Stablecoins
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.
Institutions
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.
Institutions
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.
Stablecoins
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.
Stablecoins
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.
Central bank money
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.
Stablecoins
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.
Stablecoins
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.
Stablecoins
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.
Stablecoins
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.
Africa & emerging markets
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.
Africa & emerging markets
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.
Stablecoins
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.
Clearing & settlement
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.
Stablecoins
The yen stablecoin issuer says the extension takes the round to about 6bn yen cumulatively, with a listed logistics group aboard.
Tokenized capital markets
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.
Africa & emerging markets
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.
Stablecoins
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.
Stablecoins
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.
Stablecoins
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.
Trading venues
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.
Stablecoins
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.
Africa & emerging markets
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.
Africa & emerging markets
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.
Payments
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.
Stablecoins
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.
Regulation
Kenya gazetted the Virtual Asset Service Providers Regulations, 2026 on 24 July 2026, completing implementation of the VASP Act assented to in October 2025.
Stablecoins
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.
Regulation
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.
Africa & emerging markets
The IMF Executive Board concluded its 2026 Article IV consultation with Nigeria on 9 June 2026 and identified stablecoin oversight as a priority.
Regulation
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.
Payments
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.
Regulation
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.
Currency & FX
An IMF working paper published on 27 March 2026 examined cross-border stablecoin flows and their effects on emerging-market foreign exchange rates.
Regulation
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.
Stablecoins
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.