Standard Chartered CEO Foresees Blockchain Dominance in Global Transactions

Standard Chartered CEO predicts blockchain will dominate global transactions.

In the future, nearly all global transactions will be conducted on blockchain. This was stated by Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters during a panel discussion at Hong Kong FinTech Week, reports CNBC.

“We believe, and I think the Hong Kong leadership shares this view, that eventually almost all transactions will be conducted on blockchains, and all money will become digital,” the expert noted.

According to him, a complete overhaul of the financial system is imminent, although it will require experimentation.

Standard Chartered has intensified its efforts in the digital assets space in recent years. The bank has offered services including cryptocurrency custody and tokenized products.

Winters expressed his views during a discussion on Hong Kong’s role in the global virtual assets space, highlighting the region’s leadership in experimentation and regulation.

According to the CEO of Standard Chartered, stablecoins backed by the Hong Kong dollar could become an interesting medium of exchange for international trade.

During FinTech Week, the Securities and Futures Commission—Hong Kong’s stock market regulator—announced that it would allow licensed local exchanges to access global liquidity through consolidated order books.

This will enable local platforms to integrate global liquidity pools, reducing spreads, increasing market efficiency, and improving pricing.

Payments—A Trend for AI

In October, several experts expressed the view that cryptocurrencies will become a primary tool for the future economy of AI agents.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin noted that in the next five to ten years, artificial intelligence will begin processing “a multitude of micropayments.” However, full automation for large sums is too risky.

“AI is easy to attack. But it is suitable for small payments. Additionally, artificial intelligence can serve as a risk management tool for large transfers—checking whether a $100,000 transaction looks suspicious or not. I think we will gradually discover the right ways to combine AI with payments. There will be successes, but also mistakes,” he explained.

At Paxos, AI agents were called a potential driver for the stablecoin sector. According to company co-founder Bhav Kotecha, market fragmentation between jurisdictions and multiple “pegged” token models can be addressed with digital assistants.

AI agents can “instantly switch” between any stablecoin platforms, finding the most attractive economic conditions.

“This means that fragmentation is not necessarily a deterrent—it can become an optimizer at the market level, where artificial intelligence provides liquidity flows to the most efficient issuers. Over time, this could lead to lower fees and force providers to compete on fundamental metrics,” Kotecha stated.

Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz expects that “in the not-too-distant future, the largest users of stablecoins will be neural networks.” Users will be able to delegate their daily purchases and service payments to AI agents, with the software independently executing the necessary transactions.

New Solutions

Appropriate solutions are being developed for the AI economy of the future.

The largest US cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase, launched the Payments MCP system, which allows language models like Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini to access a crypto wallet, fiat gateway, and payments.

PayPal will implement the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) and OpenAI’s Instant Checkout feature, enabling users to make purchases through ChatGPT.

ACP is an open standard that allows merchants to list their products in AI applications, and users to make purchases through agents.

The Instant Checkout feature, launched in September, allows users to confirm orders, delivery, and payment without leaving ChatGPT.

At the end of October, the Quack AI team introduced x402 BNB—”a unified layer for signatures, payments, and management in the agent economy on BNB Chain.” The tool will allow several steps to be replaced with a single signature: confirmation → transfer → payment.

x402 BNB “eliminates the problem at the protocol level,” providing “gas-free one-click transactions that can be verified, checked, and controlled.”

In October, analysts at JPMorgan stated that Stripe will become the leader of the “dual revolution in artificial intelligence and money movement.”