When Crypto “Enters” Traditional Finance: Prediction Markets, Stablecoins, and Tokenized Stocks—How They’re Heading Toward the Mainstream?

By: imToken

For a long time, the crypto industry has been talking about “mass adoption,” usually pointing to a few relatively well-known metrics:

For example, how many people hold Bitcoin, how many addresses interact with on-chain protocols, and how many users start using wallets, exchanges, and DeFi.

Behind this lies an assumption of a fairly linear pathway: ordinary users need to understand Crypto first, then buy crypto assets, create a wallet, and finally gradually step into the on-chain world.

But the recent changes may be reversing this route. Users may not need to understand blockchain first in order to start using crypto infrastructure. Instead, existing demands—such as prediction markets, cross-border remittances, and stock trading—are actively absorbing crypto technology. These may look like three separate tracks with penetration that doesn’t happen along the same path, but they point to the same shift:

Crypto is moving from a new financial system that requires users to actively enter, to infrastructure that traditional finance and mainstream applications can call directly.

1. Prediction markets: from trading on-chain events to probability pricing tools

As everyone knows, prediction markets are not a new concept.

Especially in the crypto world, as early as the early days of Ethereum, the prediction market Augur was the first DApp on Ethereum, and it also initially validated that any event with objectively verifiable outcomes can be transformed into an on-chain contract. Market beliefs about the future are then reflected through buying and selling with real funds.

It’s just that for a long time afterward, prediction markets were often simplified as “on-chain gambling,” without truly escaping the crypto-native circle. Even the early users of platforms like Polymarket also mainly came from crypto-native groups familiar with wallets, stablecoins, and on-chain trading:

On one hand, the entry barriers for wallets, stablecoins, and on-chain trading limit participation by average users. On the other hand, even if Polymarket once broke through to a wider audience with events such as the U.S. elections, its core participants still largely remained crypto traders who understand Crypto.

But the 2026 US-Canada-Mexico World Cup provides a more mainstream window for observing prediction markets (Further reading: “World Cup frenzy, prediction markets at the table: How Polymarket and others tear open the mainstream”).

Compared with monetary policy, economic data, and political elections, football matches require almost no additional knowledge education. Whether a team can advance from the group stage, which team will make the semifinals, and whether a player can become the top scorer—these questions are already what fans discuss every day.

What prediction markets do is simply convert these scattered viewpoints into a price that can change in real time. That’s also why people say prediction markets need more than just changes in the regulatory environment to truly go mainstream: they also need a sufficiently large, sufficiently intuitive public event—and the World Cup fits the bill perfectly.

Many moments when crypto first broke into the mainstream often happened at the intersection of “high cognitive barrier technology” and “low cognitive barrier scenarios.” For example, NFTs broke through for a time because they bound on-chain assets with avatars, art, and community identity. Memes spread quickly because they compressed complex financial behavior into simple emotions and cultural symbols.

Likewise, the entry point that takes prediction markets toward broader audiences may not be macroeconomic data or complex political contracts, but rather sports, entertainment, and tournament scenarios that mainstream audiences already like to discuss.

The World Cup is special because it naturally meets three conditions.

• First, it has broad global consensus. Even if you’re not a hardcore fan, you can understand basic questions like who wins and who loses, who can advance, and who will take the title.
• Second, it has a high-frequency information flow. Pre-match lineups, player form, injuries/suspensions, tactical changes, and the match progression all continuously reshape market expectations.
• Third, it has strong social attributes. Watching games isn’t an isolated activity—it comes with group chats, sharing, discussion, debates, and emotional resonance.

At the same time, the competitive boundaries for prediction markets are also expanding. Especially recently, it’s clearly no longer limited only to vertical platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket. More and more it’s being integrated into traditional brokerage firms, crypto trading platforms, and even media products.

The reason isn’t complicated. Traditional financial markets already have many risk pricing tools like options, futures, and interest rate swaps, but these products usually have higher comprehension barriers, and it’s difficult for ordinary users to directly read market judgment from prices. Prediction markets compress complex questions into a more intuitive probability.

This is also the key for prediction markets to potentially enter traditional financial infrastructure. What they provide isn’t just another way to place bets, but a low-barrier, real-time updating expectation pricing tool.

Of course, this path still comes with obvious controversy.

How should events be defined and settled? Can people with inside knowledge participate? Do financial event contracts constitute insider trading? And for sports-type contracts, should they be subject to federal derivatives regulation or state gambling regulation—none of these are fully clear yet. As the market grows, some Wall Street firms have already started limiting employee participation in prediction market trading involving economic data and corporate events.

But in any case, the process by which prediction markets earn mainstream recognition is also the process of gradually transforming from an “open event trading experiment” into financial market infrastructure.

2. Stablecoins: from crypto assets to payment and clearing infrastructure

If prediction markets are bringing a crypto-native product logic into the mainstream, then stablecoins are taking a different route—they’re gradually hiding behind traditional payment products.

For most crypto users, stablecoins have long played the role of a trading medium. Users use USDT or USDC to buy and sell other tokens, transfer funds between different exchanges, or put them into DeFi protocols to earn yield. Because of this, issuance size has long been viewed as one of the main metrics for measuring stablecoin competitiveness.

But in the next stage, the competitive focus of stablecoins may no longer just be on-chain supply. It may be who can complete regulatory clearance first and embed themselves deeply into real scenarios like payments, clearing, and cross-border transfers.

One of the most discussed recent examples is Open USD, launched by Open Standard with the participation of more than 140 payment, banking, technology, and crypto companies.

Unlike the traditional model where reserve revenue is controlled by a single issuing entity, Open USD allows partner companies to mint and redeem for free. It also plans to distribute the income generated by reserves to the partners that drive its usage after deducting management fees.

Visa and Stripe’s related descriptions define OUSD as a shared infrastructure for global fund flows. What’s truly worth paying attention to isn’t that the market will have another dollar-backed stablecoin, but that it tries to adjust the stablecoins’ long-standing model of revenue distribution. In the past, issuers could usually capture most of the revenue generated by reserve assets, while wallets, exchanges, payment companies, and fintech platforms often bore the costs of acquiring users, product integration, and actual distribution.

If reserve revenue can be tilted further toward channels and usage scenarios, the competitive logic of stablecoins will change accordingly. This also explains why the entry of institutions like Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, and Zelle is more noteworthy than simply adding another on-chain asset.

In short, stablecoins are transforming from a Crypto product that users must actively hold and manage into a funds transfer component that traditional enterprises can call directly. What users may see are cross-border remittances, merchant settlement, enterprise payments, payroll, or even a payment card; what happens in the backend could be stablecoin + public chain settlement networks. Users may not even need to know stablecoins exist to already be using their settlement capabilities.

Meanwhile, some stablecoin products that lack real distribution channels and usage scenarios are also exiting. This further shows that completing issuance doesn’t automatically mean stablecoins naturally have value.

As the underlying technology becomes standardized, the real barriers will come more from licensing and regulatory compliance adaptation capabilities, and whether they can be embedded into business scenarios that continuously generate transaction demand.

This also implies that in the future, stablecoins may not only need to compete with other stablecoins. They may instead have to compete with card network rails, cross-border remittance systems, bank deposits, and enterprise treasury infrastructure.

3. Tokenized stocks: traditional assets moving into on-chain accounts

Compared with prediction markets and stablecoins, tokenized stocks show a more direct direction of convergence.

It doesn’t introduce a crypto product to traditional users; instead, it brings stocks, ETFs, funds, and other traditional assets into accounts that were originally mainly used to store and trade crypto assets.

In the past half year, almost all major crypto trading platforms have been rushing into this space. At the same time, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, ICE, also made a strategic investment in OKX. Both sides plan to cooperate around U.S.-regulated crypto futures, ICE market products, and NYSE-related tokenized stocks. As of the time of writing, OKX has just planned to launch tokenized U.S. stock products.

From a market-structure perspective, this cooperation has strong symbolic significance. After all, in the past, crypto exchanges tried to provide users with stock price exposure through synthetic assets, perpetual contracts, or third-party issuers. Now, the operators of traditional exchanges are directly participating in product design, price data, compliance, and on-chain market infrastructure building.

On the user-facing entry side, similar changes are already happening. Besides vertical applications, from trading platforms to wallets to on-chain DEXs—from Robinhood to Interactive Brokers, everyone is trying to expand into comprehensive financial accounts that can simultaneously handle crypto assets, stocks, and even commodities trading.

However, tokenized stocks also most easily create conceptual confusion.

A token whose name includes Apple, Nvidia, or Tesla doesn’t necessarily mean that users directly hold that company’s ordinary shares. Different products might represent direct ownership of real shares, beneficiary rights formed after shares are held by an SPV, debt instruments promised to be redeemed by the issuer, or simply derivatives that track the stock price.

These models can differ significantly in areas like dividends, voting rights, redemption rights, bankruptcy remoteness, and investor protection. Even if tokens circulate on a public chain, the legal relationships that determine users’ final rights are still often located off-chain with the issuing entities, custodians, and legal contracts. Most RWA systems adopted today also use hybrid architectures.

Therefore, tokenization doesn’t automatically equal liquidity, and it doesn’t automatically mean users have exactly the same rights as traditional shareholders. But these limitations don’t prevent tokenized stocks from becoming an important entry point.

Once compliance, custody, and shareholder rights issues are gradually resolved, stocks no longer have to exist only in broker accounts. They can be in the same on-chain account as stablecoins, be split into smaller units, be traded across different regions and time periods, and potentially further be used for collateral, lending, automated investing, and programmatic asset allocation.

At that time, the competition for wallets and trading platforms won’t only be about storing and trading crypto assets. It will be about who can become the unified entry point for users to manage global assets.

Written at the end

To be honest, this is a bit like in The Legend of Zhen Huan: when Zhang Sanfeng taught Zhang Wujun Tai Chi, he kept asking how much he remembered, until Zhang Wujun replied that he had already forgotten everything—only then did he truly grasp the essence.

Mainstreaming crypto may also go through a similar process. The truly mature sign won’t be that everyone remembers the concepts of blockchain, wallets, and stablecoins. Instead, users gradually won’t notice these technologies at all, and everything about Crypto will fade behind the product.

Of course, if you look closely, the way crypto technology enters traditional finance—from prediction markets to stablecoins to tokenized stocks—doesn’t happen in exactly the same way:

• Prediction markets take the product logic formed in the crypto world into the mainstream market, converting events and uncertainty into probabilities that can be traded in real time;
• Stablecoins embed on-chain settlement capability into payments, remittances, and enterprise fund flows, letting users use a new funds network without having to understand blockchain;
• Tokenized stocks bring traditional assets into on-chain accounts, making wallets, exchanges, and public chains gradually become new channels for issuing, trading, and settling traditional securities;

They correspond to penetration at three layers: products, funds, and assets. For the industry, this may imply a new mainstream path—no longer requiring every user to first become a Crypto user, but letting on-chain technology adapt itself to the financial needs that users already know.

Accordingly, the role of wallets will also change.

After all, when wallets are no longer only native tokens and NFTs, but gradually also stablecoins, stocks, funds, commodities, and event contracts, they need to handle not just private keys and on-chain balances, but also how to reduce the usage barriers for different assets and better connect on-chain and off-chain account systems.

Imagine this: when someone can use imToken to instantly remit money to friends and family overseas, trade the probability of an event occurring on imToken, or buy a small portion of U.S. stocks—he may not even think of himself as “using Crypto.”

It is precisely in this state where there is no longer a need to repeatedly emphasize it that crypto technology can truly move from a relatively independent niche market into the broader world of finance and business.