I became obsessed with blockchain a decade ago because of a simple idea: for the first time in human history, anyone with an internet connection could take control of their own financial sovereignty. That means someone in Argentina or Turkey - or any place where hard-earned savings can evaporate overnight - could now invest in and save in a global financial market.
That vision hasn't changed, and now, ten years later, we are seeing people around the globe get access to savings in US Dollars via stablecoins and into US financial products via the tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs).
The convergence of financial markets and blockchain is now a reality, and for founders building at that intersection, right now is your moment.
Blockchain has graduated from fringe ecosystems to serious Wall Street infrastructure.
The blockchain industry has held for 20 years that the global financial system needs an upgrade. And after two decades of experimentation and innovation, now is the time for mainstream adoption. The rush to adopt blockchain infrastructure across financial services is being driven by a combination of factors: stablecoins emerged as the killer use case, regulatory clarity in the US reinvigorated Wall Street, capital markets are opening to the category, and legitimate builders with deep experience in traditional finance are founding startups.
Regulatory clarity changed everything. For years, companies building in this space in the US operated under real legal uncertainty that pushed the best talent and capital offshore. That's shifted meaningfully in the past 18 months. The current regulatory environment, as well as the passage of the bipartisan GENIUS Act, has opened the dam for Wall Street institutions to lean in, and many have. JPMorgan, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard are all now building active on-chain strategies, and many of those same names are spending billions of dollars to acquire blockchain-enabled companies.
At the same time, stablecoins found product market fit. Stablecoin monthly transfer volume now exceeds $10 trillion. That is more than Visa, Mastercard, and American Express combined. Tokenized U.S. Treasuries have surpassed $10 billion on-chain and BCG estimates this will be $19 trillion by 2033. And, if that doesn’t convince you, one in four people in LATAM have already used stablecoins.
The cherry on top is that startups in this category now have legitimate paths to liquidity, which is absolutely game-changing. Stripe’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge in late 2024 was the metaphorical dam-breaking moment, and that momentum has only accelerated with the IPOs of Circle, Figure, Gemini, BitGo (a Mercury portfolio company), and others. Add to that Coinbase joining the S&P 500 and Mastercard’s acquisition of BVNK for $1.8B, and it’s clear the race for incumbents to build a blockchain strategy is on.
The old financial rails and the new ones are converging. The companies being funded right now will set the stage for a future where our shared global financial system is more efficient and accessible.
The stablecoin stack is laying the groundwork for the digital financial system.
At the foundation of everything we're watching is stablecoins. A stablecoin is, to put it very simply, a digital dollar that moves on public, programmable blockchain networks. There are three critical layers to the stablecoin stack being built and they are laying the groundwork for an even bigger opportunity - tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs).
The settlement layer is the chain on which stablecoins actually move. Ethereum, Solana, Tron, and a growing set of challengers, including Plasma, a Mercury portfolio company, are building chains purpose-built for high-volume stablecoin settlement.
The issuance layer is where Circle and Tether sit. These two companies alone now hold a combined position that puts them among the top 15 holders of U.S. Treasuries globally, on par with South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore. The business model is elegant: take in dollars, issue stablecoins 1:1, invest the reserves in short-dated Treasuries, and keep all the yield. It's been extraordinarily profitable, and it's why so many players are now racing to issue their own stablecoins.
The yield layer is where I've focused most of Mercury's investment attention recently. The yield layer is quickly becoming a broader earn layer, and that evolution will enable blockchain's promise of financial access to come to fruition. When access to hold a fully reserved digital dollar and earn yield on it, hold a valuable US tokenized stock, and hold a high-quality US dollar-denominated credit product is available, true saving and wealth-building opportunities will now exist for anyone, anywhere with an internet connection. On the other hand, the number of buyers for US financial products is now, quite literally, everyone around the globe. The opportunity is enormous.
OpenTrade, a Mercury portfolio company, is building the B2B2C infrastructure that lets fintechs and financial services companies offer their customers dollar-denominated savings products. In the last few months, OpenTrade has grown AUM from $100M to $200M, up 550%, and recently closed a $17 million funding round.
The infrastructure exists, the regulatory guardrails are forming, and the biggest asset managers - BlackRock, Apollo, WisdomTree - are already figuring out how to take permissionless network effects and wrap them in compliant, institutional-grade products.
The biggest prize is the tokenization of global capital markets.
If stablecoins are the foundation, tokenization of RWAs is the building being constructed on top of it.
BCG projects $19 trillion in assets on-chain by 2033. For context, optimistic projections for stablecoins at the same timeframe are $3–5 trillion. Both of these numbers are massive in comparison to where they sit today, with RWAs around $34 billion and stablecoins around $300 billion. The scale of tokenization's impact across capital markets dwarfs everything else.
So, where is the biggest opportunity? The question we have to answer isn't whether assets can be tokenized, because almost anything can be. The question is which assets should be, and what the distribution infrastructure looks like when they are.
The low-hanging fruit of money market funds and U.S. Treasuries has already been picked. They have proven the concept. The next big opportunity is in asset classes that have historically been illiquid not by nature, but by infrastructure. Private credit and private equity are two glaring examples. These are markets that have been operating on PDF contracts, fax machines, and settlement windows measured in days or weeks, without sufficient standardization to be truly efficient.
Profitr, another Mercury portfolio company, is building exactly this infrastructure for private credit markets. Profitr provides settlement in under 30 seconds on assets that previously took days of paperwork and carried real execution risk. Profitr creates the market infrastructure for secondary trading, liquidity and financial services to be built within this asset class.
For founders, the distribution question is as important as the technology. Any global citizen with an internet connection should be able to access institutional-grade, dollar-denominated financial products. Building the infrastructure to make that actually happen-the last-mile distribution layer-is one of the most important problems that needs solving.
Agentic commerce only reaches its potential with a blockchain-enabled financial system.
As AI agents increasingly operate on our behalf by handling tasks, making purchases, and managing workflows, they need a medium of exchange. Why wait 2–3 business days for settlement when agents are moving at the speed of software? Stablecoins are the only medium of exchange that actually fixes that constraint.
In an agentic commerce world where bots represent a meaningful share of economic activity, stablecoin settlement isn't just a nice-to-have, it's table stakes. Stripe understands this well enough that they're building agentic commerce infrastructure and paid $1B for a stablecoin infrastructure company to get ahead of it. The platforms that build natively for agentic commerce, with stablecoin-native architectures, will have a structural advantage, and everyone at Mercury is looking for the founders who understand this.
The convergence is here, and we are funding it.
Mercury has spent five years building expertise and relationships at the intersection of TradFi and Web3.
The founders who win in this space share a pattern. They are building crypto-agnostic revenue models that don't depend on token prices, they are founders with networks spanning both worlds and who have a defensible distribution strategy that can become their competitive moat for the next decade of rapid innovation.
There's a lot of wood to chop before this vision is fully realized. The mechanisms for tokenizing equity markets at scale are still being worked out. The distribution infrastructure for retail investors globally is still nascent. The regulatory framework, while dramatically improved, is still taking shape.
But the direction is clear: the capital is moving, and the founders building the infrastructure layer of this convergence are the ones who will define what the global financial system will look like for the next generation.
If that's what you're building, we want to be in the room.
