Tiger Research: โลกคริปโตในปี 2036 จะเป็นอย่างไร?

This article was written by Tiger Research. In 2026, blockchain has yet to change the world, but what about a decade from now? This article uses the stories of four ordinary people to depict changes that could occur by 2036—including stablecoins replacing fiat currency, 24/7 asset trading, the consolidation of public chains, and the restructuring of content payment mechanisms. These are not science fiction, but technological evolutions already underway.

"Does anyone still use paper money?"

In 2036, a currency exchange booth in the fictional country of Zutopia. Judy, who has worked here for 34 years, takes out a bill counter from the drawer and begins counting the national currency, Bucks.

"Can't believe someone still uses Bucks."

It's normal. In this inflation-prone country, the currency's value shrinks every day. Legally, it still exists, but practically, no one uses it anymore. Everyone uses dollar stablecoins for their daily lives.

Rattle, rattle, rattle.

Listening to the sound of the bill counter, Judy reminisces about the past years.

In 2002, a 22-year-old Judy experienced the national default. Banks locked their doors, and people couldn't withdraw a lifetime of savings.

"You have to exchange it right away."

Her father said. The moment wages hit the account, they had to be immediately converted to dollars. Wait a day, and Bucks would visibly depreciate. People watched 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 simply couldn't buy dollars at the official exchange rate. The government set a monthly foreign exchange quota per person, and no one knew when banks would freeze dollar deposits.

In the mid-2020s, young customers started asking her questions she couldn'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 just a phone, they could convert Bucks into stablecoins and back again when needed.

At the time, Judy never imagined it would replace her job. Old people still needed cash, and many businesses still did too. But the queues gradually got shorter. Young customers disappeared first, then the middle-aged.

By 2030, no one queued even on payday. Once businesses also had no reason to hold Bucks, they started paying wages directly in stablecoins. Bucks became a currency only needed for paying taxes and utility bills.

In 2033, the tax authority changed its stance. The calculation was simple: collecting stablecoins was more reliable than collecting Bucks. A brief notice was posted on the website.

"Accepting USDC and USDT as alternative payment methods for taxes"

Bucks still existed, but the state itself announced it preferred to receive other people's money.

In 2034, the Ministry of Finance followed suit. Bonds issued in Bucks repeatedly failed to sell, so the ministry ultimately issued new bonds denominated in dollar stablecoins. Civil servant salaries followed shortly after. By 2035, some local governments began paying half of their civil servants' salaries in stablecoins—because civil servants paid only in Bucks were hit earliest and hardest by inflation.

Printing money, collecting taxes, paying wages—these powers once exclusive to the state were transferred piece by piece into the hands of stablecoins.

As of May 2026, the total market cap of stablecoins stood at approximately $320 billion, with an annual transaction volume of $2.8 trillion. Compared to U.S. wholesale payment networks processing over $2 trillion daily, this is just three weeks' worth. Excluding wash trading and fake volume, less than 6% is actually used for payments. The remaining 88% circulates within exchanges—trading, collateralizing, and returning.

The question is where that 6% actually happens. It may start in New York and Silicon Valley, but the place truly using this money isn't the U.S. Americans have credit cards and bank accounts. Those who desperately need stablecoins are the people in countries where their currency shrinks every day.

Judy puts the bill counter back in the drawer. Will there be customers tomorrow?

2 AM, Liquidation in Ten Minutes

In 2036, a small rented room in Singapore.

2 PM. A notification sound rings, and Lia glances at her phone. An Nvidia limit order alert.

It's 2 PM in Singapore, and the New York stock market hasn't even opened. But on Lia's screen, the Nvidia chart is still moving. She clicks buy without hesitation. On the same screen, next to Nvidia, are government 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.

"Investing never stops, no matter where you are."

This is what Lia often says. To her, the world has always been this way.

In 2021, a 9-year-old Lia watched U.S. retail investors push the stock price of physical game store GameStop to the moon. It was an investment where participation itself was the focus, exceeding the value of the asset—and the organizers of this participation weren't brokerages, but online communities.

According to a 2025 World Economic Forum survey of 13 countries, 30% of Gen Z starts investing as soon as they reach adulthood—far higher than Gen X (9%) and Baby Boomers (6%). Gen Z's interest is so deep that 86% learned to invest before entering the workforce, compared to only 47% of Baby Boomers.

In Coinbase's Q4 2025 survey, 73% of young respondents said it was difficult to build wealth through traditional means—higher than the 57% of older generations.

For this generation, investing is simply a given—they want exposure to everything.

June 2025. Tokens backed 1:1 by major U.S. stocks—Apple, Tesla, Nvidia—flooded into decentralized exchanges (DEXs). No nationality restrictions, no strict KYC. With just a wallet address, U.S. stocks were within reach, and leverage was practically unlimited.

Just try again tomorrow.

Lia logs into the borderless trading platform Lemming Brothers and buys a tokenized product tracking the Korean real estate index. Ten minutes later, her phone vibrates—a liquidation alert. She swipes away the warning on her screen as if nothing happened.

For Lia, phone notifications in 2036 are like background noise in daily life. She glances at the endless stream of signals on her trading app, then picks up the phone again. This is in stark contrast to her parents, who dollar-cost average into so-called "safe assets" on regulated exchanges.

In the world Lia lives in, every form of value is converted into an asset, operating 24/7. This massive, never-stopping market tempts her into the next trade every single day—today, and every day.

The Day $2.2 Billion Vanished

In 2036, an office of a startup in Pangyo Techno Valley.

Do-hyun, an infrastructure engineer with 12 years of experience, pauses his hand as he scrolls through the network status dashboard on his monitor. Looking at the list of chains that can now be seen on one screen, he mutters.

"Ten years ago, you had to keep scrolling. Now there aren't even ten left."

In 2024, the year Do-hyun began his engineering career, was truly the era of discovery for Layer 2 rollups. Anyone could copy and paste a few lines of framework and stack code to launch their own blockchain under their own name. Do-hyun's company also rode the wave of massive infrastructure, setting up validator nodes.

The chain was called Allchain. In June 2024, fueled by airdrop expectations, Total Value Locked (TVL) soared to $2.2 billion. He still vividly remembers the cheers and clinking glasses in the conference room.

"At this rate, aren't we the next Ethereum?"

But the joy of listing was fleeting. After the token listing and airdrop rewards dried up, both the token price and chain usage plummeted. The projects and users chasing rewards turned away the moment Allchain stopped paying, and within a year, 97% of deposits had evaporated.

Allchain's brutal ending was not an isolated case. Numerous independent networks that sprouted like mushrooms back then collapsed in the same way. They enticed development teams with the sweetener of incentives, but once the funding ran dry, the ecosystem was instantly hollowed out, leaving behind only silent shells of infrastructure.

The astronomical fixed costs of running a standalone chain were beyond what a single project could bear. Unable to sustain skyrocketing infrastructure maintenance costs, the Allchains of the world announced closures one after another, fading into history.

Only a very few survived under the cold scrutiny of capital. The hundreds of chains that once seemed poised to change the world divided up the ruins of a market share just above 10%, then silently marched toward extinction.

"Back then, we all thought we could survive and build our own massive ecosystems..."

Back in 2026, people mistook the number of chains for blockchain scalability itself. But fragmented chains only fragmented the user experience and drove up security costs. What people truly wanted wasn't hundreds of complex networks—but a few massive infrastructures providing unbreakable liquidity and optimized speed.

Do-hyun sighs deeply, silently turns off the monitor, grabs his bag, and heads home.

The "Human Eyes" That Once Clicked Are Gone

In 2036, an office of a media startup in Sangam-dong.

Jae-hoon happens to be browsing another platform when he sees a banner ad in the bottom right corner and laughs.

"Can't believe companies still put banner ads on screens, waiting for readers."

Jae-hoon is right. That platform's daily traffic hit record highs every month, but traditional banner ad revenue never came in. The entire advertising model had become a thing of the past.

In the early 2020s, when Jae-hoon first entered the media industry, the formula for the internet economy was clear. Write good articles, and readers would come. Readers came, and advertisers paid to put up banners.

"How many page views today?"

This question at every morning meeting determined the fate of media companies back then.

But this peaceful formula began to vanish in the late 2020s. By 2029, more than half of global internet traffic no longer came from humans, but from AI agents and bots. AI could crawl articles and summarize them in a second—but machines simply had no "eyes" to see banner ads.

At first, like most media companies, they blocked the bots. Server costs exploded and couldn't keep up. But the price of blocking was brutal. Completely buried outside the AI search and recommendation ecosystem, the brand was forgotten. Media companies at the time faced a painful choice: block bots and lose traffic, or open the doors and earn nothing.

"Who exactly are we selling content to now?"

This desperate question filled the office. The answer wasn't ad boards—it was pricing the content itself.

What opened the floodgates of change was the x402 standard launched by Coinbase in May 2025. It technically 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 on building infrastructure: Know Your Agent (KYA) verification, settlement rails, etc. The real explosion began in 2030, when a media company started selling data directly to AI through the x402 system. Once validated, other media and data companies immediately adopted x402 and jumped into data sales.

At first, there was only some ridicule—pocket change, a few dozen won at a time, hardly worth the effort. But when hundreds of thousands, even millions of machine calls started piling up daily, real money began flowing into accounts, far exceeding what banner ads ever brought in.

"No more worrying about what advertisers think—machines pay full price, and the company runs on that."

The old web advertising model, selling ads by attracting human eyeballs, slowly came to an end, while the machine economy—AI agents transacting via APIs—was in full swing.

Jae-hoon turned off the dashboard and picked up his coffee cup. The visitor curve still showed that strange, almost vertical climb, which made no sense by old standards—but now it was the norm. He no longer checked 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 ledger of transactions won't get shorter—no, it won't.