What would Charles Cascarilla’s 2015 self make of where digital assets landed in 2026?

It’s the kind of question that hangs over a conversation like the one PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster and Citi’s Ryan Rugg hosted on the latest episode of the “From the Block” podcast. And the honest answer from someone whose been there ever since bitcoin was three cents a coin is less triumphant than his earlier self might have hoped for, and more interesting for it.

Sixteen years into his bet on blockchain rewriting financial services, Cascarilla, co-founder and CEO of Paxos, is no longer pitching a parallel system that leaves banks behind. He’s pitching something different and arguably more useful. In his view today, crypto isn’t replacing finance. It’s turning into it.

That sentence would have read like a concession a decade ago. In 2026, Cascarilla says, it sounds a lot like progress.

Is This Finally ‘the Year?’

Webster’s framing was one everyone in the industry keeps circling back to. Is 2026 the year crypto “gets real,” or is it another cycle of anticipation in a new outfit?

The perspective from Cascarilla and Rugg is somewhere between the two. The “between” is where the story gets interesting.

What’s genuinely new, Cascarilla said, is the backdrop. Regulatory clarity in the U.S., although imperfect and still evolving, has done something technology demos alone never could. It has given large enterprises permission to move.

“The regulatory clarity that we’ve talked about has given enterprises confidence, because they don’t act in gray areas,” Rugg said. “It has to be permissible for them to act.”

Permission is what turns an industry from speculation into infrastructure. Rugg, who has spent the past decade working the seam between banks and blockchain, put the arc bluntly: “We went after tokenizing IP, real estate, everything. And now here we are, circling back.” The circling back is to the unglamorous stuff, payments, stablecoins, tokenized deposits. Which also happens to be where money moves.

Small on Purpose

The most useful reframe of the episode was Cascarilla’s on scale. Crypto takes up enormous cultural space for something that represents, in financial terms, a rounding error. “Of all the assets in the world, guess how many are on the blockchain at the moment?” he asked. “Essentially zero. You can round to zero.”

That sounds like a bear case. Cascarilla means it as a bull one. If the total addressable market is effectively the entire $900 trillion global financial system, the opportunity isn’t “adoption” in the narrow crypto-trading sense.

It’s what he calls “re-platforming.” Moving the rails underneath payments, assets and capital markets onto programmable infrastructure. Where are we in that arc?

“The first pitch of the first inning,” he said.

Right in between nowhere and just getting started.

The Coexistence Thesis

A subtler shift in the conversation, and one that would have been heretical a few years ago, is how little of it was about disruption.

Stablecoins, Cascarilla argued, are likely to follow the money market fund playbook. Once feared as a threat to banks, they are ultimately an expansion of the system rather than a shrinking of it, he said.

“You’re just actually growing the addressable market,” he said, particularly by extending dollar access globally.

Rugg went further.

“I don’t view it as stablecoins or tokenized deposits. I think there are different use cases for each one, and they could coexist together quite well.”

Coexist. Not disrupt, not replace. For an industry that spent a decade insisting it would eat banking alive, the pivot to “and” instead of “or” might be the most institutionally grownup thing crypto has done.

Headwinds That Haven’t Gone Anywhere

Webster didn’t let the optimism stand unexamined. Could any of this survive a change in political administration?

Cascarilla, to his credit, didn’t pretend otherwise. “You never know what administration’s going to come into place,” he acknowledged. The blunt admission that today’s tailwind is a tailwind, not a guarantee. Favorable policy is, at best, a window.

And then there’s the other headwind, one made of trust rather than policy.

“If you had another large failure like FTX, it would definitely set back the industry in a big way,” he said. “Financial services always comes down to, Who can you trust?”

One bad actor, and the window closes on everyone.

What Remains to Be Proven

So, what would Cascarilla’s 2015 self say to his “and not or” self today?

Probably that the destination still looks roughly right and the timeline looks laughably off.

What’s been proven, 16 years in, is that the technology works, that regulators can be reasoned with, and that large institutions will eventually build on rails they once waved away.

What remains to be proven is whether any of it compounds. Whether this becomes the structural transformation the early pitch promised, or crypto’s real legacy turns out to be more subtle. Upgrading the plumbing of the system it once set out to replace.

Either outcome would be the most consequential thing to happen to financial services this decade. The unglamorous version just takes longer to notice.