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Asheesh Birla, a former Ripple board member who now runs Evernorth, an XRP-focused digital asset treasury, is out with a tidy set of 2026 predictions that basically boil down to one thing: institutions finally stop circling and start using this stuff in production.
In a short video shared to social media, Birla frames next year as the moment crypto infrastructure slips into the background and starts doing the boring work it always promised to do.
“My theme this year is really around how institutions, financial and corporate institutions, are going to start adopting blockchain technology at scale,” he said. “It’s going to be part of everyday financial infrastructure in 2026. It’s going to quietly power how money moves.”
Prediction No. 1 is corporate treasury operations getting “programmable,” in his words, as DeFi tooling collides with AI-driven automation. The pitch is straightforward: back offices are still messy, manual, and full of middlemen. If you can turn parts of treasury management into code — and then let AI help run the workflows — you compress cost, time, and operational friction.
“It’s just a more efficient way to manage their operations, which today are manual and have a lot of middlemen,” the ex-Ripple director said. “Using DeFi and AI, I think you’re going to see a lot of those efficiency gains start to come to fruition and you’re going to see fewer middlemen and a better experience for moving money and managing your global operations in 2026.”
His second call is a twist on the stablecoin trade: not just more dollar coins, but “local stablecoins” proliferating across regions, then meeting on-chain in FX venues.
“You’re going to see these challenge the 9.6 trillion dollar FX market,” he said, arguing that on-chain DEX liquidity becomes the base layer for a new kind of spot FX market that competes with legacy rails.
Prediction No. 3 is stablecoins going fully mainstream inside corporate and bank plumbing — less as a crypto product, more as settlement tech. Birla claims the upside is obvious to finance teams: “real-time analytics into your liquidity positions around the world,” faster movement, cleaner reconciliation.
He also throws out the big-number trajectory that’s become common in these forecasts, saying stablecoins could grow “from 300 billion to 100 trillion dollars in market cap” based on “industry projections.”
And then there’s the NFT comeback, which he’s careful to describe as a rebrand and a reframing, not a rerun of 2021. Forget JPEG roulette, he says. Think access.
“They’re going to be about membership access,” the ex-Ripple director said in his prediction no. 4. “So it’s going to allow you to combine ticketing, loyalty, and digital collectibles into one digital access token.”
The subtext here matters: Birla’s now building Evernorth around XRP exposure and institutional participation, with the firm positioning itself as a purpose-built XRP treasury.
So his “bigger story” is also a bit of a sales thesis, crypto moving beyond speculation by embedding into how money moves, how treasuries run, and how brands manage customer relationships.
