News, data and analysis on tokenized assets, market design and digital economic systems.
Dollar and non-dollar payment tokens as instruments: reserve composition, redemption at par, issuance economics and the rules now written for them.
The Financial Stability Board says a dollar token held worldwide but backed and regulated in a few countries could leave holders unsure whom to claim from if it failed. It puts the market no bigger than a year ago.
From late October, US users can send USDC, a digital dollar, to crypto wallets or to bank accounts in more than 60 countries. Samsung itself will hold none of the money.
The Independent Community Bankers of America asked a Washington federal court on 2 October to vacate the OCC's March chartering rule and the 2021 letter behind it, which it says let the agency charter trust banks that neither take deposits nor act as…
A 760 page proposal of 1 October opens adviser and fund crypto custody to state trust companies and, as a fallback, to advisers themselves, and treats permitted payment stablecoins as funds.
From 1 October a payment stablecoin issuer needs a Florida licence or an exemption to do business in the state.
Roughrider Coin, issued by VersaBank's US bank on Fiserv's new digital asset platform, went live on 1 October for payments between North Dakota's banks and credit unions, minted against dollars held in custody accounts and burned on arrival, with the…
HSBC said on 30 September that its licensed Hong Kong dollar stablecoin will be called HSBC RedCoin and will start with payments through PayMe. It has issued nothing, names no blockchain and gives no date beyond the second half of 2026.
The Commission registered Coinbase Clearing LLC as a derivatives clearing organisation on 28 September, permitted to clear only fully collateralized futures, options on futures and swaps. Coinbase calls it the first USDC-native clearing house.
Citi said on 28 September that its merchant clients can take stablecoins at checkout through Coinbase, converted to dollars and settled by Citi as bank of record, and that Coinbase will run accounts that turn incoming dollars into stablecoins on…
The minority staff of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations reported on 28 September that 84 per cent of 846 wallets the US and Israel designated for links to Iran and its proxies transacted wholly or almost wholly in USDT, and that…
The Federal Reserve Board asked for comment on 24 September on two GENIUS Act proposals: reserves at par in short-dated safe assets or their tokenized forms, an operational risk charge of 1 to 2 per cent of coins outstanding, and a presumption that…
The two companies announced a five-year agreement and a $100m share placement on Tuesday. Circle's release describes promotion and infrastructure services.
In a 57-page response to the European Commission's review of MiCA, the European System of Central Banks asks that the prohibition on remunerating holders apply to unregulated crypto borrowing, lending and staking too, naming liquidity mining as an…
SoFi Bank says settlement of its debit and credit card transactions across Mastercard's network now runs in SoFiUSD, on a programme it puts at $25bn of annualised volume.
Arc goes live with gas payable in USDC and no native token required, and Circle has minted the full 10bn supply of one anyway.
Senate Republicans published 635 pages on Sunday night, two days before a procedural vote that needs sixty. Four changes from the 10 September version have not been read anywhere. The ethics ban no longer expires in 2029.
Ways and Means votes on Wednesday morning on 114 pages nobody has read to the end. The wash sale rule applies to dispositions after the date of introduction, which was Monday. The $10 fee exemption waits for 2028.
A verified complaint in Manhattan seeks forfeiture of 61,192,367.59 USDT across ten Tron addresses as the proceeds of Iranian oil sold to Chinese buyers. Its own table shows the issuer froze every one of them in June and July 2025.
The BlackRock HKD Digital Liquidity Fund is authorised in Hong Kong as the first locally domiciled money market fund offering a constant net asset value to retail investors, and can be bought with tokenized deposits or HKDAP.
The bank settled a live cross-border payment in USBDC between its own entities in North America and Europe on the public Stellar network, and the pilot exercised freezing and clawback alongside minting and redemption.
A card programme owes Visa every day and collects from cardholders later. Visa is now handing its settlement files to an onchain lender that funds the gap and takes repayment out of the receivables through a smart contract.
SIX and TWINT joined UBS, PostFinance, Sygnum, Raiffeisen, Zürcher Kantonalbank, BCV and Swiss Stablecoin AG in a live sandbox for CHFD, a franc token running since June.
Two years of Bank Secrecy Act filings and 33,904 reports, and the finding that matters on this beat is not the total: whatever the victim was persuaded to buy, the proceeds were nearly always turned into stablecoins, and almost exclusively into USDT.
Preliminary conditional approval for OpenReserve Bank, a full-service insured national bank in Salt Lake City, whose plan puts tokenized capabilities across all deposit products and a stablecoin subsidiary it has not yet applied for.
Corporate Decision #1390 lets Revolut custody digital assets through a UK affiliate and lets its customers pay remittances in stablecoins. It may not issue the Revolut-branded token, manage its reserves, or hold a digital asset on the bank's own balance sheet.
Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, UBS, MUFG and fifteen others say they will establish a company this half to support a USD stablecoin, with a euro one to follow and nothing else settled.
MAS puts its 2023 framework into legislation with a licence class in which an issuer may not do banking or any other regulated business, may pay no interest, and may be designated systemic and ordered off Singapore's venues.
Its general manager argues stablecoins fail on singleness, interoperability and financial integrity, and that bank money on a programmable ledger passes the tests they fail.
The Financial Accounting Standards Board proposed on 18 August that some stablecoins may sit on a balance sheet as cash equivalents, and set three conditions.
The Treasury proposed the rules deciding who may issue a dollar stablecoin in the United States, and read the GENIUS Act to let a qualifying foreign issuer do it here directly rather than only reach the market at second hand.
The Comptroller granted preliminary conditional approval on 14 August to charter World Liberty Trust Company, which will issue and redeem USD1, hold its reserve and custody digital assets as a fiduciary.
KPMG US issued an unqualified opinion on the 2025 financial statements of Tether International, the entity Tether says is the only issuer of USDT, and found reserves exceeding liabilities by $6.814bn at 31 December 2025.
Cohort 2 of the Central Bank of Nigeria's regulatory sandbox takes applications from 12 August for supervised live testing of stablecoin issuance, virtual asset payments, custody and on-ramps.
cNGN, issued by WrappedCBDC under the Nigerian SEC's oversight, has gone live on Celo with an onchain foreign exchange pairing, giving the naira a regulated onchain form beside the dollar tokens that dominate local use.
Total revenue and reserve income of $701m in the second quarter grew 7% year on year, short of the $712m CoinDesk says analysts expected, as a 66 basis point fall in the rate Circle earns on its reserves offset a quarter's growth in the coin's average supply.
Eleven institutions will secure the stablecoin issuer's own layer-one network before its 16 September mainnet, and the DTCC will make Arc a supported chain for tokenizing the assets it custodies from the second half of 2027.
The yen stablecoin issuer says the extension takes the round to about 6bn yen cumulatively, with a listed logistics group aboard.
The SEC-registered transfer agent brings its dShares home, selling every S&P 500 company for USDC through self-custody wallets, in what the firm calls an industry first.
SC Ventures, the Sony Innovation Fund, Polychain Capital and Blockchain Capital back the pan-African payments company's dollar-account business, taking its equity financing past $120m as it moves into Latin America and the Asia-Pacific.
BSTBL puts an existing Treasury fund's shares on Ethereum through BNY; BRSRV is a new multi-chain vehicle with Securitize—both shaped to sit inside GENIUS Act reserve rules.
The NYDFS has granted Circle Internet Trust Company a limited purpose trust charter, putting the USDC issuer under the New York Banking Law a decade after it took the first BitLicense.
BDO's attestation shows $183.6bn of USDT backed by $187.8bn of assets at 30 June—an excess of $4.11bn, down from $8.23bn a quarter earlier.
Revenue of $1.22bn missed on both the trading and subscription lines and the shares fell about 5% after hours, in a quarter the exchange's own release leads on a record 10.3% share of crypto trading volume.
The federally regulated dollar token Tether launched in January now mints and burns natively on the payments network, where it can also pay for gas.
A memorandum of understanding puts securities tokenization, blockchain settlement and investor education on the table at East Africa's largest exchange, with the role of USDT still undefined.
The exchange holding Nigeria's first provisional digital asset approval says businesses can now settle in 14 currencies across nine African markets and beyond, a bet that regulated rails can undercut some of the world's costliest payment corridors.
The USDC issuer acquires more than 680 patent families and says the deal makes it the largest US blockchain patent holder; the price was not disclosed.
Amanah Advisors certifies XAUT as compliant with Islamic finance principles, as Tether courts Islamic banks and savers in markets where gold, not the dollar, is the trusted store of value.
Kenya gazetted the Virtual Asset Service Providers Regulations, 2026 on 24 July 2026, completing implementation of the VASP Act assented to in October 2025.
The Bank for International Settlements published the money and payments chapter of its 2026 Annual Economic Report on 23 June 2026, arguing that stablecoins fall short on singleness, elasticity and integrity of money.
On 22 June 2026 the Bank of England published a policy statement and draft Code of Practice for sterling systemic stablecoin issuers, dropping proposed individual holding limits in favour of a temporary £40bn cap per issuance.
The IMF Executive Board concluded its 2026 Article IV consultation with Nigeria on 9 June 2026 and identified stablecoin oversight as a priority.
The European Commission opened a two-part consultation on revising the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation in May 2026, with responses due by 30 August 2026.
Mastercard and the African digital-asset platform Yellow Card announced a partnership on 7 May 2026 to build stablecoin-based payment and settlement rails across Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority granted its first stablecoin issuer licences on 10 April 2026 to HSBC and to Anchorpoint Financial, a joint venture led by Standard Chartered with Animoca Brands and HKT.
An IMF working paper published on 27 March 2026 examined cross-border stablecoin flows and their effects on emerging-market foreign exchange rates.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency published a proposed rule on 25 February 2026 implementing the GENIUS Act, consolidating reserve, redemption, audit and supervision requirements for payment stablecoin issuers in a new 12 CFR Part 15.
Tether announced USAT on 27 January 2026, a dollar stablecoin issued in the United States by Anchorage Digital Bank under the GENIUS Act framework, with Cantor Fitzgerald as reserve custodian and preferred primary dealer.
Receiving $200 in Sub-Saharan Africa cost 8.46% in the third quarter of 2025; the tokens undercutting that price are almost entirely dollar-denominated, and the flows are unmeasured.
Circle's euro token held €381.8m in June 2026 against $72.6bn of its dollar token, and MiCA's ban on paying interest sent what euro demand exists onchain into money market funds instead.
What issued, what settled, what the supervisors changed, with the numbers behind it and a note on what the numbers do not show. One email, Thursday mornings.
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