Asheesh Birla, the former Ripple board member who now runs Evernorth — a treasury focused on institutional XRP exposure — laid out a bullish, institution-forward roadmap for crypto in 2026 in a short social-video posted December 23.
At the center of Birla’s thesis: next year will be when blockchain slides out of the spotlight and into the plumbing of finance, with institutions moving from experimentation to production. “It’s going to be part of everyday financial infrastructure in 2026,” he says. “It’s going to quietly power how money moves.”
What Birla predicts for 2026
- Programmable treasuries: Corporate back offices, he argues, remain manual and fragmented. By combining DeFi tooling with AI-driven automation, parts of treasury management will be codified and automated — cutting costs, time and middlemen while improving global cash management and operational workflows.
- Local stablecoins + on-chain FX: Rather than only more dollar-pegged coins, Birla expects a proliferation of regionally-oriented “local stablecoins” that meet on-chain in FX venues. He predicts on-chain DEX liquidity could become the base layer for spot FX markets that compete with legacy rails — a potential challenge to the roughly $9.6 trillion FX market.
- Stablecoins as settlement plumbing: Stablecoins, he says, will migrate from a crypto product to a settlement technology embedded in bank and corporate systems, enabling real-time liquidity analytics, faster movement of funds and cleaner reconciliation. Birla cites industry projections that see stablecoin market cap expanding dramatically — a range he summarizes from about $300 billion to as high as $100 trillion.
- NFTs reimagined as access tokens: Not a repeat of 2021’s collectible mania, Birla foresees NFTs repurposed as membership and access tokens — combining ticketing, loyalty and digital collectibles into unified digital access instruments.
Why it matters — and the subtext
Birla frames 2026 as the start of Institutional DeFi: less speculation, more operational utility. He points to growing enterprise demand and evolving regulatory clarity as tailwinds. The commercial angle is clear — Birla is building Evernorth as a purpose-built XRP treasury and positioning XRP-based infrastructure as a core component of that institutional future. That context underscores his optimism while also serving as a business thesis for Evernorth.
Market snapshot
At press time, XRP traded at $1.8577.
Birla’s full comments and the short video were shared on social media with the message that the next phase of digital assets will be institutional, global and value-driven.
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