The big towers of Wall Street giants may soon house an unexpected tenant: cryptocurrency. Blockchain technology is shedding its Wild West reputation, and America’s business elite is quietly preparing to embrace digital assets on an unprecedented scale. And Ripple’s president, Monica Long, has publicly made an announcement about this. According to her, 250 of America’s largest corporations will either hold cryptocurrency or deploy blockchain-powered financial instruments by the end of 2026. Her forecast comes after years of technical and regulatory groundwork that has begun transforming the sector from a fringe experiment to mainstream financial infrastructure.
Balance Sheets Go Digital
Long’s projections are striking. She expects corporate balance sheets to collectively have over $1 trillion in digital assets by late 2026, with around half of Fortune 500 companies formulating strategies for digital assets.
Current adoption remains modest but is picking up. For example, GameStop bought 4,710 Bitcoin in May 2025, joining public companies like Block Inc. and Tesla that have been buying Bitcoin. A mid-2025 Coinbase survey found that six in 10 Fortune 500 executives said their companies were already working on blockchain initiatives.
The stablecoin market has particularly caught Long’s eye. She thinks these assets will become the primary tool for global settlement within five years, moving from alternative payment rails into foundational infrastructure. Regulatory progress and the involvement of heavyweights like Visa and Mastercard are pushing this shift forward.
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Digital asset treasury companies have surged from four in 2020 to over 200 today, with nearly 100 launched in 2025 alone. Long expects this boom to accelerate.
As 2026 unfolds, it may witness the true “institutionalization” of crypto: where Wall Street’s biggest players don’t just watch from the sidelines but actively build with blockchain as the new operating layer of modern finance.
