Institutions are running out of time to stop treating stablecoins as an experiment.
Tokenization is heating up, and legacy institutions are at risk of falling behind as the total market cap of stablecoins reaches a new all-time high north of $300 billion, says Bitget Wallet COO Alvin Kan.
In a new interview with Coinage, Kan says conversation inside boardrooms have already shifted from curiosity to urgency as traditional finance begins to collide with crypto infrastructure in real time.
“I think stablecoin adoption is going to be… if you adopt, it is good. If you don’t adopt it, you’re not going to be competitive, right? So it’s a do or die situation for them in the next few years,” he said.
Kan’s warning captures a broader inflection point for the industry. What began as a niche use case for crypto-native traders to move dollars between exchanges has quietly evolved into a foundational layer for global payments, remittances, and increasingly, institutional finance. And now, the pressure is building.
Just a few years ago, stablecoins were framed as a “nice-to-have” alternative to legacy rails for cross-border transfers. Today, they’re becoming something closer to mandatory infrastructure.
Even Jamie Dimon, a long-time crypto skeptic, has begun to acknowledge the shift. In his latest annual shareholder letter, the JPMorgan Chase CEO warned that a new class of blockchain-based competitors is moving faster than incumbents.
“While we have been able to grow, many but not all of the new players have been quite successful and continue to raise both money and their ambitions,” Dimon wrote. “In addition, a whole new set of competitors is emerging based on blockchain, which includes stablecoins, smart contracts and other forms of tokenization.”
It’s a notable shift in tone, and one that reinforces Kan’s view that the competitive landscape is already changing. The question is no longer whether institutions will engage with stablecoins, but whether they can move quickly enough to keep up.
Part of what’s accelerating that timeline is the rapid convergence between crypto and traditional financial systems. Stablecoins are no longer operating in parallel to legacy rails — they’re increasingly being integrated into them.
“Payments has been a very core theme in the last year,” Kan said, pointing to the role of card networks like Visa and Mastercard in bridging the gap between crypto and existing merchant infrastructure.
Instead of forcing merchants to accept crypto directly — a process that proved slow and unfamiliar — the industry has shifted toward abstraction. Users can pay with stablecoins, while merchants receive funds through systems they already understand. The result is a seamless experience that hides the underlying crypto rails entirely. (Bitget partnered with Mastercard to issue debit cards that allow users to spend crypto natively.)