“The global economic infrastructure is fragmenting, but the world is accommodating that.”
Among the leaders and experts gathered at Davos 2026, this sentiment from Standard Chartered’s Bill Winters was widely held: business is definitely not as usual, but adjusting nonetheless.
With the geopolitical landscape constantly shifting and the world economy “undergoing profound transformation”, what exactly does adjustment look like? And where does it leave the future of money?
The World Economic Forum sought the views of four experts to answer these questions: Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle; Denelle Dixon, CEO and Executive Director of the Stellar Development Foundation; Ray Dalio, CIO of Bridgewater Associates; and Bill Winters, CEO of Standard Chartered.
From tokenized dollars and refugee aid to gold reserves and digital wallets, here they explain how money is being rewired – and what that means for trust, growth and inclusion.
The internet financial system
Jeremy Allaire, whose company Circle operates the largest regulated stablecoin, USDC, envisages a world in which money is exchanged “as effortlessly as we communicate”.
He expects that “all money will be digital” in the near future and that payments will feel as easy as sending a message or starting a video call – instant, global, low‑cost and largely invisible on the backend.
Just as the internet enabled information for all, Allaire sees future finance democratizing money – “what we call the internet financial system”. He says that “every person, every business, everywhere in the world” will be able to transact and access capital. To demonstrate the technology’s potential reach, Allaire referenced Circle’s recent efforts to get digital aid to displaced refugees from the war in Ukraine.
“We created a system where there could be direct aid disbursement to known individuals registered as refugees. Those known individuals only needed a mobile device, which they were able to get access to. The funds would effectively reach them as digital dollars – instantly – in a corruption-resistant way. There’s no cash being handed around, no one taking pieces of it and hiding it. And when they receive the money, they can use it directly to make payments.”
Digital money as everyday inclusion
Denelle Dixon, of nonprofit Stellar Development Foundation, speaks along similar lines, in terms of the ease and equality of digital assets. “My goal is that, hopefully, when people use any kind of digital wallet, that it feels very similar to what they’re using today.”
She views blockchain as the backend technology that people will neither need, nor want to know about – instead, it “should just feel like they’re either using mobile money or their bank account, and that they’re able to easily trade the assets themselves for whatever value they’re seeking, whether that be other kinds of digital assets or when they’re buying things”.
Dixon makes the point that, unlike in traditional banking, “there are no intermediaries” with digital assets – “you are the owner” – giving individuals much more financial freedom.
She gave the example of developing countries that “started using mobile money years before” the West got on board. “We’re seeing that you can now, as a creator, for example, export your talent globally and get paid in a stablecoin in your home country – whether that be in a part of the African continent or in Latin America and South America – and easily transfer that into your local currency. So, I think that there is such a huge opportunity and we’re seeing tremendous growth there.”
Dixon was also keen to debunk the widely-held belief that crypto means criminal. “I think the biggest myth of digital money is that it’s only used for fraud or using money that you can’t actually trace.”
While 2025 saw over $3.4 billion of crypto theft globally, Dixon points out that digital money can “so simply and easily” be traced, which, in theory at least, makes criminal activity harder to achieve.
Reshaping what safe money looks like
“We’re seeing the geopolitics, the world governance system, go from a multilateral system to a unilateral system … which creates a greater sense of risk.”
Global macro investor and author Ray Dalio sees a rocky road ahead for monetary systems. The current fiat system – in which central banks control both the supply and value of money – is under threat as debt burdens and geopolitical tensions grow. Dalio cites the recent trade tensions between Europe and the US over the latter’s attempts to annex Greenland as an example of how “just the fear of those things happening has an effect as to what is sold and what is bought”.
This volatile landscape has increased the demand for gold, which is seen as a safe investment as it’s “more difficult to confiscate”, Dalio says, when countries are seeking to enforce sanctions. Digital currencies like bitcoin are also harder for governments to “grab”, he says.
But the future of money, according to Dalio, ultimately hinges on what can be trusted as “a storehold of wealth” – be that gold, notes, stablecoin or other digital currencies. “Individuals may feel they can’t trust their governments, or governments feel that the individuals are trying to get away with moving their money, for example.” So, whether future banking becomes fully digital is still undecided, he says.
What he is sure about, however, is the cyclical nature of finance and money: “The same things happen over and over again,” says Dalio, who predicted the financial crisis of 2008. Even the AI bubble doesn’t faze him: “I think it’s important to understand that almost all great technological changes produce bubbles naturally, because nobody knows exactly how much to invest in something that is fantastic.”
Right now, Dalio notes, the AI cycle is “not yet much of a bubble”. He explains that while the technology itself is transformative, the danger arises when investors begin to “invent wealth” by valuing companies based on potential rather than cash flow. “So, these things will happen,” he concludes, “and it will be important to know how those are going to be well dealt with because the consequences are profound”.
Re‑plumbing the financial system
For Bill Winters of Standard Chartered, 2026 is all about the consolidation of three trends that surfaced during 2025.
Firstly, he anticipates “the bedding down of what it means to be in a multipolar world, economically and financially”; the second “major shift” is the digitization of money; and the third is the wide-scale adoption of AI.
Winters describes the wholesale switch to tokenized money as a “re-plumbing of the financial system”, in which “overnight settlements” via banks are replaced by the instantaneous transfer of stablecoins, central bank digital currencies, or other forms of digital money.
“Once the money is in tokenized form, it can be transferred through blockchain technology from party A to party B, or from currency A to currency B, instantly, 24-7, with an indelible record of that transaction which is perfectly traceable and observable,” he says. “So there are tremendous efficiencies that come from the digitization of money. There are also tremendous improvements in security, assuming we get it all right.”
That will depend on a global regulatory framework, which isn’t yet in place, Winters says. It’s a topic explored by the Forum’s platform, The Future of Blockchain and Digital Assets, which examines how the geopolitical landscape is influencing regulatory developments in the field.
It will also require “the building out of the network itself”, he says. Swift, the main payment platform in the current market, is “building its own blockchain-based payment network”, for instance. Existing blockchains are not big enough to cope with the volume that will need to come through, explains Winters.
When asked whether cryptocurrencies were in trouble – given that 62% of chief economists surveyed for the Forum’s latest Chief Economists’ Outlook predict a decrease in their value over the coming year – Winters is unperturbed. “What I do think is clear is that there is now value attached to having a non-fiat currency,” he says.
Taken together, these four perspectives suggest that whatever the future of money, the systems, protections, and principles behind it will need to be shored up. As the Chief Economists’ Outlook makes clear, “the decisions made by governments, businesses and workers in the year ahead will be pivotal … to ensure that as many people as possible can access the rewards of the new economy”.
Source: World Economic Forum
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