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.
The study argues that 2026 will mark a shift from cycles-driven onchain activity to everyday financial behavior—paying, saving, earning, managing assets, and moving money across borders—placing wallets at the center of interactions with both onchain infrastructure and real-world financial systems. As finance moves onchain, wallets are evolving into everyday financial operating systems, enabling users to interact with multiple layers of finance in one place.
Three forces are defining the future of everyday onchain finance: Payments are scaling and becoming invisible; AI is becoming an economic actor; Markets are rebalancing toward functional assets. Stablecoins have quietly grown into a dominant value-transfer network, rising from a $205 billion market cap in 2024 to $308 billion in 2025, with onchain stablecoin settlements reaching $33 trillion and USDC processing $18.3 trillion in transfers—surpassing USDT in transaction volume for the first time. This growth reflects usage rather than speculation, as stablecoins are embedded in cross-border payments, local instant systems like PIX and SPEI, and even traditional card networks via Visa and Mastercard; regulatory clarity through the GENIUS Act, MiCA, and new licenses in Hong Kong and Japan further undergird this shift, while PayFi models seek to keep settlement capital liquid and productive. Wallets are becoming the routing layer, deciding which currency to use, how to settle, and where capital flows, all without exposing users to underlying complexity.
AI is becoming an economic actor. The era of machine-native payments enables AI agents to execute stablecoin payments directly within HTTP request flows, enabling real-time, usage-based pricing, autonomous purchases of data and services, and high-frequency, low-value transactions at machine speed. By 2026, AI agents are expected to operate as economic participants, executing tasks and transacting under predefined permissions, with wallets serving as permission managers for agents, visibility layers showing agent activity and spending, and risk controls enforcing limits and safeguards via a new trust model dubbed “Know Your Agent” (KYA).
Markets are rebalancing toward functional assets. Onchain liquidity increasingly flows toward assets with real-world relevance—real-world assets (RWAs) doubled to $37.7 billion in value, perpetual DEXs surpassed $1 trillion in monthly volume at peak, and prediction markets surpassed $40 billion in annual trading volume. RWAs are evolving beyond simple tokenization, while perpetual DEXs—led by platforms like Hyperliquid—offer institutional-scale liquidity. Onchain perps now represent a sizable share of centralized-exchange derivatives, and prediction markets are maturing into information markets that translate real-world events into probabilistic signals. Across these markets, users gravitate toward platforms offering multiple asset classes through a single interface, with the wallet again serving as the gateway.
Onchain perps now represent a sizable share of centralized-exchange derivatives, and prediction markets are maturing into information markets that translate real-world events into probabilistic signals. Across these markets, users gravitate toward platforms offering multiple asset classes through a single interface, with the wallet again serving as the gateway.
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