This article is written by Tiger Research. In 2026, blockchain has not yet changed the world, but what about a decade later? This article uses the stories of four ordinary people to depict potential changes by 2036—such as stablecoins replacing fiat currency, assets trading around the clock, consolidation of public chains, and the restructuring of content monetization mechanisms. These are not science fiction but ongoing technological evolutions.
"Does Anyone Still Use Paper Money?"
2036, a currency exchange point in the fictional country Zutopia. Judy, after 34 years on the job, takes a counterfeit detector out of the drawer and starts counting the local currency, Bucks.
"Someone still uses Bucks."
It's normal. In this inflation-prone country, the currency's value shrinks daily. Legally, it still exists; in practice, no one uses it anymore. Everyone uses US dollar stablecoins for daily life.
Whirrrrrrr.
Listening to the sound of the detector, Judy remembers these years.
2002, 22-year-old Judy experienced a sovereign default. Bank doors locked shut, people unable to withdraw their life savings.
"Go exchange it now."
Her father said. As soon as wages hit the account, they had to be exchanged for dollars immediately. Wait a day, and Bucks would visibly depreciate. People checked the black market dollar exchange rate more diligently than the front-page news.
"How much is the dollar today?"
This question started every day. You couldn't buy dollars at the official rate. The government set monthly foreign exchange limits per person, and no one knew when banks would freeze dollar deposits.
In the mid-2020s, young customers started asking questions she didn't understand.
"Can I exchange for USDT?"
At first, only a few freelancers and exporters used it to receive money from overseas. No banks, no queues. With a phone, you could exchange Bucks for stablecoins and swap back when needed.
Back then, Judy never imagined it would replace her job. The elderly still needed cash, many businesses too. But the lines got shorter bit by bit. Young customers disappeared first, then the middle-aged.
By 2030, no one queued even on payday. Once businesses had no reason to hold Bucks either, they started paying salaries directly in stablecoins. Bucks became a currency needed only for paying taxes and utility bills.
2033, the tax office changed its stance. The calculation was simple: collecting stablecoins was more reliable than collecting Bucks. A brief notice was posted on the website.
"Accept USDC and USDT as alternative payment methods for taxes."
Bucks still existed, but the state itself announced it preferred others' money.
2034, the Treasury followed suit. Bonds issued in Bucks repeatedly failed to sell, so the Treasury eventually issued new bonds denominated in dollar stablecoins. Civil servant salaries soon followed. 2035, some local governments started paying half their civil servant salaries in stablecoins—because those only receiving Bucks were hit earliest and hardest by inflation.
Printing money, collecting taxes, paying salaries—these powers once belonging solely to the state were being transferred, piece by piece, into the hands of stablecoins.
As of May 2026, the total market capitalization of stablecoins is approximately $320 billion, with annual trading volume of $2.8 trillion. Compared to the over $2 trillion processed daily by the US wholesale payment network, that's just three weeks' worth. Excluding wash trading and fake transactions, less than 6% is actually used for payments. The remaining 88% just circulates within exchanges—trading, collateralizing, coming back.
The question is where that 6% actually happens. It might have started in New York and Silicon Valley, but the places truly needing this money are not in the US. Americans have credit cards and bank accounts. The people truly desperate for stablecoins are those in countries where their currency shrinks every day.
Judy puts the counterfeit detector back in the drawer. Will there be customers tomorrow?
2 AM, Liquidated in Ten Minutes
2036, a small rental apartment in Singapore.
2 PM. A notification chime sounds. Lia glances at her phone. A limit order alert for NVIDIA.
2 PM Singapore time, the New York Stock Exchange isn't even open. But on Lia's screen, NVIDIA's chart is still moving. She clicks Buy without hesitation. On the same screen, next to NVIDIA, are treasury bonds, real estate REITs, and data center infrastructure funds, all in one interface.
By 2036, you don't just trade stocks—you can trade everything in the world.
"Investment never stops, no matter where you are."
This is what Lia often says. For her, the world has always been like this.
2021, 9-year-old Lia saw US retail investors pushing the stock price of the physical game store GameStop to the sky. It was a kind of investment where participation itself became the focus, surpassing asset value—organized not by brokers, but by online communities.
According to a 2025 World Economic Forum survey across 13 countries, 30% of Gen Z started investing as soon as they became adults—far higher than Gen X (9%) and Baby Boomers (6%). Gen Z's interest runs so deep that 86% learned to invest before entering the workforce, compared to only 47% of Boomers.
In Coinbase's Q4 2025 survey, 73% of young respondents said it's hard to build wealth through traditional means—higher than 57% of older generations.
For this generation, investing is just a given—they want access to more of everything.
June 2025. Tokens 1:1 collateralized against major US stocks—Apple, Tesla, NVIDIA—flooded into decentralized exchanges (DEXes). No nationality restrictions, no strict KYC. As long as you have a wallet address, US stocks are within reach, with leverage practically unlimited.
Try again tomorrow.
Lia logs into the borderless trading platform Lemming Brothers and buys a tokenized product of the Korean real estate index. Ten minutes later, her phone vibrates—a liquidation alert. She swipes away the warning on the screen as if nothing happened.
For Lia, the phone notifications of 2036 are like background noise to daily life. She checks the endless stream of signals from the trading app, picks up her phone again. This contrasts sharply with her parents, who dollar-cost average into so-called "safe assets" on regulated exchanges.
In Lia's world, every kind of value is turned into an asset, running non-stop 24 hours a day. This enormous, never-resting market tempts her into the next trade every day—today, as always.
The Day $2.2 Billion Evaporated
2036, a startup office in Pangyo Techno Valley.
Do-hyun, an infrastructure engineer with 12 years of experience, stops scrolling through the network status dashboard on his monitor. Looking at the list of chains now viewable on a single screen, he mutters.
"Ten years ago you had to scroll forever. Now there aren't even ten."
2024, the year Do-hyun started his engineering career, was truly the great era of discovery for Layer 2 rollups. Anyone could copy-paste a few lines of framework and stack code, launch their own blockchain under their own name. Do-hyun's company also rode the massive infrastructure wave, building validator nodes.
The chain was called Allchain. In June 2024, fueled by airdrop expectations, its Total Value Locked (TVL) soared to $2.2 billion. He can still vividly remember the scene of clinking glasses and cheering in the meeting room.
"At this rate, aren't we the next Ethereum?"
But the joy of listing was fleeting. After the token listed and airdrop rewards dried up, the token price and chain usage plummeted off a cliff. Those projects and users chasing rewards turned away once Allchain stopped paying, evaporating 97% of the deposits within a year.
Allchain's brutal end was not unique. Countless independent networks that mushroomed that year collapsed the same way. They lured developer teams with the sweetener of incentives, but once the funds dried up, the ecosystem emptied out instantly, leaving only silent shell infrastructure.
The astronomical fixed costs of running an independent chain exceeded what any single project could bear. Unable to withstand soaring infrastructure maintenance fees, Allchains one by one announced shutdowns, disappearing into history.
Only a tiny handful survived under capital's cold gaze. Hundreds of chains once seemingly poised to change the world carved up the ruins of a market share barely above 10%, then went extinct silently.
"Back then we all thought we could survive, build our own massive ecosystems..."
Around 2026, people mistook the number of chains for blockchain scalability itself. But fragmented chains just broke the user experience and raised security costs. What people truly wanted wasn't hundreds of complex networks—but a few massive infrastructures, providing liquidity that never breaks, optimized for speed.
Do-hyun sighs deeply, silently turns off the monitor, picks up his bag, and heads home.
The "Human Eyes" That Once Clicked Are Gone
2036, a media startup office in Sangam-dong.
Jae-hoon happens to be browsing another platform and laughs when he sees a banner ad in the bottom right corner.
"There are still companies sticking banner ads on screens, waiting for readers."
Jae-hoon is right. That platform's daily visits hit new highs every month, but traditional banner ad revenue just doesn't come. The entire ad model has become a thing of the past.
In the early 2020s, when Jae-hoon first entered the media industry, the formula for the web economy was clear. Write good articles, readers come. Readers come, advertisers pay for banners.
"How many pageviews today?"
This question at every morning meeting determined the life and death of media companies back then.
But this peaceful formula began to disappear in the late 2020s. By 2029, over half of global web traffic no longer came from humans, but from AI agents and bots. AI would scrape articles and summarize them in a second—but machines have no "eyes" to see banner ads.
At first, like most media companies, they blocked the bots. Server costs exploded, impossible to keep up. But the price of blocking was brutal. Completely buried outside the AI search and recommendation ecosystem, brands were forgotten. Media companies faced a painful choice back then: block bots and lose traffic, or open the doors but earn no money.
"Who are we selling our content to now?"
This desperate question filled the office. The answer wasn't ad boards—it was pricing the content itself.
The gatekeeper of change was the x402 standard launched by Coinbase in May 2025. It technologically resurrected the HTTP 402 response code—the "Payment Required" signal—that had been abandoned in a corner of web standards for 30 years.
By 2029, the focus was building infrastructure: Know Your Agent (KYA) verification, settlement rails, etc. The real explosion started in 2030 when a media company began selling data directly to AI via the x402 system. Once verified, other media and data companies immediately adopted x402, jumping into data sales.
At first, there were only sneers—just small change, a few dozen won at a time, not worth the effort. But when hundreds of thousands, even millions, of machine calls piled up daily, real money started flowing into accounts, far exceeding what banner ads used to bring.
"No need to worry about what advertisers think anymore—machines pay the full price, the company runs on this."
The old web ad model, selling ads by attracting human eyeballs, slowly winds down, while the machine economy—AI agents transacting via APIs—unfolds in full force.
Jae-hoon closes the dashboard, picks up his coffee cup. The visitor curve still shows that strange, almost vertical climb, nonsensical by old standards—but now it's the norm. He no longer checks how many people visited, but how many AI agents paid today.
Tomorrow, hundreds of thousands of agents will knock on his server's door again, and that honest transaction log won't get shorter—not anymore.
