The Web3 and Fintech communities shared their thoughts on payments, blockchain, and more before jetting off for the holidays.
“CFOs are no longer asking if blockchain will be used in B2B payments—they’re asking how fast they can transition to it.
“With cross-border transactions still slow and expensive, stablecoins are emerging as a CFO-friendly solution that reduces FX slippage, accelerates settlement, and provides 24/7/365 liquidity.
“As payment networks remove transaction fees and automate AR/AP workflows, finance leaders are reframing payments as a margin-enhancing function. “In an era of bank outages, geopolitical disruptions, and fragmented payment partners, finance teams are reducing single-point-of-failure risk. Decentralized networks—are becoming a strategic hedge for treasury operations.”
– Jeremy Almond, CEO of Paystand
“The Fed Reserve will reduce interest rates by 1.75% by the end of 2026. The recent small reductions by the Fed still leave the Fed Funds rate about 185 basis points above historical levels. Powell is likely to reduce rates by another 50 basis points before the end of his term, with his successor returning rates to the historical norm. The net result will be lower borrowing costs, higher employment, and greater economic growth.
“The Fed Funds rate and what businesses pay for credit are highly coupled. Getting Fed Funds back in line will be a stimulus for greater business lending.
“Ahead of rate changes, potential borrowers (especially small business owners who have struggled to access capital with elevated interest rates) should prepare necessary materials for loan applications. When used properly, debt capital can be used for more than just added liquidity — it can support greater business expansion and profitability.”
– Pat Reily co-founder, Uplinq
“The geopolitical volatility will potentially stabilize in the new year. Risk around tariff uncertainty and interest rates will ease, unlocking stronger opportunities for business investment and global expansion. Heading into 2026, business leaders can stay ahead by closely tracking opportunities (and risks), and acting quickly when new opportunities emerge.
“As an entrepreneur who’s navigated through economic volatility before, resilient growth always comes back to first principles thinking: strong value propositions and healthy unit economics. Companies that expand market share by solving real customer needs will thrive. Those that rely on ‘buying market share’ can only sustain it for so long before they run out of capital and inevitably fall behind.”
– Chen Amit, CEO, Tipalti
“In 2026, UX isn’t about having the most widgets. It’s about how intuitive and easy solutions are to implement and use. Mid-sized companies are increasingly complex, and they expect straightforward technology that allows them to scale efficiently with improved visibility and control over business risk.”
“Despite some rhetoric, the world is becoming even more global, and so is the supply chain. As companies add international subsidiaries, they need banking, currencies, and payment capabilities that can cross borders. This means cash flow visibility will become much more critical and challenging, even as implementing increased global regulation and security standards creates greater complexity.”
– Robert Israch, president, Tipalti
“Another major challenge for businesses operating across volatile currency markets is leveraging stablecoins for global treasury management. For markets like Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa, stablecoins offer a practical solution for transparent, rapid value transfer while maintaining dollar balances locally.”
“Geopolitical volatility and rapid shifts in sanctions and regulations will be the dominant risks, with Venezuela serving as a prime example. For globally scaled companies, risk and compliance have become moving targets that require continuous adaptation. The challenge is staying abreast of rapid regulatory shifts to effectively manage currency exposure and develop hedging strategies.”
– Manish Vrishaketu, chief customer and operating officer, Tipalti
“In 2026, the key will be balancing dual mandates of investing in long-term innovation while driving efficient, profitable growth. Owners will need to move beyond a single annual budget to continuous, multi-scenario rolling forecasts.
“The CFO is already a vital role as the steward of financial health and compliance, but that role is expanding to become more of a ‘chief value officer’ and architect of enterprise value. This should include co-owning digital transformation and acting as the primary translator and storyteller of business strategy for the investor community. The CFO needs to become the primary partner to the CEO, leveraging a single source of financial and operational data to drive cross-functional alignment, with an equal voice in decision-making.
“As we move into 2026, CFOs will also increasingly be viewed as ‘chief reality officers,’ with their primary deliverables being confidence and readiness. Investors and boards will measure them not just by the accuracy of the past, but by the agility of their forecasting and the speed at which they can model and pivot the business in real-time.”
– Alex Cedro, VP of finance, Tipalti
The future of blockchain-based verification systems
“The biggest gap today is not the blockchain itself, but the persistent overestimation of what blockchain alone can actually solve. Blockchain guarantees immutability, not truth. It can ensure that a record has not been altered, but it cannot verify whether the original data is accurate, complete, or free from manipulation at the point of capture. In renewable energy and agriculture, the real bottleneck remains the lack of standardized, high-quality, georeferenced, and independently verifiable data.
“Most renewable certificate and environmental verification systems remain stuck in pilot phases because they still depend on inconsistent reporting standards, manual inputs, and fragmented verification processes. When upstream data is weak, blockchain does not fix the problem; it simply preserves flawed information permanently. The technology is often marketed as a final solution, when in reality it is only one integrity layer within a much larger verification system.
“The shift now underway, and likely to accelerate into 2026, is the convergence of blockchain with satellite monitoring, IoT sensors, AI-based risk models, and government-grade regulatory frameworks. In this integrated context, blockchain stops being the headline and becomes the backend infrastructure for auditability. By 2026, we should see fewer ‘blockchain-for-green’ experiments and more fully automated, standardized, and end-to-end MRV (monitoring, reporting, and verification) systems where the real innovation lies in measurement and validation, not in the ledger itself.
“2026 can indeed become a real turning point for verification systems, but that will depend far less on blockchain itself and far more on the maturity of data integrity. What will define this moment is not the adoption of another technology layer, but the ability of the sector to deploy reliable digital measurement and validation systems at scale across energy, agriculture, and land use in a way that remains economically viable; without that, the entire effort becomes unsustainable.
“To achieve this, companies must also be able to take a critical view of their own processes and truly understand on-the-ground realities. Even the most advanced IT team adds little value if the organization does not understand how challenging real-world data collection can be in remote areas, or is not prepared to operate offline when connectivity simply is not available.
“There are encouraging signs. Satellite monitoring is now continuous and affordable, IoT sensors are cheaper and more robust, AI-based risk detection is reaching operational maturity, and regulators are beginning to build real digital environmental compliance frameworks. If these elements are integrated into standardized, end-to-end verification flows, blockchain naturally finds its place as an audit infrastructure. In that case, 2026 could mark the transition from experimentation to institutional-grade verification.
“At the same time, if the industry continues to prioritize token-driven narratives without fixing the weakness of data at the source, the risk of scaling greenwashing is very real. Blockchain does not stop poor data from entering the system. If projects remain dependent on self-reported information, manual checks, or opaque methodologies, the technology only makes those distortions more permanent, not more credible.
“So 2026 is not an automatic inflection point. It becomes one only if measurement, validation, and regulatory acceptance evolve at the expected pace. If they do, blockchain will fade from the spotlight and operate quietly as part of the trust infrastructure. If they do not, the same tools risk being used to scale greenwashing in digital form.”
– Jon Trask, CEO of blockchain-based enterprise system Dimitra
Architectural evolution of Web3 (Layer 3 as the Final Frontier)
“The industry is currently obsessed with trying to settle every single transaction on-chain but the real solution is to allow parties to interact directly, without 30,000 computers supervising every step.
“We need to fill the gap in Web3 stacks with trustless peer-to-peer communication that moves the security of DLT into the application level rather than relying on full blockchain verification for everything.
“This high-performance Layer 3 architecture can create a complete system that finally realizes Satoshi’s vision by making trading faster and safer through direct off-chain interactions.”
Regulatory maturation and solving for compliance
“The key problem Web3 faces is that trading remains centralized and dependent on trusting platform operators – yet the industry cannot mature in a system devoid of compliance and TradFi integrations.
“A viable goal for the next cycle is TrustFi which solves this by embedding advanced decentralized solutions directly into TradFi rather than trying to circumvent it. Another way to integrate these worlds is for banking institutions to implement DeFi technology from the inside and scale that model for others. This approach allows traditional brokers to finally enter the digital asset sector and advise institutional clients, making the market more organized and protected by established financial systems.
“The next wave of value creation in Web3 will be driven by a new utility layer where developers build high-frequency applications that give the network substance, much like how the iOS app ecosystem defined the iPhone.
“I would say we are at a similar stage to the Internet in the year 2000. To move beyond this early phase we must remove technical friction through account abstraction so users can access services with standard credentials instead of managing complex wallets.
“This will enable immediate real-world usage like instant payments without block delays and create the environment for the next unicorn to be a fully automated organization that runs entirely on smart contracts, while its founders manage it from the beach.”
– Alexis Sirkia, chairman of Yellow Network