According to The Future is Onchain, a report published in January 2026 by Dfns and Boston Consulting Group (BCG), much of today’s financial architecture still rests on systems designed in the 1970s and 1980s – patched, layered and modernised, but not rebuilt for a 24/7, API-native, global economy.

And the result is friction that customers have to absorb. 

Take remittances. In the report’s example, a USD $1,000 cross-border transfer results in roughly USD $956 received – an effective cost of around 4.4%. That’s not a one-off failure; it’s how the stack works: correspondent banks, FX spreads, intermediaries, settlement windows.

Now contrast that with a wallet-to-wallet transfer on a public blockchain. The report illustrates settlement within seconds, with fees below $0.10 – estimating total costs roughly 90% lower than traditional rails.

Real moves from pilot to production 

The report clearly tracks how on-chain finance is moving beyond experimentation.

Stablecoins, it notes, grew from roughly $30 billion in 2020 to around $300 billion at the time of writing, with projections reaching $3 trillion by 2030. Meanwhile, the report also points to projections that tokenised funds could reach $600 billion in AUM by 2030. 

And what’s happening inside credit markets is also revealing. Dfns and BCG estimate that traditional banks lend at roughly 129% of M1 money supply, while stablecoin lending-to-supply ratios hover around 20% – and fell below 5% during the 2022–2023 crypto winter. In other words: the monetary base is forming before the full credit engine.

The report argues blockchain infrastructure is unlikely to replace banks’ core systems wholesale. Instead, it proposes a dedicated digital-asset operating layer – modular, regulatory-aware and integrated with existing stacks.

This is about extending and embedding (and ideally, improving) systems – not just ripping them out and replacing them. 

Incumbents aren’t waiting

If this were just a blockchain-enthusiast story, the card networks and remittance giants could ignore it.

They definitely aren’t. 

• Western Union has announced plans to launch USDPT, a US dollar payment token on Solana, with availability expected in the first half of 2026.
• Stripe has completed its acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure provider Bridge.
• Visa has announced stablecoin settlement in the United States, bringing USDC settlement to US institutions.
• Mastercard has published new capabilities aimed at enabling stablecoin transactions and expanding stablecoin settlement options with partners. 

Whether you see this as offensive or defensive (or neither of the above), it’s certainly strategic. 

If settlement, treasury and liquidity management migrate on-chain, the control points of the value chain shift. Interchange economics, FX spreads and float models come under pressure. New rails change margin structures.

The Middle East is not standing still. The Central Bank of the UAE has established a licensing framework for payment token services – suggesting that token-based payment activity is moving into a clearer regulatory perimeter.

Infrastructure and regulation are beginning to align.

What does this mean for MENA fintech? 

For operators across the GCC and wider MENA, the question to ask now is where blockchain fits. 

Cross-border corridors (from the Gulf to South Asia, Africa and the Levant) are precisely where remittance costs, FX spreads and settlement delays compound. On-chain rails offer one lever, and regulatory clarity offers another.

If stablecoins scale towards the trillions and tokenised funds towards hundreds of billions – as projected in the Dfns/BCG report – on-chain liquidity pools become systemically relevant. Payments, lending, treasury and capital formation begin to converge on programmable infrastructure.

This changes the architecture of banks and card networks. And that structural shift has already begun.