Happy Holidays. Eric here. 

PayPal is all in on stablecoins. 

The $56 billion payment giant’s CEO, Alex Chriss, told Fortune this week that it is integrating blockchain solutions across its verticals. 

Why? Because the 30-year-old venture must reinvent itself to stay relevant in an ever-changing world. 

“If you were to build the payments ecosystem from scratch today, it wouldn’t look like the way it does today,” said Chriss. “You would start to use some sort of blockchain, or some sort of thing that probably looks a lot like stablecoin.”

PayPal is hardly alone. Wall Street players aplenty are on a campaign to integrate blockchain solutions into their offerings.

Tech titans like Stripe and Google are launching their own blockchains, banks such as Santander and Société Générale are reportedly exploring the creation of their own stablecoins, and crypto firms and institutional players are scooping up blockchain businesses in multi-million-dollar acquisitions. 

As Mike Giampapa, general partner at Galaxy Ventures, told me, institutions “view these efforts as opportunities for growth and margin expansion, replacing legacy rails with modern blockchain infrastructure without requiring end users to materially change existing behaviour.”

These efforts are expected to continue next year, too. 

If 2025 was the year when regulators and lawmakers cleared the path for traditional financial firms to adopt crypto rails, 2026 is set to be the year when they take advantage of that opportunity. 

And rest assured that DL News will be there to report on it.

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