Crypto: New In The Battle Of Chains, Distribution Is King 2026

The blockchain battle is now centered on distribution, as established firms convert existing customers into network participants and create new competitive landscapes.

Opinion by: Marcin Kaźmierczak, co-founder of RedStone

The fight for dominance in blockchain won’t be won by whoever has the lowest fees or the fastest consensus; it will be won by whoever can mobilize the largest base of users.

Circle, Stripe, Coinbase and others are soon to follow, rewriting their business models around proprietary chains. They already control the payment flows, merchant networks and trading activity that most blockchains spend years trying to attract.

By redirecting that existing volume into their own ecosystems, they don’t just launch chains; they throw them into orbit with gravity.

This shift is the axis around which the next wave of blockchain dominance will rotate. Transaction fees that once accrued to neutral networks now stay in-house. Compliance and settlement can be built into the DNA of the chain. Merchants, traders and institutions aren’t asked to join — they’re automatically upgraded into validators, liquidity providers and onchain participants.

For incumbents, the cold-start problem disappears. For everyone else, it defines the gap between success and irrelevance. The result is a new competitive landscape.

Consider Coinbase’s launch of Base. It didn’t need to “bootstrap” the new chain. Instead, it routed tens of millions of existing users directly to it. Overnight, Base became one of the most active layer 2s in the ecosystem, not because it offered radically different technology but because Coinbase already owned the audience.

Circle has a similar advantage with USDC (USDC). By directing settlement flows toward its own chain, Arc, Circle secures the network effects of the most widely used dollar stablecoin. Likewise, Stripe, with its millions of merchants, can migrate payment rails onto Tempo, offering lower fees and faster payouts as incentives. Taken together, these moves show that the center of gravity in blockchain has already shifted upstream.

Startups need to design effective incentive programs, invest heavily in marketing and hope speculators stick around long enough to bootstrap real activity. Incumbents, by contrast, instantly convert existing customers into network participants. What would take a startup chain years of ecosystem building, these companies accomplish instantly with entrenched customer bases.

Source: CoinTelegraph