In This Article
- Do you see 2026 as a year of consolidation and “cooling off” for Bitcoin and crypto? Or do you think we are entering a second leg of expansion driven by new institutional products?
- With the US GENIUS Act passed in 2025 and the EU's MiCA fully live, what are your predictions for 2026?
- "We're going to move on from talking about stablecoins generally to the requirements you need for them to reach their potential"
- More About Eco Inc.
With the Clarity Act showdown, the industry pivots to a state-by-state strategy, and a few industry leaders are being vocal about the path forward. Eco Inc. CEO and Co-founder Ryne Saxe joins us to break down the future of stablecoins, regulatory clarity, and the crypto outlook for 2026.
In an exclusive chat with 99Bitcoins.com, Saxe said, “Stablecoin market cap has risen without taking a break throughout the past 12 months. People are beginning to draw comparisons between stablecoins and where Visa was just a few decades ago; this isn’t entirely unwarranted. Major DeFi protocols are preparing to onboard institutional dollars en masse next year. We’re talking big batches of dollars in transactions, which will have obvious and massive infrastructure demands.”
I have intelligence that suggests stablecoins could potentially reach $56 trillion as soon as August.
“Without giving too much away, there are lots of rumors about big institutional partnerships coming onchain and protocols building vault primitives specifically for their needs. There’s an irony in this: stablecoins were thought to turn TradFi into DeFi, but this shows there’s plenty of assimilation going the other way as well.”
Do you see 2026 as a year of consolidation and “cooling off” for Bitcoin and crypto? Or do you think we are entering a second leg of expansion driven by new institutional products?
“I think 2026 will see the whole crypto industry solidify and mature, in part owing to new institutional products, but also a much greater degree of institutional buy-in. Now that trusted mainstream finance players are in the game, it’ll be a story of smarter dollars, bigger names, and sharper technology.”
But I think the real expansion story will be programmable money. Stablecoin adoption and infra are roughly where broadband internet adoption and infra were in 2000.
“Your options for bridging, swapping, executing money movement across chains/protocols feel like your search engine options in 1998. When we get truly programmable money, which looks like it could be on the horizon for 2026, with transactions that effectively react and execute in real time, I also think this whole agentic category will light up with new possibilities and use cases.”
With the US GENIUS Act passed in 2025 and the EU’s MiCA fully live, what are your predictions for 2026?
“I think the main themes surrounding these items of legislation, and any subsequent equivalents elsewhere, will be speed and friction: it’s how fast or slow they permit stablecoins to be used at a useful scale. And I think that continues to be a function of regulatory clarity.”
“The U.S. GENIUS Act and MiCA gave us a usable blueprint, but that’s just one big milestone. Now we need to solidify it with the necessary regulatory agency rules, and see how much of a blueprint it serves for other foreign regimes that have yet to decide.”
“The more disparate those frameworks end up being, the more friction will exist across borders, and the more time we’ll need to build single platform integrations that are cross-compliant. So it’s not really a question of whether this technology takes over, but how quickly and through what use cases that benefit from regulatory clarity first. Legislators will realise that it isn’t in anyone’s interests to resist the inevitability of this technology.”
We’ve gone from explaining the concept, to official U.S. payment and derivatives market adoption, in less than 12 months. This is happening now in real time. However big most analysts think the stablecoin market is going to be, they’re likely underestimating it.
🚨 @POTUS signs the GENIUS Act into law — a historic piece of legislation that will pave the way for the United States to lead the global digital currency revolution. pic.twitter.com/bYT0bAEjcJ
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) July 18, 2025
“We’re going to move on from talking about stablecoins generally to the requirements you need for them to reach their potential”
“As for Eco, in light of these huge stablecoin volumes, we’re going to move on from talking about stablecoins generally to the requirements you need for them to reach their potential. This includes segmented focuses on confidentiality and data control, more reliable cross-chain infrastructure, better solutions for transaction programmability, predictable and perfect transaction execution at speed and scale. It’s important to recognize that Eco itself is not a stablecoin or another stablecoin chain; it’s a network that seamlessly connects them and programs money movement across them. We want Eco to be in its own category, as the very best platform for stablecoin movement on chain.”
More About Eco Inc.
Eco Inc. is a blockchain company building software that maximizes money’s value. The company is a founding contributor to the Eco Protocol and the builder of Bend. The mission of the company is to make people’s money work for them — powering products that make it easier to hold, move, and earn with your money, on your terms, than ever before.
Eco has raised more than $90 million from leading investors bridging crypto and consumer fintech, including a16z Crypto, Founders Fund, Pantera, Activant Capital, and L Catterton.
Why you can trust 99Bitcoins
Established in 2013, 99Bitcoin’s team members have been crypto experts since Bitcoin’s Early days.
Weekly Research
100k+Monthly readers
Expert contributors
2000+Crypto Projects Reviewed
