A figure of $3.6 trillion in digital cash is bullish for the liquidity of Bitcoin and Ethereum as these tokens can be included in the same pools as perpetual, decentralized exchanges and major brokers.
If they are enclosed in walled gardens, they are plumbing, not fuel. Institutional desks and on-chain credit markets may prefer fully collateralized stablecoins and tokenized Treasuries over Bitcoin and Ethereum as collateral, thereby reducing structural demand.
Conversely, more fluid stablecoins reduce friction for new money flowing into stablecoins and then into Bitcoin and Ethereum, and deep, regulated stablecoin pools make it easier to arbitrage and hedge ETFs and funds.
The $3.6 trillion target is plausible, but only if banking infrastructure, compliance design, and user experience align across multiple jurisdictions.
For Bitcoin and Ethereum, the bullish reading is not about the size of digital dollars, but how many of them are allowed to be in the same pool.
Forecasts assume integration, not disruption. If this integration blocks the permissionless layer, Wall Street gets its digital cash infrastructure and crypto gets a larger but still limited trading pool.
