Digital finance in 2026: what to expect as pilot schemes move into real-world use

Digital finance has moved into the mainstream as regulated stablecoins and tokenised assets scale up, but industry experts say 2026 will be defined by success in developing interoperable, regulated, use-case-driven rails rather than more digital silos.\nAs more than 130 jurisdictions explore central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), alongside dozens of stablecoin initiatives and a growing array of tokenisation platforms, day-to-day payments and finance are undergoing a rapid structural overhaul.\nWhile these digital money and asset experiments promised greater efficiency, transparency and speed, they also risked deeper fragmentation, regulatory pitfalls and operational vulnerabilities, experts warned.\n“The cracks are not technical; they are regulatory, geopolitical and operational,” said Florian Spiegl, founder and CEO of digital investment platform Evident Group. Cyberattacks and bridge failures were hitting the connections between ledgers rather than blockchains themselves, raising the risk that liquidity could be trapped in incompatible regulatory regimes and turn markets into regional “walled gardens”, he added.\nHong Kong, positioned as a leading digital asset hub with active regulatory frameworks, has emerged as a template for cross-border cooperation, concrete compliance standards and institutional-grade readiness, according to Deng Chao, CEO of HashKey Capital. “The entry of major economies and large commercial institutions into stablecoins and tokenisation is a positive signal that the industry is moving towards mainstream adoption,” he said.\n“Blockchain and Web3 technology are inherently global, but real-world applications must be embedded in regulation and local use cases.”\nUltimately, global finance was likely to converge on a mix of shared core infrastructure layered with specialised networks for different jurisdictions, sectors and institutions, rather than a single monolithic system, he added.\n“In 2026, the differentiator isn’t who tokenises fastest, it’s who tokenises with controls regulators can trust and auditors can verify,” said Cora Ang, head of legal and compliance for Asia-Pacific at Amina Group, a Swiss financial services firm focused on virtual assets.\nHong Kong would be a credible interoperability laboratory, while a multi-rail world remained the base case, shaping how firms build and invest with compliance-by-design, multi-network connectivity and operational resilience in mind, she said.\nThe city accelerated its push into regulated digital assets in 2025, rolling out clearer licensing regimes for exchanges, stablecoins, virtual‑asset dealers and custodians while promoting tokenisation pilots to attract institutional capital. These efforts were advancing as the cryptocurrency sector gained fresh traction and experienced extreme volatility.\nStablecoins were demonstrably working across borders, with US dollar-pegged stablecoins being highlighted by several experts interviewed by the Post.\n“Stablecoins have effectively become the digital rails of the US dollar, already processing trillions of dollars in monthly value, and there are now clear signals from US policymakers that digital dollar infrastructure is becoming a strategic priority,” said Spiegl.\nAn industry guide published by Visa put 2024 cross-border payments settled in stablecoins at about US$5.7 trillion – up more than 57 per cent from a year earlier.\n“What’s genuinely working today is stablecoins as a 24/7 settlement instrument in specific corridors, particularly for institutional crypto flows and time-sensitive treasury or trade-related movements where the parties accept on-chain settlement and the compliance controls are mature,” said Ang.\nHashKey’s Deng said the initiatives most likely to “take off” in 2026 would be stablecoins, tokenised deposits and institutional-grade settlement networks that were deeply integrated with real-world commercial use cases and robust regulatory frameworks, along with the tokenisation of financial assets such as funds, bonds and equities.\nTokenised deposits were the banks’ answer to stablecoins, drawing on their funding pools, client networks and real‑economy use cases, and they could also pay interest, Deng said. “However, they remain relatively closed within a bank’s own ecosystem, while stablecoins on public blockchains are more open and move more easily across different networks,” he said.\n\n“Projects that lack concrete use cases, clear legal pathways or credible compliance interfaces are likely to fall visibly behind in this next phase of competition.”\nFinancial fragmentation could be a real risk with multiple projects in play. The worst-case scenario was a global economic wipeout of 6 per cent, or US$6.5 trillion, by 2030, and the loss of nearly 280 million jobs, according to research by The Economist.\n“We see the early signs of ‘digital islands’ – systems that are optimised for domestic or regional use, but lack the ability to connect seamlessly with others, creating fragmentation at the global level,” said Yang Wen, head of North Asia at the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift).\n“CBDC is already moving in the direction of competing blocs, with mBridge driven mostly by China-friendly countries, the G7 cross-border payments partnership and the digital euro project,” said Sean Lee, co-founder of IDA, a Hong Kong-based Web3 digital asset company.\nHowever, “early initiatives in [increasing interoperability] are already taking shape via the Open Stable Network and Project Kissen, with top financial institutions in Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Europe testing production-ready scenarios”, Lee added.\n“The future of finance is going to consist of multiple ways to send value,” said Yang. “The challenge for the industry is not about moving value across individual systems, but enabling secure, compliant transactions across multiple systems and value forms.”\n