The Internet’s Missing Layer: How Value Protocols Are Revolutionizing Finance
The Internet has long been based on universal protocols that govern how data travels across the network. HTTP, SMTP, TCP/IP, and TLS have defined how content, messages, and data move, ensuring predictable distribution over the Internet. However, one crucial aspect has been missing: a standardized method for shifting value. Today, money still moves through fragmented institutional silos, creating duplication of controls and slowing cross-border settlements.
This gap is about to close, thanks to the emergence of stablecoins and wallets as a protocol of value. Instant, low-cost, and verifiable transfers are transforming payments into a common settlement layer that behaves like an internet infrastructure. According to Aishwary Gupta, global head of payments and RWAs at Polygon Labs, “2026 is the point of convergence: wallets, stablecoins, and tokenized assets on the same tracks make finance programmable, borderless, and automatic – completing the internet’s missing layer of value.”
New Paradigm for Value Transfer
The old model of value transfer is cumbersome, with multiple vendors responsible for single tasks, such as verifying identity, protecting against fraud, processing payments, and managing currency conversion. Each system recreates a customer’s profile and repeats previous checks, leading to slow and costly transactions. In contrast, the new paradigm emerging is one where wallets become the universal interface through which users and companies share identities, permissions, and payment instruments.
Stablecoins have quietly become the Internet’s first native transport layer for value. Transfers can now be processed in seconds, with costs falling to levels that traditional systems cannot achieve. Each stablecoin transfer contains its own proof, making verification easy and transfers clear long before a bank message reaches its correspondent. The use of stablecoins has already reached a global scale, with USDC (USDC) alone having a market cap of $75 billion and Polygon seeing over 153 million transactions in the last 30 days.
Tokenized Assets and the Future of Finance
Tokenized assets are completing the picture, allowing for instant settlement and easier liquidity management. When short-term instruments such as government bonds, credit exposures, and bills follow the same lines as payments, the line between local and foreign payments blurs, revealing an interconnected global environment. Regulated money market funds are already held in public accounts, and governments in Asia are issuing regulated digital currency instruments with clear legal status.
As Aishwary Gupta notes, “Finance is about to become programmable, auditable, and borderless by default, just as the Internet itself already is.” The old institutional model will give way to a protocol that spans the Internet, connecting the value itself – money, assets, and trust – and completing the missing financial layer of the Internet. This convergence – wallets, stablecoins, and tokenized assets living on the same rails – makes 2026 the first year that the financial world behaves like a true internet protocol.
Read more about the future of finance and the Internet’s missing layer of value in the original article: https://crypto.news/the-internet-never-had-a-value-protocol-that-changes/
Aishwary Gupta is the global head of payments and RWAs at Polygon Labs. Aishwary is a chartered accountant with over seven years of experience in finance and technology, specializing in FinTech and Blockchain.
