Everyday Finance Onchain: Key Trends Shaping 2026

How wallets are becoming the front door to everyday financial activity
Bitget Wallet released a research report titled Everyday Finance Onchain: Key Trends Shaping 2026, highlighting that crypto wallets are increasingly becoming the primary interface for everyday financial activity onchain.

The report includes perspectives from ecosystem participants such as Polygon, Stellar, MoonPay, 1inch, WalletConnect, Base, Sei, Morph, CertiK, Dune, and Animoca Brands.

Crypto is entering a new phase. In 2026, onchain activity is no longer driven primarily by speculative trading cycles. Instead, it's increasingly shaped by everyday financial behavior: paying, saving, earning, managing assets, and moving money across borders. This shift marks a structural change in how digital finance works - and at the center of it all is the wallet.

Wallets are no longer just tools for accessing blockchains. They're becoming the main financial interface where users interact with onchain infrastructure and real-world financial systems simultaneously. As finance moves onchain, wallets are evolving into everyday financial operating systems. Based on onchain data, market trends, and infrastructure changes observed across 2025, three forces are defining the future of everyday onchain finance.

Payments are Scaling and Becoming Invisible
Stablecoins have quietly become one of the largest value transfer networks in the world.

In 2025 alone:
Stablecoin market cap grew from $205B to $308B
Onchain stablecoin settlement reached $33 trillion
USDC processed $18.3T in transfers, surpassing USDT in transaction volume for the first time

This growth didn't come from speculation. It came from usage. Stablecoins are now embedded into:
Cross-border B2B and B2C payments
Local instant payment systems like PIX (Brazil) and SPEI (Mexico)
Global card networks via Visa and Mastercard
Brokerage and fintech platforms accepting stablecoins as funding rails

Regulatory clarity accelerated this shift. In 2025, the U.S. GENIUS Act, Europe's MiCA framework, and new licensing regimes in Hong Kong and Japan brought stablecoins firmly into compliant financial infrastructure.

What's changing next is visibility. As stablecoins integrate into payment flows, they increasingly operate behind the scenes. Users interact with familiar interfaces, while stablecoins handle settlement invisibly in the background. At the same time, PayFi models keep settlement capital liquid and yield-generating, turning idle balances into productive assets.

Wallets become the routing layer, deciding which currency to use, how to settle, and where capital flows, all without exposing complexity to the user.

AI Is Becoming an Economic Actor
The next major shift in onchain finance isn't human-driven-it's machine-driven. Until recently, AI systems could recommend actions but not execute them. Payments were the bottleneck. That changed in 2025 with the emergence of machine-native payment protocols like x402, which allow AI agents to make stablecoin payments directly within HTTP request flows."
This enables:
Usage-based, real-time pricing instead of subscriptions
Autonomous agents purchasing data, compute, and services
High-frequency, low-value transactions at machine speed

In 2026, AI agents will increasingly act as economic participants: executing tasks, managing resources, and transacting independently under predefined permissions. This introduces a new trust model: "Know Your Agent" (KYA). Wallets play a critical role here. They become:
Permission managers for AI agents
Visibility layers showing what agents are doing and spending
Risk control systems that enforce limits and trigger safeguards

As money begins to move programmatically rather than manually, wallets shift from storage tools to governance and coordination layers for both humans and machines.

Markets Are Rebalancing Toward Functional Assets
Speculation hasn't disappeared, but it's no longer the only driver. In 2025, onchain liquidity increasingly flowed toward assets with clearer financial purpose:
Real-world assets (RWAs) doubled to $37.7B in value
Perpetual DEXs processed $1T+ in monthly volume at peak
Prediction markets surpassed $40B in annual trading volume

RWAs are evolving beyond simple tokenization. As perps, synthetics, and oracles mature, users gain tradable exposure to equities, bonds, commodities, and macro events without relying on static custody models.

Perpetual DEXs, led by platforms such as Hyperliquid, have reached institutional-scale liquidity. Onchain perps now represent nearly 20% of centralized exchange derivatives volume, narrowing a gap once thought to be structural.

Prediction markets also matured. Rather than novelty bets, they increasingly function as information markets, turning real-world events into probabilistic financial signals. With major global events ahead in 2026, this category is poised for further acceleration.

Across all of these markets, a common pattern emerges: users gravitate toward platforms that offer multiple asset classes through a single interface.

Once again, the wallet becomes the gateway.

Why Wallets Sit at the Center of Everyday Onchain Finance
This evolution mirrors a broader shift in fintech itself.
Fintech 1.0 put banking online
Fintech 2.0 made finance mobile
Fintech 3.0 moves finance onchain

In this phase, blockchain goes beyond an interface upgrade; it becomes the settlement layer. Finance becomes instant, global, programmable, and permissionless.

As functions once spread across banks, exchanges, payment apps, and crypto tools consolidate, the wallet becomes the natural point of convergence. It's where users manage cash flow, deploy capital, trade risk, interact with agents, and maintain ownership-all in one place.

This also changes how adoption should be measured. Protocol metrics and exchange volumes show activity, but wallets reveal behavior. They capture why users are onchain, what they do repeatedly, and which actions persist over time.

From that perspective, wallets are no longer passive tools but are becoming financial operating systems where the front end through which onchain finance becomes usable, repeatable, and embedded in daily life.
Looking Ahead
As we move through 2026, onchain finance is entering everyday use. Payments are becoming invisible infrastructure. AI agents are beginning to transact autonomously. Markets are shifting toward assets with real-world relevance. Access is no longer the primary challenge. The next phase is about making onchain finance intuitive, reliable, and durable enough to support daily behavior. That responsibility increasingly sits with wallets. Everyday onchain isn't about replacing existing systems overnight. It's about building a parallel financial layer-open, global, and user-owned-that people can actually use.

And wallets are where that future takes shape.

Read the full report here https://www.bitget.com/web3/blog/articles/key-trends-2026

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About Bitget Wallet
Bitget Wallet is an everyday finance app designed to make crypto simple, secure, and usable in daily life. Serving more than 90 million users worldwide, it offers an all-in-one platform to send, spend, earn, and trade crypto and stablecoins through blockchain-based infrastructure. With global on- and off-ramps, the app enables faster and borderless onchain finance, supported by advanced security and a $700 million user protection fund. Bitget Wallet operates as a fully self-custodial wallet and does not hold or control user funds, private keys, or user data. Transactions are signed by users and executed on public blockchains.

This release was published on openPR.