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While stablecoins have emerged as crypto’s dominant payment mechanism, a subtler shift may be underway: the emergence of Bitcoin not just as a store of value, but as a reference benchmark, a unit of account for global assets and financial flows. The idea may sound speculative, but some of the world’s most prominent institutions are already signaling in this direction.
Just this March, BlackRock’s tokenized fund BUIDL added Bitcoin to its balance sheet, allocating to Sablier’s Bitcoin streaming vault via an on-chain money market. Hours later, Franklin Templeton’s CEO publicly endorsed BTC as a “monetary anchor”, stating: “It’s not just a hedge. It’s part of a long-term capital structure.”
Meanwhile, dollar-backed stablecoins have become the de facto infrastructure layer for digital payments with over 140 million daily transactions and settlement volumes rivaling major card networks. Yet the reliance on USD pegs comes with regulatory frictions and geopolitical exposure. What if the future of trade isn’t denominated in fiat, but in Bitcoin while still settled in stablecoins?
Historically, Bitcoin has occupied the “digital gold” narrative; a scarce store of value held by long-term investors and protocol treasuries. But that framing may be expanding.
“More and more institutions are pricing assets in Bitcoin terms, not just holding it as treasury collateral,” says Luke Xie, co-founder of SatLayer. “If you’re a mining firm or a sovereign wealth desk in a high-inflation country, benchmarking in BTC can help de-risk exposure to dollar volatility. You still use stablecoins to settle but the unit of value is BTC.”
This shift is playing out at multiple levels: mining equipment priced in BTC, tokenized assets benchmarking against Bitcoin baskets, and emerging DeFi derivatives denominated in sats rather than cents. Earlier this year MicroStrategy began referencing its own valuation in BTC terms, highlighting the symbolic and functional importance of Bitcoin as a monetary measuring stick.
If Bitcoin becomes the reference unit, what happens to stablecoins?
“People assume all stablecoins must be pegged to fiat but that’s just the first chapter,” argues Alex Hung, product lead at BTCC. “We’re now seeing interest in stable-value instruments that are BTC-denominated: synthetic sat-backed units, baskets that adjust for volatility, or vaults that rebalance into BTC indexes. These are no longer theoretical. They’re being built.”
Indeed, on-chain experiments like Ethena’s USDe (backed by ETH and delta-hedged positions) or Inverse Finance’s DOLA are already pointing to hybrid stabilization models. Builders are now exploring whether similar constructions can track BTC reference prices, while maintaining predictable purchasing power for everyday transactions, particularly in emerging markets where dollar access remains constrained.
Borja Martel Seward, co-founder and CEO of Roxom, sees this trend as part of a broader economic pattern already unfolding globally: “What we see at Roxom is that the world could become one big Argentina. A bi-monetary world. People might spend and get paid in dollars or local currencies but they’ll think in Bitcoin. Just like in Argentina, where citizens transact in pesos but save and measure wealth in USD, the global future could be spend-in-fiat, save-and-benchmark-in-BTC.”
The appeal? A non-sovereign benchmark with programmable logic, coupled with stable settlement instruments that can function across jurisdictions without FX friction.
In a fragmented monetary world, the allure of a politically neutral reserve benchmark (and programmable settlement rails) is growing stronger. The IMF recently projected that cross-border payment corridors could save $100 billion annually with programmable settlement layers. But implementation remains constrained by currency frictions and compliance complexity.
Bitcoin may not replace the dollar in daily use but it could offer a consistent value layer across systems, enabling settlement in whichever stablecoin makes sense locally.
It’s a modular approach: Bitcoin sets the standard, stablecoins do the plumbing.
This dual-stack thesis – BTC as unit of account, stablecoins as medium of exchange – is still nascent. But momentum is building. The Lightning ecosystem is exploring “synthetic stablecoins” denominated in sats. Firms like Galoy and Fedi are developing Bitcoin-native community banking models that enable USD or fiat-pegged balances underpinned by BTC reserves.
In parallel, sovereign miners, export firms, and even DeFi protocols are beginning to report in BTC, not dollars. This isn’t a return to the gold standard, it’s the emergence of a programmable, post-sovereign ledger standard.
As institutions lean into tokenized real-world assets and programmable finance, the logic of separating benchmark from settlement may prove not just efficient, but inevitable.
Global regulators thus far have mandated that stablecoins maintain a 1:1 backing with fiat currency, emphasizing stability and investor protection, while expressing reluctance to allow reserves in alternative assets like cryptocurrencies or commodities due to their volatility.
With that said, historically the U.S. dollar was backed by gold, a tangible asset that provided intrinsic value, until the abandonment of the gold standard in 1971. As Bitcoin gains traction as a decentralized store of value, often likened to “digital gold,” could regulators eventually allow it to evolve into a reserve asset for stablecoins?
While this shift is unlikely in the near term, figure adoption trends could prompt a reevaluation.
