How is the global financial market changing and where is the place for Russia in it. Analysis

The main thing in the material:

• Stablecoins are no longer a niche crypto tool and are becoming part of the global payment infrastructure. Banks create their own digital money. Tokenized deposits are developing along with stablecoins.
• The United States, Europe and China have chosen different strategies for the development of digital money, but they are moving towards the same goal — speeding up and making payments cheaper.
• The next stage is the creation of a global settlement infrastructure. This is precisely the task that international projects such as Agora should solve.
• Russia is forming its own model based on the digital ruble and digital financial assets.
• Investors are focusing on asset tokenization, new payment methods, and the infrastructure on which the economy of the future will operate.

The global financial system has entered a new stage where different models of digital money compete. Stablecoins are rapidly moving out of the gray area of the crypto market and becoming part of the usual payment infrastructure. Banks, in order not to lose control over payments, promote tokenized deposits in response. In fact, the restructuring of the global payment infrastructure has begun. Against this background, Russia has to set up its own payment routes in the face of sanctions. Izvestia investigated how the struggle for the "money of the future" is unfolding and what it means for investors.

Stablecoins become part of regular payments

A couple of years ago, stablecoin was considered a niche cryptocurrency product. However, it is now starting to compete with traditional financial instruments.

According to CoinDesk, the market capitalization of stablecoins reached a historic high of $321 billion in April this year, and the capitalization of Tether, the world's largest issuer of dollar stablecoins, rose to a record $190 billion. At the same time, the market remains highly concentrated: the two largest stablecoins, USDT and USDC, are now estimated at about $260 billion in total.

The status of stablecoins in the United States changed after the adoption of the GENIUS Act (full name — Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act). This law has created a regulatory framework for their release and circulation. Before the advent of uniform rules, large financial organizations treated stablecoins with caution due to legal risks. However, after the legislative framework appeared, the largest market participants began to move to the practical implementation of stablecoins in the payment infrastructure.

In April of this year, Visa scaled a pilot project for settlements in stablecoins to nine blockchain networks, adding Base, Polygon, Canton Network, Arc and Tempo to the already supported Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche and Stellar. And in early June, Mastercard announced the expansion of opportunities for final settlements between participating banks in its payment system, allowing the use of regulated stablecoins for this purpose.

Around the same time, it became known that the payment giants Stripe, Visa and Mastercard are close to launching a joint platform for transactions with stablecoins. According to sources, the Coinbase crypto exchange may also join the project. If these plans come to fruition, the market that has been dominated by Tether and Circle for a decade could change dramatically. And we are talking not only about the redistribution of shares between players, but also about a paradigm shift — stablecoins are gradually becoming part of the usual financial infrastructure. The IMF noted that against the background of the adoption of legislation on stablecoins in the United States, the market value of public companies that handle payments has decreased by about 18%, or by $ 300 billion. In other words, the market has begun to price in future competition between traditional payment services and stablecoins. FinTech Weekly analysts expect that in 2026, stablecoins will account for about 3% of all dollar payments, and by 2031 their share will grow to 10%.

Banks are trending

In the race to control cash flow, banks have also begun to introduce their own digital payment tools. Now they mainly finance their activities with customer deposits — these funds become the source of loans and investments. If the client transfers funds from a bank account to stablecoins, the money actually leaves the banking system and comes under the control of the digital token issuer.

In Europe, the Société Générale group has become a pioneer in the field of launching regulated stablecoins. Its subsidiary SG-FORGE launched the regulated euro-stablecoin EUR CoinVertible (EURCV) in 2023, and introduced a dollar version, USD CoinVertible (USDCV), in 2025. The American bank BNY Mellon became the custodian (custodian) of dollar reserves.

The pan-European banking consortium Qivalis is currently preparing to launch a regulated euro-backed stablecoin. UniCredit, Raiffeisen Bank and BNP Paribas are among the project participants, with a total of 37 banks involved. The first issue of the new digital currency is planned to be held in the second half of 2026.

Similar projects are being launched all over the world. In parallel, a number of financial organizations are betting on another model of working with digital money — tokenized deposits. The tokens are issued by the banks themselves. In fact, this is a digital form of a bank deposit, but instead of the usual account entry, a digital token appears on the account, which can be used for quick payments on the blockchain. The most striking example is the JPM Coin deposit token, which JPMorgan launched for institutional clients. When making payments using tokens, money does not leave the banking system.

In the UK, they are trying to scale this idea to the entire banking system. The UK Finance Association is implementing a pilot on the use of the tokenized pound sterling. Seven banks are involved in the project, including Barclays, HSBC and Lloyds. Among the stated scenarios are transfers between marketplace users and payments for mortgage refinancing.

However, in order for the new form of bank money to become truly widespread, banks in different countries must be able to settle accounts with each other. SWIFT, the largest operator of the international interbank messaging system, has already joined this issue. Recently, the company announced its readiness to pilot a system for cross-border round-the-clock payments using tokenized deposits. 17 banks from six continents joined the project.

States offer their own model

Against this background, the world's central banks are building their own financial architecture based on digital money — the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). This is a digital form of public money — an obligation not of a private issuer or a commercial bank, but of a central bank. Their task is to preserve the role of the state in the monetary system as payments become digital.

By May 2026, 146 countries and monetary unions, which account for more than 98% of global GDP, were exploring the possibility of issuing a CBDC. For comparison, in May 2022 there were 87 of them. At the same time, 77 countries have already moved directly to development, piloting or launching.

China is implementing the largest pilot project. By the end of 2025, the volume of transactions in digital yuan (e-CNY) exceeded $2 trillion. At the same time, the country is developing the mBridge project, a platform for cross—border payments using blockchain between the central banks of China, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. In addition, this year Beijing decided to integrate digital government currency into the banking system: funds in e-CNY wallets opened with commercial banks began to be accounted for as their deposit obligations, which allowed them to charge interest. The goal is to make the digital currency more attractive to users without depriving banks of their deposit base.

In general, the approaches of the world's central banks to the state digital currency differ. Some of them promote wholesale CBDCs, which are used exclusively by banks and other financial organizations for settlements and do not create direct competition to bank deposits. Others are betting on a retail digital currency that is accessible to citizens. The European Central Bank continues to prepare a digital euro project that can be used in everyday life. With the adoption of the necessary legislation in 2026, pilot operations may begin in the second half of 2027, and the release of the digital euro in 2029.

In other words, the central banks of the world are currently experimenting with their own digital money, but the question arises — how to make all these systems interact with each other within a single financial infrastructure. The international Agorá project is currently being implemented, aimed at creating a single platform for operations with tokenized deposits of commercial banks and digital money of central banks.

Judging by trends, in the near future, stablecoins, deposit tokens or digital currencies of central banks will not displace each other, but will coexist. The results of tokenization will determine the legal regimes, the choice of settlement asset, infrastructure management and international coordination. Without this, the market may break up into separate digital "islands" where calculations do not fit together.

Russia is going its own way

Russia is also looking for its own model of participation in the struggle for the "money of the future", but taking into account the sanctions restrictions. The country relies primarily on the digital financial assets market (CFA) and the digital ruble, the mass introduction of which is scheduled to begin on September 1.

At the same time, the regulator is discussing with market participants the issue of ruble-denominated stablecoins and issues of their regulation. At the same time, it is proposed to divide the spheres of their application: to maintain the ban on the use of such tools in domestic calculations, but to allow them for international transactions. However, while the Bank of Russia is discussing the parameters of a future regulated model, the A7A5 ruble stablecoin is already being used in cross-border settlements. Over the past year, it has become the fastest growing stablecoin (in terms of supply growth), overtaking USDT and USDC. Analysts estimate that the total volume of transactions with the A7A5 has exceeded $100 billion.

In fact, Russia is creating a new digital financial infrastructure in which different forms of money will perform different tasks: the digital ruble can be used for government and everyday payments, CFA can be used to raise capital and tokenize assets, and stablecoins can be used for foreign trade and cross—border transactions.

The main conclusion for an investor is that it is not so much the set of available tools that is changing, as the logic of the financial market itself. If digitalization used to concern securities trading, now the money itself and the rights to assets are gradually becoming digital. Therefore, it is more important for an investor to focus not on the history of stablecoins (after all, this is not an investment in the classical sense, but a tool for storing and moving value), but on assets, services and financial models that can benefit from the transition to a new digital infrastructure. It is around her that the next stage of financial market development will be formed in the coming years. And tokenization is likely to become as familiar a part of it as non-cash payments or mobile banking.