A week in Finland felt like a crash course in contradictions.

We’ve seen nuclear-juiced mining rigs doubling as sauna heaters.

We’ve seen stablecoins creep across borders like midsummer sunlight sneaks past blackout curtains.

We’ve seen geese confirm that every country has its own flavor of feathered psychopath.

Now let’s sum up our findings and put on our prediction hats.

By 2028, how big will stablecoins be? And where will the entire crypto market cap land when the dust settles?

$2 trillion… and $26 trillion. Respectively.

And that might be the conservative take.

Here’s why. And what it means.

The GENIUS Act’s Secret Plan

While in places like Finland, the game is to simplify cross-border payments and make them cheaper for the remote tech workers…

In many parts of the world, the entire finance game is figuring out how to get local currency into dollars.

Nobody’s talking about it, but everyone’s playing it. Regulators slap a few wrists, but the game never stops.

And that game is about to get a lot more dynamic.

The GENIUS Act has an unspoken goal that only becomes clear when you zoom out: redirect a large share of offshore dollar liquidity onto US-regulated stablecoin rails.

To recap, the Eurodollar market is the global system of U.S. dollars held in banks outside the U.S.

This creates trillions in offshore dollar credit that operates beyond direct U.S. control.

Technically, the Fed and Treasury have no duty to support offshore dollars. But in practice, every major crisis—Latin America in the ’80s, the 2008 crash, the 2020 panic—has triggered a rescue.

If the U.S. ever signaled “no more implicit guarantee” on these dollars? Stablecoins would start looking a lot more attractive.

To be sure, if this happened, it wouldn’t be an overnight thing.

If Washington flatly said “we’re never rescuing offshore dollars again,” panic would hit immediately. More likely they’d signal it gradually (explicit protections with stablecoins), rather than slam the door.

Why would the U.S. do this? Simple.

Offshore Eurodollar banks may or may not recycle into Treasuries. But stables are legally required to hold them. Suddenly, Washington has a giant captive buyer base.

Once money flows into stablecoins, the U.S. has greater leverage over front-end funding costs. This creates a massive sink of global savings that Washington can tap.

Consider why things are moving so fast on the stablecoin front. If the U.S. is slow, offshore dollars could go into yuan-backed stablecoins (China’s already trialing these), or other emerging (BRICS?) options.

While Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says stablecoins will hit $2 trillion by 2028…

He could be playing it cool.

But, as the market stands now… even a $2T stablecoin market loosely implies a $26T total crypto market cap.

What would this look like?

Three big things to consider.

The Energy Angle (Crypto + Nukes)

At $26T, you’re looking at an implied $500,000 Bitcoin. (And $20,000 ETH.)

With Bitcoin, this won’t happen without raising some serious energy questions.

Bitcoin mining as “energy buyer of last resort” has a good chance of expanding: nuclear plants, stranded gas, renewables balancing.

The joke about miners heating Finnish saunas? By 2028, that’s a model: crypto monetizing waste energy, stabilizing grids.

Energy and crypto become Siamese twins.

The Rise of American Superapps

Imagine if U.S. tech giants—encouraged by Trump—roll out stablecoin accounts directly through WhatsApp, Instagram, X, Telegram… the lot.

Fiat on-ramps shrink to two clicks; off-ramps look like “tap-to-card” and instant local bank payouts. That’s even more retail money entering into the global stablecoin economy.

Once it’s in stablecoins? It’s collateral. You can trade it, borrow against it, earn yield. DeFi explodes.

A $26T crypto market cap implies ~$8T spread across alt L1s, DeFi tokens, AI tokens, etc. Through that lens, some of today’s early-stage cryptos begin to look like Bitcoin did in 2015.

Tokenized Assets Ride the Wave

Tokenized assets are the natural next step once stablecoins are entrenched. The leap to tokenized Treasuries, stocks, and commodities isn’t a leap at all—it’s just the next screen in the same app.

First it’s a $1 stablecoin. Then it’s a $1 slice yielding a steady return. From there it’s Apple shares, or a fraction of a gold bar, or even exposure to oil futures.

What starts as “payments” quickly turns into “savings,” and then into “investments,” all using the same rails.

A $27 trillion U.S. bond market, a $100 trillion global equities market, a $20 trillion commodities market—once even a sliver of those migrate on-chain, they become part of the crypto universe.

And unlike the TradFi system, tokenization makes every asset programmable: instant settlement, 24/7 trading, fractional access, collateral that can plug directly into DeFi.

It’s not just Bitcoin at $500k or Ethereum at thirty thousand. It’s crypto absorbing a chunk of the entire financial stack.

At that point, the market cap math breaks the frame. At that scale, crypto isn’t a trade—it’s the tide.