Adrian Cachinero’s 18-month-old daughter might grow up without ever walking into a bank branch or signing paperwork for a checking account. That’s not wishful thinking from a crypto evangelist; it’s a product thesis shaping how his firm, Steakhouse Financial, builds DeFi infrastructure today.
“My daughter, she’s one and a half years old, and I think she might never need to open a bank account in her life,” Cachinero told CoinDesk in London. “We’re building products for that generation.”
Steakhouse Financial manages more than $4 billion in blockchain-based vaults, smart contracts that let users deposit stablecoins, earn yield, and retain custody of their assets without handing them to a bank or broker. The firm’s bet is straightforward: children born after 2020 will expect financial services to work the way the rest of their digital lives work, which is to say instantly, globally, and without waiting three business days for a wire to clear.
Cachinero isn’t predicting banks will vanish. He’s predicting their visibility will. “I might be the last generation that remembers life before the internet,” he said. “For the generations that followed, the internet is just a fact of life.” The same logic applies to money. If payments, savings, and lending can live inside a wallet app, the separate account at JPMorgan or Barclays starts to look like infrastructure rather than a consumer relationship.
Visa’s Data Shows Retail Stablecoin Use Already at Scale
Skepticism about crypto’s everyday utility has always centered on the gap between white-paper promises and actual transaction volume. The latest numbers from Visa’s stablecoin tracker offer a partial answer.
Over the most recent 30-day period, the tracker recorded $6.6 billion in volume across 132.4 million transactions that fell below $250, the threshold Visa uses to flag retail-sized payments. That’s roughly 4.4 million small-value stablecoin transactions per day. For context, Venmo processed about 5.5 million daily peer-to-peer transactions in its most recent fiscal year. Stablecoins are not yet larger than Venmo in pure transaction count, but they’re operating in the same order of magnitude, and they work across borders without requiring both parties to hold accounts at the same app.
Standard Chartered expects the market to keep expanding. The bank’s May 2026 investor presentation projected stablecoin circulation will grow roughly sevenfold, from its current base to approximately $2 trillion by 2028. That forecast assumes continued regulatory clarity, particularly in the U.S. where the GENIUS Act framework has given issuers a compliance pathway. (For background on how that legislation works, see our GENIUS Act stablecoin regulation explainer.)
The projection also assumes stablecoins will carve out a specific niche rather than replacing all forms of digital money. Standard Chartered’s global head of payments, Naveen Mallela, expects stablecoins to dominate retail payments and remittances, while bank-issued tokenized deposits handle wholesale and institutional flows. The distinction matters. A migrant worker sending $200 home to the Philippines probably doesn’t need the counterparty guarantees that come with a regulated bank deposit. An asset manager settling a $50 million trade probably does.
The Wallet-as-Account Model: One App, Many Issuers
Mallela’s personal vision (he clarified this was not a formal Standard Chartered position) goes further than stablecoin payments. He sees a future where the bank account as a standalone product disappears entirely, replaced by a wallet tied to the user’s identity.
“Rather than having bank accounts with individual banks or having separate brokerage accounts, you would have a wallet where you’ll have cash, tokenized deposits of some sort issued by different banks, stablecoins, tokenized money market funds, crypto and funds, all of that in one app, one wallet,” he said.
This isn’t as radical as it sounds. The model already exists in embryonic form. Apps like Robinhood and Revolut let users hold cash, stocks, and crypto in one interface. The difference is that those apps still rely on traditional banking rails underneath: Robinhood’s cash sits in partner banks, and withdrawals move through ACH. Mallela’s wallet would use tokenized assets native to blockchains, which could settle in minutes rather than days.
Banks wouldn’t exit the system under this model. They’d recede from the consumer-facing layer while continuing to provide the deposits, liquidity, and regulatory controls that make the tokens trustworthy in the first place. Think of it like the relationship between AWS and a consumer app: most users never think about Amazon’s data centers, but the infrastructure is still there.
The European Central Bank is watching this shift nervously. As we reported earlier this month, ECB official Piero Cipollone warned that stablecoins could drain European banks’ retail deposits, pushing the central bank to accelerate its digital euro pilot. The concern is that if consumers park their euros in dollar-denominated stablecoins like USDC or USDT, European banks lose a stable funding base, and European monetary policy loses transmission.
Binance Sees the Youth Shift in Emerging Markets
Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by volume, is already seeing younger user demographics, though the data is impressionistic rather than rigorous.
“I think a lot of our users are younger,” said Shunyet Jan, Binance’s head of exchange and trading. “Especially in emerging markets, they definitely are younger.” Jan acknowledged that Binance doesn’t have data showing whether its average user is getting younger over time, but the pattern he describes aligns with broader fintech trends.
Neobanks, the app-first challenger banks like Nubank, Chime, and Revolut, now capture nearly 40% of new banking accounts globally, with over 1.4 billion users according to Simon-Kucher data. These users are already comfortable with a phone as their primary financial interface. The step from a neobank app to a crypto wallet is smaller than the step their parents took from a branch-based bank to online banking.
Binance’s response is to expand beyond trading. Jan said the exchange wants to build a “super app” that lets customers hold different assets and use them from one place, adding payments and other financial services to the core exchange product. The super-app model, popularized by WeChat in China and Grab in Southeast Asia, bundles messaging, payments, shopping, and financial services into a single interface. It’s a logical endpoint for both crypto exchanges and neobanks, which is why they’re converging on the same territory.
Everyone Is Moving Onto Everyone Else’s Turf
The competitive dynamics here are worth spelling out. Banks have added crypto trading (JPMorgan’s digital asset desk, Goldman’s crypto derivatives). Crypto exchanges have added debit cards, payment services, and tokenized assets. Fintech apps have added both. “You could see how everyone is moving onto each other’s turf,” Jan said.
This convergence is blurring the line between banking and crypto, but it’s also highlighting the gaps that remain. Most cross-border payments still move from one bank account to another. Stablecoins can transfer value between wallets around the clock, but Mallela noted that users can face delays when money must reach a bank account. The last mile, converting a stablecoin to local currency and depositing it in a bank, still involves traditional rails.
Self-custody is another unresolved question. Steakhouse Financial’s vaults let users retain control of their assets, which is the philosophical core of DeFi. But most consumers don’t want to manage private keys, and most regulators don’t trust them to do it safely. The wallet model Mallela described could be custodial, with banks or licensed wallet providers holding keys on behalf of users, which would make it more palatable to regulators but less different from the current system.
The regulatory landscape is also uneven. The U.S. has moved toward clarity with the GENIUS Act for stablecoins and the FIT21 framework for digital assets. Europe has MiCA. But emerging markets, where Binance sees the youngest user growth, often have less defined rules. India’s Reserve Bank has pushed to keep banks away from crypto entirely, as we covered earlier this month. A wallet-based financial system that works in London or New York might not be legal in Mumbai or Lagos.
What the Numbers Actually Support
Let’s be precise about what the data shows and what it doesn’t.
Visa’s stablecoin tracker confirms that retail-sized transactions are happening at scale: $6.6 billion across 132.4 million transactions in 30 days. That’s real volume, not test transactions or wash trading. But it doesn’t tell us who these users are, whether they’re younger than traditional banking customers, or whether they’re using stablecoins as a primary financial tool or a supplement.
Standard Chartered’s $2 trillion projection is exactly that: a projection. It assumes regulatory tailwinds, continued dollar dominance, and no major stablecoin failure that spooks regulators into restrictive action. All of those assumptions could prove wrong.
The neobank figure (40% of new accounts, 1.4 billion users) shows that digital-native banking is mainstream, but neobanks are still banks. They hold deposits, comply with banking regulations, and operate within the traditional financial system. The leap from neobank to crypto wallet is conceptually smaller than the leap from branch banking to neobank, but it still requires users to adopt new infrastructure, learn new risks, and trust new counterparties.
Cachinero’s statement about his daughter is a prediction, not a fact. It’s directionally plausible, especially if stablecoin adoption continues on its current trajectory and if tokenized deposits gain traction among banks. But “might never need” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Regulatory reversals, security incidents, or simple consumer inertia could all slow the shift.
The Persistence of Bank Infrastructure
Even the most bullish crypto executives aren’t predicting that banks disappear. They’re predicting that banks become invisible. The deposits in Mallela’s hypothetical wallet would still be bank deposits. The stablecoins would still be backed by bank accounts or Treasury securities held by regulated entities. The compliance controls would still involve Know Your Customer checks and transaction monitoring.
What changes is the interface. Instead of logging into a bank’s website to check your balance, you’d open a wallet app. Instead of initiating a wire transfer through your bank’s portal, you’d send a stablecoin to a wallet address. The user experience would feel like crypto, but the infrastructure underneath would still be banking.
This hybrid model might be the most realistic outcome. Pure DeFi, where users hold their own keys and interact directly with smart contracts, remains niche. Pure traditional banking, where everything moves through correspondent banks and settles in days, is increasingly untenable for a generation that expects instant everything. The middle ground is tokenized assets and stablecoins issued by regulated entities, held in wallets that look like crypto apps but behave like regulated financial products.
Whether that middle ground satisfies the ideological commitments of either crypto maximalists or banking traditionalists is another question. But it might satisfy the 18-month-olds who, in 16 years, will be opening their first financial accounts, or their first wallets, or whatever we end up calling them.
What Remains Unresolved
The shift Cachinero and Mallela describe prompts skepticism that neither fully addressed.
First, who bears the risk in a wallet-based system? In traditional banking, deposit insurance protects consumers up to regulatory limits. In crypto, losses from hacks, exploits, or issuer failures often fall on users. A wallet holding stablecoins from multiple issuers and tokenized deposits from multiple banks would need some framework for allocating losses when things go wrong. (Our derivatives dashboard tracks liquidation events that offer a window into how quickly losses can cascade in crypto markets.)
Second, how do central banks maintain monetary policy transmission if retail deposits move from domestic banks to dollar stablecoins? This is the ECB’s concern, and it applies to any country whose currency isn’t the dollar. A French household holding USDC instead of euros is effectively dollarizing their savings, which limits the Banque de France’s ability to influence their financial behavior through interest rate policy.
Third, what happens to financial inclusion? The crypto industry often claims that wallets are easier to open than bank accounts, which is true in jurisdictions with burdensome bank bureaucracy. But wallets require smartphones, internet access, and some baseline financial literacy about private keys and transaction fees. It’s not obvious that a farmer in rural Indonesia is better served by a Solana wallet than by a basic bank account with a local institution.
These questions don’t have obvious answers, and the executives quoted in London didn’t pretend they did. What they offered instead was a direction: financial services moving from account-based to wallet-based, from institution-centric to user-centric, from slow settlement to instant settlement. Whether Cachinero’s daughter actually grows up without a bank account depends on how the next decade resolves the regulatory, technical, and economic challenges that remain.
That’s not a certainty. It’s a bet. And Steakhouse Financial, Binance, and Standard Chartered are all placing their chips on the same side of the table.
