Stablecoins

The European Union's 20th sanctions package against Russia takes effect on May 24, banning EU persons from any transaction with Russian or Belarusian crypto-asset service providers — and, for the first time, with decentralised platforms operating from those jurisdictions.

Coinbase Asset Management opened a stablecoin-linked institutional credit fund on Thursday, with investors able to hold their shares either through traditional channels or as tokens minted on Ethereum, Solana or Base via Superstate's FundOS platform.

South Korea's largest card issuer signed a memorandum of understanding with the Solana Foundation on Thursday to develop stablecoin payment infrastructure on Solana, with eight other Korean financial institutions reportedly building parallel integrations.

Stablecoin issuer Agora filed for a national trust bank charter with the OCC on April 24, racing for federal oversight while traditional banks pressure Congress to delay the underlying legislation.

Visa added Arc, Base, Canton, Polygon, and Tempo to its stablecoin settlement pilot on Wednesday. The network now spans nine chains and is processing $7 billion in annualised live volume, up 50 per cent in a single quarter.

Meta has begun routing creator earnings through Circle's USDC on Solana and Polygon via Stripe, starting in Colombia and the Philippines. It is the company's first stablecoin product since regulators forced it to abandon Libra in 2019.

David Marcus put a Bitcoin-settled dollar account onto the Visa network on Tuesday and gave AI agents permission to spend from it. The principal-member status is the rare part — most fintechs rent access to Visa through Marqeta or Stripe Issuing.

The EU's 20th sanctions package against Russia includes a total ban on crypto transactions with Russian-based providers, the bloc's most comprehensive crypto-specific enforcement action to date.

Western Union confirmed its Solana-based dollar stablecoin USDPT will launch next month, connecting crypto wallets to the company's network of 360,000 retail payout locations across 200 countries.

Israel's Capital Market Authority approved BILS, a shekel-pegged stablecoin built on Solana by licensed brokerage Bits of Gold, making it the first regulated fiat-backed token in the Middle East.

The exchange's new KuCard converts USDC to Australian dollars at the point of sale through Mastercard's global network, with support for Apple Pay and Google Pay, turning any of 37 supported trading pairs into spendable funds at 90 million merchant locations.

Tempo's new Zones feature lets enterprises run permissioned parallel chains for confidential transactions like payroll and treasury management, but critics say the operator-controlled model amounts to a glorified database with a blockchain receipt.

The stablecoin issuer blocked two TRON wallets holding a combined $344 million after OFAC designated them as part of Iran's sanctions-evasion network. Treasury Secretary Bessent called it part of a broader campaign to cut off Tehran's financial lifelines.

The USDC issuer's chief executive told Reuters that China could launch a yuan-backed stablecoin within three to five years, framing the dollar-yuan contest as a technological race that Circle intends to win regardless of which currency prevails.

SocGen-FORGE's MiCA-compliant USDCV token is now available directly in MetaMask through a partnership with Consensys, making it one of the first European bank-issued dollar stablecoins accessible to mainstream crypto users.

Ethereum now hosts 60 per cent of the global stablecoin market after its on-chain supply reached an all-time high of $180 billion, according to Token Terminal data, driven by a 150 per cent increase over three years.

Emmanuel Macron delivered the opening address at Paris Blockchain Week on Tuesday, calling for the rapid development of euro-denominated stablecoins and a digital euro to counter the dollar's near-total grip on the tokenised money market.

The payments giant launched a platform on 9 April that lets artificial intelligence agents initiate purchases, handle tokenisation and enforce spend controls across its network of 150 million merchants.

Aave pays 2.61% on USDC while high-yield savings accounts offer 5%. The yield premium that drew billions into decentralised finance has evaporated, and the protocols' best remaining rates come from repackaging traditional finance.

The Cantor Fitzgerald-led process is the first time Tether has opened its cap table meaningfully since founding. The asking price would make the stablecoin issuer worth more than every US bank except JPMorgan Chase — and investors have until late April to decide.

MoonPay has signed on to the stablecoin payment rail that WalletConnect and French terminal maker Ingenico began building earlier this year, giving the in-store crypto checkout experiment a branded fiat settlement layer for the first time.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority handed its inaugural stablecoin issuer licences to HSBC and Anchorpoint Financial on Friday, selecting two winners from a field of 36 applicants and clearing the path for the city's first bank-issued HKD stablecoins within months.

Polygon Labs is seeking between $50 million and $100 million in equity to fund its Open Money Stack stablecoin payments business, built on the Coinme and Sequence acquisitions it completed in January. The raise positions Marc Boiron's company as a settlement layer underneath Stripe, Mastercard, and the banks, rather than a consumer-facing payments brand.

The non-profit initiated an $11 million conversion through CoWSwap's time-weighted average price mechanism, just days after reaching its 70,000 ETH staking target — highlighting the tension between generating yield and meeting dollar-denominated expenses.

Vault Summit in Cannes drew Apollo, Bitwise, Franklin Templeton and fifty other speakers to Hotel Barrière Le Majestic for eight hours of institutional DeFi that felt nothing like a typical crypto conference.

The payments giant will let US iGaming operators accept stablecoin and cryptocurrency deposits through MoonPay's infrastructure, tapping into a market where 83 per cent of players say they want crypto payment options.

Aave's 2.61 per cent APY on USDC now trails the 3.14 per cent offered by Interactive Brokers on idle cash, inverting the risk-return logic that underpinned decentralised lending for five years.

Senators Tillis and Alsobrooks reached a bipartisan compromise on stablecoin yield on March 20, 2026, clearing a major obstacle to CLARITY Act passage.

Stablecoin market capitalization reached $319 billion by mid-March 2026, driven by institutional adoption and the GENIUS Act framework.

The combined market capitalization of stablecoins exceeded $200 billion in March 2025, driven by expansion of existing issuers and the launch of new entrants competing across different blockchain ecosystems.