For a long time, discussions about “mainstream adoption” in the crypto industry tended to focus on a familiar set of metrics: For example, how many people hold Bitcoin, how many addresses interact with on-chain protocols, and how many users have begun using wallets, exchanges, and DeFi.
Behind these metrics was a relatively linear assumption: ordinary users would first need to understand crypto, then buy crypto assets, create a wallet, and gradually enter the on-chain world.
Recent developments, however, may be reversing this path. Users do not necessarily need to understand blockchain before they encounter crypto infrastructure. Instead, existing needs—such as prediction markets, cross-border transfers, and stock trading—are beginning to absorb crypto technology. These areas may appear to belong to three separate sectors, and adoption is unfolding along different paths, but they all point to the same underlying shift:
Crypto is shifting from a new financial system that users must actively enter into infrastructure that traditional finance and mainstream applications can plug into directly.
1. Prediction Markets: From On-Chain Event Trading to a Tool for Pricing Probabilities
Prediction markets are nothing new.
In the crypto world, Augur emerged early in Ethereum’s development as the network’s first DApp. It offered an early demonstration that any event with an objectively verifiable outcome could be turned into an on-chain contract, with real-money trading reflecting the market’s expectations about the future.
For a long time afterward, however, prediction markets were simply labeled “on-chain gambling” and never truly moved beyond crypto-native circles. The early users of platforms such as Polymarket were indeed mostly crypto-native participants already familiar with wallets, stablecoins, and on-chain trading:
On the one hand, the learning curve associated with wallets, stablecoins, and on-chain transactions limited participation among ordinary users. On the other, even when Polymarket briefly broke into the mainstream through events such as the U.S. presidential election, its core participants remained mostly crypto-savvy traders.
The 2026 World Cup, however, offers a more mainstream lens through which to view prediction markets. Further reading: "World Cup Fever Propels Prediction Markets: How Polymarket and Peers Are Driving Mainstream Crypto Adoption"
Compared with monetary policy, economic data, and political elections, football requires almost no additional explanation. Who will advance from the group stage? Which team will reach the semifinals? Can a particular player finish as the top scorer? These are questions football fans already discuss every day.
Prediction markets simply turn these scattered views into a price that changes in real time. That is why changes in the regulatory environment alone will not be enough for prediction markets to truly break into the mainstream. They also need a public event large and intuitive enough to engage a mass audience—and the World Cup fits the bill.
Many of crypto’s breakout moments have occurred when technologies with high cognitive barriers meet use cases that are easy to understand. NFTs briefly entered the mainstream because they connected on-chain assets with avatars, art, and community identity. Meme coins spread rapidly because they compressed complex financial behavior into basic emotions and cultural symbols.
Likewise, the gateway through which prediction markets reach a broader audience may not be macroeconomic data or complex political-event contracts, but sports, entertainment, and major events that people already want to discuss.
The World Cup is particularly well suited to this role because it naturally meets three conditions.
First, it has broad global recognition. Even people who are not dedicated football fans can understand basic questions such as who will win, who will advance, and who will lift the trophy.
Second, it produces a constant stream of information. Pre-match lineups, player form, injury and availability updates, tactical changes, and the course of the match all continually reshape market expectations.
Third, it has a strong social dimension. Watching football is rarely an isolated activity; it comes with group chats, reposts, discussions, arguments, and shared emotion.
At the same time, the competitive landscape for prediction markets is expanding. Recently, competition has clearly moved beyond specialist platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket, as prediction markets are increasingly integrated into traditional brokerages, crypto trading platforms, and even media products.
The reason is straightforward. Traditional financial markets already offer a wide range of risk-pricing instruments, including options, futures, and interest-rate swaps. These products are often difficult to understand, and ordinary users may struggle to read the market’s expectations directly from their prices, whereas prediction markets compress complex questions into a more intuitive probability.
This is why prediction markets may become part of traditional financial infrastructure: they offer not just another way to bet, but an accessible, real-time tool for pricing expectations.
Of course, this path remains controversial.
Questions around how events should be defined and settled, whether insiders should be allowed to participate, whether financial-event contracts could amount to insider trading, and whether sports contracts should be regulated as federal derivatives or under state gambling laws all remain unresolved. As the market grows, some Wall Street firms have also begun restricting employees from trading prediction-market contracts tied to economic data and corporate events.
Whatever the outcome of these debates, the process through which prediction markets gain mainstream recognition is also the process through which they evolve from open experiments in event trading into financial market infrastructure.
2. Stablecoins: From Crypto Assets to Payment and Settlement Infrastructure
If prediction markets are bringing a crypto-native product into the mainstream, stablecoins are taking a different route: they are gradually disappearing behind traditional payment products.
For most crypto users, stablecoins have long served primarily as a medium of exchange. Users swap other tokens with USDT or USDC, move funds between exchanges, or deposit stablecoins into DeFi protocols to earn returns. As a result, circulating supply has traditionally been treated as one of the main measures of a stablecoin’s competitiveness.
In the next phase, however, competition may no longer be determined solely by on-chain supply. What may matter more is who secures an early compliance advantage and embeds stablecoins in real-world use cases such as payments, settlement, and cross-border transfers.
One of the most discussed recent examples is Open USD, launched by Open Standard with the participation of more than 140 companies across the payments, banking, technology, and crypto sectors.
Unlike the traditional model, in which a single issuer captures most of the reserve income, Open USD allows partners to mint and redeem it free of charge and plans to distribute reserve income—after management fees—to the partners that drive its use.
Visa and Stripe also describe OUSD as shared infrastructure for moving money globally. What makes this design noteworthy is not simply the addition of another dollar stablecoin, but its attempt to reshape how stablecoin economics are distributed. Traditionally, issuers capture most reserve income, while wallets, exchanges, payment companies, and fintech platforms bear much of the cost of user acquisition, product integration, and distribution.
If more reserve income flows to distribution channels and real-world use cases, the competitive dynamics of stablecoins will change accordingly. This also explains why the involvement of Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, and Zelle matters more than simply adding another on-chain asset.
Ultimately, stablecoins are shifting from crypto products that users must actively hold and manage into money-movement components that traditional businesses can use directly. Users may see a cross-border remittance, merchant settlement, corporate payment, payroll service, or payment card, while stablecoins and public blockchain settlement networks operate in the background. They may already be relying on stablecoin settlement without even knowing it.
At the same time, some stablecoin projects without meaningful distribution channels or practical use cases are leaving the market. This further demonstrates that issuing a stablecoin does not automatically make it valuable.
As the underlying technology becomes more standardized, the real moats will increasingly lie in licensing, regulatory compliance, and the ability to embed a stablecoin in a business use case that generates sustained transaction demand.
This also means that the ultimate competitors of stablecoins may not be other stablecoins, but card networks, cross-border remittance systems, bank deposits, and corporate treasury infrastructure.
3. Tokenized Stocks: Traditional Assets Move into On-Chain Accounts
Compared with prediction markets and stablecoins, tokenized stocks represent a more direct form of convergence.
Rather than introducing a crypto product to traditional users, tokenized stocks bring stocks, ETFs, funds, and other traditional assets into accounts that were previously used mainly to hold and trade crypto assets.
Over the past six months, nearly every major crypto trading platform has rushed into the market. Meanwhile, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, made a strategic investment in OKX. The two plan to collaborate on U.S.-regulated crypto futures, ICE market products, and NYSE-related tokenized stocks. At the time of writing, OKX had also just announced plans to launch tokenized U.S. equities.
From a market-structure perspective, this partnership is highly symbolic. In the past, crypto exchanges tried to provide users with exposure to stock prices through synthetic assets, perpetual contracts, or third-party issuers. Now, the operator of a traditional exchange is participating directly in product design, price data, compliance, and the development of on-chain market infrastructure.
Similar changes are already emerging at the user-facing layer. Beyond specialized apps, trading platforms, wallets, and on-chain DEXs—from Robinhood to Interactive Brokers—are all trying to become comprehensive financial accounts that support trading in crypto assets, stocks, and even commodities.
Tokenized stocks, however, are also particularly easy to misunderstand.
A token bearing the name of Apple, Nvidia, or Tesla does not necessarily mean that its holder directly owns common shares in the corresponding company. Different products may represent direct ownership of real shares, beneficial interests in shares held through a special-purpose vehicle, debt instruments that an issuer promises to redeem, or derivatives that merely track a stock’s price.
These structures can differ significantly in dividends, voting rights, redemption rights, bankruptcy remoteness, and investor protection. Even if a token circulates on a public blockchain, the legal relationships that determine the holder’s ultimate rights often remain off-chain, in the issuer, custodian, and governing contracts. Most RWA systems today use this hybrid architecture.
Tokenization therefore does not automatically create liquidity or give users the same rights as traditional shareholders. These limitations, however, do not prevent tokenized stocks from becoming an important gateway.
As compliance, custody, and shareholder-rights issues are gradually addressed, stocks will no longer need to exist only in brokerage accounts. They could sit alongside stablecoins in the same on-chain account, be divided into smaller units, trade across regions and trading hours, and be used as collateral or for lending, automated investing, and programmable asset allocation.
At that point, wallets and trading platforms will no longer compete solely over the storage and trading of crypto assets, but over who can become the unified gateway through which users manage global assets.
Closing Thoughts
Mainstream adoption may succeed precisely when users no longer notice the crypto infrastructure behind the product.
Crypto’s path to mainstream adoption may follow a similar process: true maturity may not mean that everyone remembers concepts such as blockchain, wallets, and stablecoins, but that users gradually stop noticing the technology at all as crypto disappears behind the products they use.
On closer examination, prediction markets, stablecoins, and tokenized stocks are entering traditional finance in different ways:
- Prediction markets bring a product model developed in the crypto world into mainstream markets, turning events and uncertainty into probabilities that can be traded in real time;
- Stablecoins embed on-chain settlement into payments, remittances, and corporate fund flows, allowing users to access new financial networks without needing to understand blockchain;
- Tokenized stocks bring traditional assets into on-chain accounts, allowing wallets, exchanges, and public blockchains to gradually become new channels for the issuance, trading, and settlement of traditional securities;
Together, these represent adoption at three levels: products, money, and assets. For the industry, this may point to a new path toward mainstream adoption—one that no longer requires every user to become a crypto user first, but lets on-chain technology adapt to financial needs that users already understand.
The role of wallets will change accordingly.
Once wallets contain not only native tokens and NFTs but also stablecoins, stocks, funds, commodities, and event contracts, they will need to handle more than private keys and on-chain balances. They will also need to lower the barriers to using different assets and better connect on-chain and off-chain account systems.
Imagine using imToken to send money instantly to friends or family overseas, trade on whether an event will occur, or buy a fractional share of a U.S. stock—without necessarily thinking of any of these activities as “using crypto.”
It is precisely when crypto no longer needs to be repeatedly emphasized that the technology may finally move beyond a relatively self-contained niche market and enter the broader financial and commercial landscape.