Crypto and the New Era of World Finance
A systems-level reading of crypto’s most influential voice at the World Economic Forum
At the World Economic Forum’s New Era for Finance panel in Davos 2026, Changpeng Zhao, better known as CZ, sat alongside the CEOs of ING, BNY Mellon, and Primavera Capital to discuss how technology is reshaping the global financial system.
What emerged was a coherent worldview about financial system design, delivered with unusual candor. Here is what he actually said, and why it matters.
Crypto as Infrastructure, Not an Asset Class
CZ’s central move is subtle but significant. He consistently reframes crypto from a speculative asset class to a question of financial system design. This is not about price movements. It is about plumbing.
Three claims anchor his perspective.
First, crypto is already operating at system scale.
Legitimacy comes from scale and behavior under stress, not theory.
Binance serves roughly 300 million users, larger than most banks. Its trading volumes have exceeded those of major stock exchanges. During moments of acute stress in the crypto market, Binance processed billions of dollars in withdrawals in short timeframes without failure.
The implicit argument is that systems prove themselves under load. By that measure, crypto infrastructure has already passed stress tests that would expose fragility in traditional institutions.
Second, financial instability is structural, not technological.
This is where CZ parts company with conventional regulatory thinking.
When the discussion turned to Silicon Valley Bank and the risks of speed, he pushed back directly. Faster withdrawals, in his view, did not cause the collapse. They revealed it. Fractional-reserve banking creates fragility by design. Speed merely exposes weaknesses sooner.
Slowing systems down does not reduce risk. It traps users inside weak structures.
Technology, in this framing, does not create instability. It makes existing instability visible. This is a direct challenge to the regulatory instinct to add friction as a substitute for resilience.
Third, global regulatory coordination will not centralize, and that is fine.
CZ was explicit that a single global crypto regulator is unrealistic. National priorities, capital controls, and tax regimes diverge too much.
What he sees instead is regulatory passporting. These are mutual recognition arrangements where licenses in one jurisdiction are accepted in others. Convergence through practice, not harmonization through institutions.
What’s Actually Working According to CZ
“Within crypto today, only two sectors have truly matured into robust industries,” he said. “Exchanges and stablecoins.”
Exchanges provide liquidity, access, and price discovery. They are not glamorous, but they are real, scaled, and durable.
Stablecoins, which he sees them as the bridge between crypto and the real economy. They are already functioning as settlement rails and becoming infrastructure for future payments.
Everything else, by his own assessment, remains experimental.
What He’s Watching Next
CZ pointed to three areas where he expects the next wave of meaningful change.
1. Payments, but not the way people expect
He openly acknowledged that crypto-native consumer payments have not worked. People do not want to pay in crypto.
The shift he is watching is invisible crypto. Consumers swipe familiar cards, crypto settles in the background, and merchants receive fiat. The user experience does not change. The settlement layer does.
This matters because crypto adoption no longer depends on behavior change. It depends on back-end integration. Payments become crypto’s first mass-market use case once users do not know they are using it.
2. Tokenization, especially state-led
CZ noted active discussions with governments about tokenizing assets to monetize value earlier and fund infrastructure and market development.
The model resembles traditional privatization, but tokenization enables far smaller allocation sizes and broader participation. This reframes crypto from anti-state to state-enabled capital formation. It is a consequential shift, particularly for emerging markets.
3. AI agents as economic actors
This was his most forward-looking claim.
AI agents will not use bank cards. They will not wait for invoices. They will transact autonomously. In that environment, crypto becomes the native payment layer, not ideologically, but functionally.
Even if human payments remain hybrid, machine-to-machine economies require programmable money. This is where crypto stops competing with banks and begins to bypass them.
What CZ Is Skeptical About
If something does not solve a coordination problem at scale, it will not last.
That lens leads him to be candid, even dismissive, about parts of his own industry.
Memecoins, culturally resonant but structurally weak
NFTs, a boom-and-bust cycle with limited durable use
Metaverse hype, where demand collapsed once novelty wore off
He also predicted that demand for physical bank branches will shrink significantly over the next decade. Banks will not disappear, but electronic Know-Your-Customer (KYC) and digital-first services reduce the need for brick-and-mortar presence.
The Deeper Insight
CZ is not arguing that crypto will replace banks. He is making a more destabilizing claim.
Banking fragility is a design choice, not a law of nature.
From that perspective:
Bank runs are not anomalies. They are features of fractional-reserve systems.
Slowness is not safety. It masks structural weakness.
Trust emerges from system behavior under stress, not institutional history.
This is a systems-architecture argument, not a libertarian one. And it is why traditional finance should pay attention, not because CZ is right about everything, but because he is asking questions incumbents would prefer not to answer.
What to Watch in 2026
If you take this framework seriously, do not watch prices. Watch where crypto embeds into existing systems.
Stablecoins inside traditional payment flows
Not new tokens, but Visa, Mastercard, and bank settlement using stablecoins in the background. The signal is crypto settling transactions while users still see fiat.Regulatory passporting, not global rule-making
Look for bilateral or regional agreements where crypto licenses or compliance regimes are recognized across jurisdictions. Fewer grand frameworks, more practical coordination.Government-led tokenization, especially in emerging markets
Watch states tokenize infrastructure, commodities, or public assets to raise capital. This is crypto moving from parallel markets into sovereign balance sheets.AI agents acquiring wallets and spending authority
The signal is machines paying for services, compute, or data autonomously. This is programmable money becoming operational, not theoretical.
These are the signals that show whether crypto is becoming financial infrastructure, rather than remaining an ideological or speculative layer.
If an individual wants to get ahead of this, choose work, projects, or clients that already touch payments, compliance, or automated transactions, and stop spending time on crypto trading, narratives, or “Web3” side projects.
That means doing three very specific things:
Read how payments actually work, not crypto blogs.
Learn how card payments, bank transfers, and cross-border settlements move end to end: who authorizes, who clears, who settles, and how long each step takes.
Learn one real compliance process.
Pick a jurisdiction (EU, US, UK, or Singapore) and understand, in plain terms, how identity checks, transaction monitoring, and reporting actually happen inside a firm.
Work on or observe a real system.
Choose a job, contract, project, or case study that involves payments, onboarding, or automated approvals, and watch how decisions are made under real constraints.
That’s it. Just proximity to where money actually moves.
