Newsletter · · Ashutosh Agarwal

SoFi Moves Its $25 Billion Card Program Onto Stablecoin Rails - Stablecoins Eat Banking - Week of September 21-28, 2026

A synthesis of what fintech and crypto podcasts, operators, and analysts said about stablecoins and banking for the week of September 21-28, 2026, built around SoFi moving its $25 billion-plus card program onto its own SoFiUSD stablecoin settling over Mastercard. Operators and commentators split on whether incumbents co-opt stablecoins or independent issuers like Circle keep the margin, as Binance takes a paid stake in Circle, JPMorgan details Kinexys volumes, and Congress leaves the timetable to regulators.

Stablecoins Eat Banking

Week of September 21-28, 2026: SoFi Moves Its $25 Billion Card Program Onto Stablecoin Rails

Last week the story was Washington. The CLARITY Act died, the ban on stablecoin yield died with it, and the banks came away with nothing. This week the banks answered, and not with lobbyists. They answered with plumbing. A US bank moved a $25 billion card program onto its own stablecoin, running over Mastercard. Canada's six biggest banks teamed up on tokenized deposits. JPMorgan went on its own podcast to say its blockchain unit handles about $7 billion a day. And the co-founder of the first federally chartered crypto bank called tokenized deposits the gateway drug that gets banks hooked on crypto. Meanwhile, Circle paid for its reach the expensive way: it sold Binance a $100 million stake and agreed to pay it a monthly fee for every USDC sitting in its wallets. If you want to know who keeps the money in this industry, follow those fees.

TL;DR

  • Incumbents are now building on stablecoins, not just arguing about them. SoFi began settling its card program, expected to process more than $25 billion a year, in its own SoFiUSD over Mastercard's network, with no change needed from merchants. Canada's six largest banks launched a joint tokenized-deposit project. JPMorgan's Kinexys says it has handled over $4 trillion to date (Thinking Crypto, Sep 23; J.P. Morgan's Making Sense, Sep 22).

  • Circle bought reach from Binance, and it isn't cheap. Binance paid $100 million for 1.24 million Circle shares at $80.84 each. Circle also signed a five-year promotion deal and will pay Binance a monthly fee tied to the USDC held in Binance wallets. That makes a second big distributor taking a cut of Circle's reserve income, after Coinbase (Thinking Crypto, Sep 23).

  • Congress is out until after the midterms, so the timetable now belongs to the regulators. The Senate leaves in early October. Final GENIUS Act rules are expected in November. Circle is working toward a January 18, 2027 effective date ("don't hold me to that date"). The Fed has also put out its own proposed framework for issuers (The Banker Next Door, Sep 22; Tokenized, Sep 21).

What's new

Ranked by how much each item matters for a portfolio: live deals and operator data first, commentators second.

1. SoFi puts a $25 billion card program on its own stablecoin, over Mastercard

The most important live deal of the week, and it points toward the incumbents. SoFi Bank and Mastercard went live with stablecoin settlement. SoFi is moving its card program onto SoFiUSD, which the headline calls "the first stablecoin issued by a nationally chartered U.S. bank." Settlement is the back-office step where money actually changes hands between the banks behind a card payment. The program is expected to process more than $25 billion a year.

Two details matter. First, "generally, merchants do not need to accept stablecoins or change their payment systems." The stablecoin runs underneath the card network, not around it. Second, SoFi is "already discussing stablecoin settlement with large U.S. merchants and may expand into cross-border payments and remittance" (Daily Crypto News, "Sept 23: The Stablecoin Endgame?", Sep 23).

Tony Edward, host of Thinking Crypto (commentator, reading the headlines), drew the obvious conclusion: "MasterCard is not saying, well, that's a bank. We don't want to work with them. They're a competitor... No, they're all working together" (Thinking Crypto, "HUGE NEWS! BLACKROCK REVEALS CRYPTO AI AGENT PLANS! MASTERCARD STELLAR XLM & BINANCE CIRCLE USDC!", Sep 23).

Why it moves the thesis: this is the "co-option" scenario, happening live and at scale. A regulated bank issues the dollar token. A card network carries it. The merchant, and the fee the merchant pays on every card swipe (called interchange), stay exactly where they were. That is the opposite of the "stablecoins bypass Visa and Mastercard" story. It also matters for Circle. Every bank that can issue its own coin is a bank that doesn't need USDC for its own settlement.

In the same show: BVNK, the stablecoin payments firm Mastercard recently won the bidding for, added the Stellar blockchain. That gives enterprise customers "single API access to Stellar across 130 plus markets for high volume sub penny stable coin payments" (Thinking Crypto, Sep 23). An API is simply a plug that lets one company's software connect to another's. Mastercard now owns a stablecoin-settlement business and carries a bank's stablecoin over its own network. That is a hedge on both sides.

2. Circle sells Binance a $100 million stake, and agrees to pay it to push USDC

The distribution deal of the week, with a catch. Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, bought a $100 million strategic stake in Circle: 1.24 million shares at $80.84 each. The two also signed a five-year deal to promote USDC across Binance's platforms. The detail to underline: Circle "will pay Binance a monthly fee tied to USDC held through its wallet infrastructure." Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire (operator) called Binance "the world's largest and most widely used wallet for stablecoins" and said the deal "will accelerate global and emerging market preference and adoption of USDC." The obvious target is Tether's lead outside the US (Thinking Crypto, Sep 23).

Why it moves a number: Circle makes most of its money from interest on the reserves backing USDC. Coinbase already takes a large share of that income under their existing revenue split. Now Binance gets a monthly fee on its own USDC balances. More coins in circulation is good for Circle. But each new coin placed through a big partner comes with a cut going out the door. [DIRECTIONAL, the fee rate was not disclosed on the podcast; the margin impact is our inference.] The one hard number is the $80.84 price per share: a large, well-informed buyer was willing to pay it.

Circle was busy elsewhere, too:

  • Payments network. Raagulan Pathy (operator; founder of KAST and former head of Circle's Asia business) said Circle "just made an acquisition today or yesterday... of Tazapay," adding "another 200 or so" staff in Asia (Thinking Crypto, Raagulan Pathy, Sep 24) [CLAIM, unverified, deal terms not given].

  • Why Tazapay. On Tokenized, Circle's Nikhil Chandhok (operator) explained that Tazapay handles the "last mile fiat rails", meaning delivery into local bank accounts. He said it is "growing 100% year over year" on the back of stablecoin volume, and that Circle wants a future where cross-border swaps happen "in local stablecoins" (Tokenized, "SEC Unlocked Tokenized Stocks", Sep 21).

  • Lending products. Circle launched Bitcoin-backed USDC borrowing for institutional clients (Thinking Crypto, Sep 22). Coinbase users can now borrow USDC against Bitcoin at fixed rates and fixed maturity dates through Morpho (Daily Crypto News, Sep 23).

3. JPMorgan puts numbers on its deposit-token business

The largest US bank used its own podcast to make the incumbent case. Oli Harris, who leads Kinexys, JPMorgan's blockchain business (operator/insider), gave the scale. Since 2015 the platform has "transacted over $4 trillion to date, and we process approximately $7 billion a day." It runs blockchain deposit accounts and the JPMorgan deposit token ("JPM Coin") on public blockchains, with 24/7 transfers. It also offers "atomic, on-chain, near-real-time FX settlement across eight major currencies: dollar, euro, sterling, aussie, sing dollar, hong kong dollar, yen, and renminbi." "Atomic" means both sides of a currency swap settle at the same instant or not at all (J.P. Morgan's Making Sense, "Why tokenization is gaining momentum", Sep 22).

His framing is the incumbent thesis in one line:

"On-chain money is becoming credible through regulated forms like tokenized commercial bank deposits, such as our very own JP Morgan coin. And that matters enormously, because tokenized assets cannot scale without a trusted settlement asset... No cash leg means no market."

Hannah Elson, JPMorgan's Global Head of Custody (operator/insider), made a quieter point that worries us more on Circle's behalf. Asset managers are launching tokenized money market funds "to target some of those reserve stablecoin asset flows." In other words, the fund industry wants the cash that stablecoins park in T-bills (Making Sense, Sep 22).

Why it matters: $7 billion a day is real volume. By Harris's own account, product-market fit today is "smarter treasury management and payments settlement," and he names the hard part as "privacy, governance, and finality" as bank networks connect to public blockchains. JPMorgan is not trying to replace stablecoins. It is trying to be the dollar that institutions settle in.

4. Anchorage: tokenized deposits are how banks get hooked on crypto

The best insider interview of the week. Nathan McCauley, co-founder of Anchorage Digital (operator; the federally chartered crypto bank that issues USAT, Tether's US-regulated dollar), spoke on The Rollup. He cut through the "banks vs. crypto" framing in a way worth quoting at length (The Rollup, "Nathan McCauley: Tokenized Deposits Are The Real Trojan Horse For Banks (Insider Take)", Sep 27).

First, there is no single "bank view." "The very large GSIBs don't even really exist," he joked, meaning the global systemically important banks. "There's a bunch of divisions within that large bank, each that have their own agenda." Wealth desks want Bitcoin. Payments desks want stablecoins and tokenized deposits. Lending desks want crypto as collateral. And "the bank lobby actually weirdly doesn't always act in the very interests of the banks themselves... the bank lobby was advocating for things that sometimes when you actually go talk to the individual banks, they didn't even want."

Second, the real problem tokenized deposits fix is boring. "Many banks don't actually know how much money is in their accounts until the end of the day because all those systems are batch processed." "Batch processed" means transactions are saved up and run in bulk, often overnight. A 24/7 internal rail "blows them away," even on a closed network.

Third, the gateway. "When you bring tokenized deposits into a bank. They get wallet infrastructure... After they have the wallet infrastructure, it's a very small leap to say, hey, now we're going to start accepting stable coins." He resisted the Trojan-horse label: "it's a gift, but it's a gift that doesn't turn on you."

Fourth, the timeline is long. These will be "sidecars for quite some time, maybe a decade," running next to old systems. "No one's doing a rip and replace." He also said Anchorage will soon announce "banks adopting us as their tokenized deposit infrastructure," and that its bank-infrastructure business is where growth has been "really boosted" this year.

Why it matters: on this view, deposit tokens and stablecoins are stages of one adoption curve, not rivals. The value goes to whoever supplies the plumbing (custody, wallets, settlement) and to the chain that "win[s] the settlement leg for stable coins."

5. MoneyGram: billions pre-funded in stablecoins, and its own coin to keep the yield

An incumbent money-transfer company explained why it issued its own dollar. Josh Ramos, SVP at MoneyGram (operator), described two live uses (The Future of Money, "How MoneyGram Is Using Stablecoins to Transform Remittances?", Sep 25).

  • Treasury. "We have money pre-funded, billions of dollars pre-funded around the world at any given time." "Pre-funded" means cash parked in advance in each country so transfers can pay out instantly. Moving it with stablecoins "reduces our float. We can offer better prices to our customer." Much of this runs in USDC: "We have a close relationship with Circle."

  • Consumer balances. MoneyGram operates in 200+ countries and territories, and building a local balance product one country at a time was "massive." Built on its own stablecoin, MGUSD, "launching another country is no longer any technical build."

The economics line is the one to keep. MGUSD "gives us the full yield on that for either lowering the cost of the remittance... or sharing some of that through rewards, depending on the regulatory structure. Right. So for us, it's sort of like owning the full stack." His market prediction: "we don't need a hundred different USD back stable coins or a thousand." He compared it to the neobank craze, which produced "a couple winners, not thousand winners." His stack: Stellar, Bridge (Stripe), M0 and Fireblocks, with on/off-ramps also on Solana and Tempo.

Why it moves a number: big distributors are working out that the reserve yield is the prize. Either they keep it by issuing their own coin (MoneyGram, SoFi), or they get paid to hold someone else's (Binance, Coinbase). Both routes squeeze the independent issuer's margin.

6. Congress is out, the regulators are in, and GENIUS has a date

The timetable, in plain English.

  • CLARITY is on ice until after the midterms. Joseph Bergquist of The Banker Next Door (commentator; community-bank perspective) noted senators "were scheduled to leave in early October and return after midterm elections." If Democrats gain power, "this thing is basically DOA" (The Banker Next Door, "The Clarity Act fails to advance! (Crypto Series Part XLI)", Sep 22).

  • The yield language that died. Bergquist recapped what the bill would have done: language from Senators Tillis and Alsobrooks barred rewards on stablecoin balances "economically or functionally equivalent to interest bearing bank deposits." A later draft would have let the Treasury Secretary restrict rewards "if community banks saw a measurable deposit flight," with that clause expiring after 18 months. None of it is law.

  • GENIUS rules. On GENIUS itself: "We're waiting for the final rule to be issued by some of the regulators here in November" (The Banker Next Door, Sep 22).

  • Circle's target date. "On like Jan 18th, 2027, when Genius goes into effect. Don't hold me to that date," said Circle's Chandhok, calling it "real stable coin money, OCC supervised" (the OCC is the federal bank regulator) (Tokenized, Sep 21).

  • The Fed's proposal. The Federal Reserve "proposes a new regulatory framework for stablecoin issuers under the Genius Act," per Thinking Crypto's headline read (commentator). No details were given on the podcast (Thinking Crypto, "BLACKROCK ONDO FINANCE BIG TOKENIZATION NEWS! BITGET CRYPTO EXCHANGE HACKED!", Sep 25).

  • SEC guidance. SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce (regulator) said the SEC is working on "guidance around how the entities that we regulate treat stable coins, genius stable coins and other stable coins," plus tokenized money market funds (The Wolf Of All Streets, "Hester Peirce Explains What Crypto Still Needs Before She Leaves the SEC", Sep 27).

Brian Armstrong, Coinbase CEO (operator), said "the ethics deal is what killed it." He said all four of Coinbase's must-haves, including stablecoin rewards, "were fixed in this most recent draft," and argued the banks shot themselves in the foot: "some of the big banks just didn't want the competition and they wanted to use the government to kind of squash their competition." On the regulators taking over: "in the short term, it's probably better for us in certain ways. It's a little bit more permissive" (The Wolf Of All Streets, "That's Something I Didn't Envision In My Wildest Dreams" | Brian Armstrong, Sep 21).

The political risk to file away: the Castle Island hosts (investors) flagged that Sherrod Brown, former Senate Banking chair and in their words "a chief architect of Choke Point 2.0," is running again in Ohio. He is "in the lead" per Polymarket, and Fairshake, the crypto industry's political action committee, plans to spend $30 million against him. Their read: "if I had to guess, I would say Sherrod will win." They expect SEC-CFTC rulemaking to cover tokenized-securities market structure, but not CLARITY's developer protections (On The Brink with Castle Island, "Weekly Roundup 09/25/26", Sep 25).

Why it matters: the rewards loophole survives into 2027 by default. But a Democratic Senate with Brown back on the Banking Committee is the most plausible way the yield door gets closed later. That makes the midterms a real event for issuer economics.

Also worth your time (operator color)

  • Cross-border is where stablecoins already win. Raagulan Pathy (operator): "The way to move dollars today through banks is super clumsy... stable coins are just, like, ridiculously good PMF" (product-market fit). KAST reaches "170, 180 countries from day one," versus Revolut's "45 or 50 countries and 30 of those are Europe." He has told his marketing team to "ban the use of the word stable coins"; the new tagline is "just money." His call: "USDC, USDT just way out in front... the lead is very substantial," and would-be new issuers "have kind of given up." He expects even "a city or JP" (Citi, JPMorgan) to offer stablecoins by 2030 (Thinking Crypto, Sep 24).

  • Philippines remittances down to 10–20 basis points. Wei Zhou, CEO of coins.ph (operator), said his rails have cut remittance costs to "10 or 20 bips" (a basis point, or "bip", is one-hundredth of a percent). The bottleneck is USDT/USDC-to-peso liquidity: "Somebody wants to sell $30 million of USDC on your platform, price tanks." He is working with Tether and hopes merchants accept stablecoins "by the end of the year" (Around The Coin, "How Stablecoins Move Money Across Borders - Wei Zhou | ATC #630", Sep 23).

  • The hidden foreign-exchange volume. Chris Kim, CEO of Axis (operator), described "quiet volume": the conversion of stablecoins to and from local currencies that happens off-chain and doesn't show up in blockchain data. He noted "non-banks are taking up to 40% of the market share" in FX (foreign-exchange trading) and expects that to "accelerate in the tokenized era" (The Edge Podcast, "Building Citadel Securities For The Tokenized Era | DeFi Frontier", Sep 24).

  • Money market funds make a play for stablecoins' collateral role. Sandy Kaul of Franklin Templeton (operator) said tokenized money market funds are "superior collateral to stablecoins" on derivatives exchanges because "you get better haircuts." A haircut is the discount an exchange applies to collateral, so a smaller one means more trading credit. Franklin has partnerships with OKX and "more to come," and its Benji fund pays interest "every single calendar day of the year, including Saturdays, Sundays and holidays" (Thinking Crypto, Sandy Kaul, Sep 22).

  • Visa's consumer survey. In a Visa-commissioned Morning Consult survey of 2,192 US adults, the share who said they would use stablecoins rose from 36% to 56% in a hypothetical with "bank-level fraud protection and deposit insurance" (Thinking Crypto, "BIG CRYPTO NEWS! NYSE TOKENIZED STOCKS! USD STABLECOINS TO GO GLOBAL!...", Sep 24). Read that twice: Americans want stablecoins to behave like bank deposits. That is a point for the deposit-token camp.

  • Tempo passes $2 billion. Tempo, the payments blockchain incubated by Stripe, "passed 2 billion in 30-day TPV" (total payment volume), per the Tokenized hosts (Tokenized, Sep 21).

The debate

The disintermediation question got its sharpest split in months. This time it was fought with live deals, not just lobbying.

The case for disintermediation: stablecoins take the margin

Reeve Collins, Tether co-founder (founder/insider; not a current Tether executive), put the bull case plainly on Bitcoin.com News (Bitcoin.com News Interviews, "Stablecoins Could Become the Default Money by 2030 | Tether Co-Founder Reeve Collins", Sep 25).

On the bank lobby's "deposit flight" warning: "Basically, that's banks saying they're going to make less money... When you look at a stablecoin, there's no fractional reserve. It's all 100% backed. And there's T-bill rates earned on that stablecoin. And the banks are saying, no, if they earn a T-bill rate, we don't want the stablecoin issuers to share it with the depositors." ("Fractional reserve" means a bank lends out most of the deposits it takes in.)

On whether banks can compete: "The banks could compete because the banks make way more than the T-bill rates... But their business model would collapse if they started giving it all away." And on the GENIUS Act: "It's both an amazing opportunity for banks and a huge competitive threat."

Add the operator evidence:

  • MoneyGram built its own coin specifically to capture "the full yield."

  • Pathy's KAST reaches 170-plus countries without a single local bank build.

  • coins.ph is moving money into the Philippines at 10–20 basis points.

  • Armstrong's reading of CLARITY: the banks' fight over rewards "shot themselves in the foot," because GENIUS already allows rewards.

The steel-man: stablecoins are simply a better product for moving dollars across borders and between machines. The yield loophole is intact at least into 2027. The only thing that could close it is a future Congress. Deposits leave slowly, then quickly.

And the banks don't seem to see it coming. The Bank Director 2026 Technology Survey, reviewed on The Banker Next Door (commentator), found:

  • 63% of bank executives and directors think stablecoins are overhyped, as do 79% for crypto and 43% for tokenized deposits.

  • Only 16% cite crypto or stablecoin platforms as a top competitive threat, versus 58% who cite fintechs like Block and PayPal.

  • On stablecoin wallets, just 12% are offering or planning them, 42% say they can't, and 46% say they're "not a priority."

(The Banker Next Door, "Review of Bank Director's 2026 Technology Survey", Sep 21). That is what complacency looks like, in numbers.

The case for co-option: incumbents keep the value

This week's deals mostly pointed the other way.

  • SoFi + Mastercard: a bank-issued stablecoin carried over the card network, with merchants and interchange untouched.

  • Canada's big six (BMO, CIBC, National Bank, RBC, Scotiabank, TD) formed a joint venture for tokenized deposits, starting with transfers between the banks themselves (Thinking Crypto, Sep 23).

  • JPMorgan's Kinexys at about $7 billion a day, with "no cash leg means no market."

  • Nathan McCauley (operator) says tokenized deposits are "purely additive" sidecars "maybe a decade" long, and a bridge into stablecoins that runs through bank wallet systems.

  • Franklin Templeton says tokenized money market funds beat stablecoins as trading collateral.

  • JPMorgan's custody chief says asset managers are going after "reserve stablecoin asset flows."

The steel-man: stablecoins win the technology argument and lose the economics. Banks can issue their own coins. Networks carry them. Distributors either issue their own (MoneyGram) or charge a fee to hold someone else's (Binance's new monthly fee from Circle, Coinbase's split). Money market funds compete for the collateral and the reserves. That leaves the independent issuer with a thinning slice of a rate-sensitive income stream: commoditized, just as the bear case says.

Our read

Both sides are right about different markets, and this week sharpened where the line falls.

  • Outside the US: remittances, dollar savings in weak-currency countries, and the Binance user base. There, USDC and USDT are winning outright. The operators (Pathy, Zhou, Ramos) are real and growing.

  • Inside the US: card settlement, wholesale bank transfers, and institutional cash. There, the incumbents are absorbing the technology quickly, and the "on-network" model (SoFi over Mastercard, JPM Coin) is ahead.

The tell for Circle is not how many USDC coins exist. It is how much of each reserve dollar Circle keeps once Coinbase, Binance and the next distributor are paid.

Stocks in play

  • SOFI (SoFi), Loud week; biggest mover in our universe. Live stablecoin settlement on Mastercard for a card program processing more than $25B a year, in its own SoFiUSD. Bull: first nationally chartered bank with its own stablecoin at scale. It keeps the reserve income in-house and has a path to merchant settlement and remittances. Bear: so far it only changes the settlement leg; merchants and consumers see nothing new. Economics were not disclosed, and bank-issued coins may never travel beyond the issuer's own network. Watch: a named large US merchant signing up for direct stablecoin settlement, and any cross-border launch (Daily Crypto News, Sep 23).

  • MA (Mastercard), Loud week, after being quiet last week. Carrying SoFiUSD settlement, plus BVNK (owned by Mastercard) adding Stellar across 130+ markets. Bull: it gets paid on both routes. It carries bank stablecoins over its network and owns a direct stablecoin-payments business, turning a threat into a new product line. Bear: settlement in stablecoins is the first step toward merchants asking why they pay the full card fee. Watch: a second bank moving a card program onto its own stablecoin; BVNK volume disclosures (Thinking Crypto, Sep 23).

  • CRCL (Circle), Loud week. $100M Binance stake at $80.84 a share; five-year promotion deal with a monthly fee to Binance on USDC balances; Tazapay (acquisition per Pathy, [CLAIM, unverified]); Bitcoin-backed USDC lending; working toward a Jan 18, 2027 GENIUS start. Bull: Binance puts USDC in front of "hundreds of millions" of users outside the US, where Tether is strongest. Last week's Fed hike still lifts reserve income. Pathy calls the USDC/USDT lead "very substantial." Bear: a second major distributor now takes a cut. SoFi and MoneyGram show that big players would rather issue than rent USDC. Tokenized money market funds are going after the reserve pool. Watch: disclosure of the Binance fee terms, and what Circle's next report shows for how much of its revenue goes out to distributors (Thinking Crypto, Sep 23; Tokenized, Sep 21).

  • COIN (Coinbase), Covered. Armstrong: the ethics fight killed CLARITY, stablecoin rewards were "fixed" in the final draft, and regulator-led rules are "a little bit more permissive." New fixed-rate USDC loans via Morpho. Bull: rewards on USDC remain legal; SEC and CFTC rulemaking opens tokenized stocks and derivatives. Bear: Circle now has a second paid distributor, which weakens Coinbase's unique position. And according to the Wall Street Journal story recapped on The Banker Next Door, Senate staff grew so frustrated with Coinbase's lobbying that one senator's office "began refusing to meet with a member of Armstrong's lobbying team," a relationship cost if the bill returns. Watch: any change to the Coinbase–Circle split after the Binance deal; the rulemaking timeline (The Wolf Of All Streets, Sep 21; The Banker Next Door, Sep 22).

  • JPM (JPMorgan), Loud week, from its own podcast. Kinexys: $4T+ handled to date, about $7B a day, JPM Coin on public blockchains, instant FX in 8 currencies. Custody is building digital wallets and linking to DTCC (the main US securities settlement utility) and Ethereum. Bull: the leading candidate to be the institutional dollar on-chain, the "cash leg" everything else needs. Bear: Kinexys volume is tiny next to JPM's total payments; open questions on privacy and finality on public chains; the bank lobby JPM belongs to just lost the yield fight. Watch: JPM Coin activity on public chains; any retail-facing product (Making Sense, Sep 22).

  • V (Visa), Covered, indirect. Commissioned the 36%-to-56% consumer survey; a partnership with HiFi on stablecoin-funded payouts; its stablecoin platform was advertised on Tokenized. Bull: the survey backs Visa's pitch that bank-grade protection sells stablecoins, which it can wrap in cards. Bear: no hard volume figure for its tokenized-asset platform (VTAP) again this week, and Mastercard got the headline deal. Watch: a Visa-network equivalent of SoFi (Thinking Crypto, Sep 24; Thinking Crypto, Sep 25).

  • Tether (USDT, private), Covered, mostly by commentators. Anchorage issues its US-regulated coin, USAT, per The Rollup's host. The Real Investment Show said Tether holds "more treasuries now than the U.K." [CLAIM, unverified, speaker hedged with "I think"]. Unf*cking The Republic (partisan commentator) cited $1.5B of Tether net income for Q2 2026 [CLAIM, unverified]. coins.ph is working with Tether in the Philippines. Bull: the moat outside the US is intact, and USAT gives it a regulated US route. Bear: Binance, the largest exchange, is now paid to promote USDC. Watch: USAT supply; how USDT fares on Binance (The Rollup, Sep 27; The Real Investment Show, Sep 23; Unf*cking The Republic, Sep 25).

  • MoneyGram (private), Loud week, after being quiet last week. Billions pre-funded using stablecoins; MGUSD for consumer balances in 200+ countries; USDC for treasury. Watch: whether other remittance firms follow with their own coins. Ramos expects "some level of consolidation globally" (The Future of Money, Sep 25).

  • Anchorage (private), Loud week, after being quiet last week. Says bank tokenized-deposit deals will be announced soon; its bank-infrastructure business is the fastest-growing. Watch: the named bank clients (The Rollup, Sep 27).

  • Stripe/Bridge (private) & Fireblocks (private), Mentioned. Both are in MoneyGram's MGUSD stack; Stripe-incubated Tempo passed $2B in 30-day payment volume. Watch: Tempo's month-over-month growth (The Future of Money, Sep 25; Tokenized, Sep 21).

  • PYUSD/PayPal and XYZ/Block, Quiet on stablecoins. Both appeared only as the fintechs 58% of bank executives call their top threat (Bank Director survey). There was no PYUSD product news.

  • HOOD (Robinhood), Quiet on stablecoins. Discussed only for tokenized stocks on Robinhood Chain.

  • QUIET this week (no stablecoin coverage in the window): C (Citi), BK (BNY), BAC, WFC, GS, MS, FI (Fiserv), FIS, GPN (Global Payments), GLXY (Galaxy; only a passing mention of a commercial-paper deal settled in stablecoins), BitGo. Citi is quiet for a second straight week despite its Token Services franchise. The payment-processor middle tier (Fiserv, FIS, Global Payments) is now on an extended silent streak while Mastercard, SoFi and MoneyGram rebuild the settlement layer above and below them. Silence is on the record. One caveat: dedicated searches for a few of these names were limited this week, so read "quiet" as "no coverage surfaced."

Read-throughs

  • Card networks and interchange. SoFi-over-Mastercard is the template networks want: the stablecoin replaces the settlement leg, and interchange survives. Near term: mildly positive for MA, which now profits whether banks issue coins or businesses pay in stablecoins directly (BVNK). The long-run risk hasn't gone away. Once merchant settlement runs on stablecoins, as SoFi is "already discussing," the case for paying full card fees gets weaker. Visa needs its own bank-issuer showcase.

  • Money-center and correspondent banks. Correspondent banks are the big banks that move money across borders for smaller banks. The incumbents are acting, not waiting: JPM at about $7B a day, Canada's big six, SoFi. McCauley's view that the "sidecar" lasts a decade means no sudden flight of deposits. But the cross-border corridors, where correspondent banks earn their fees, are exactly where operators report 10–20 basis point costs and 170-country reach. Correspondent banking is the most exposed business line. Community banks, per the Bank Director survey, are the least prepared.

  • Payment processors. Merchant acquirers and processors like Fiserv, FIS and Global Payments were absent again. The action is going to card networks (Mastercard/BVNK), stablecoin fintechs (KAST's upcoming merchant acceptance, Tazapay), and infrastructure firms (Bridge, Fireblocks, Axis). The risk for the processor middle tier is being routed around quietly, not being disrupted loudly.

  • Custody and exchange infrastructure. This was the clearest winner of the week. Anchorage sells tokenized-deposit plumbing to banks. Fireblocks supplies security for MoneyGram. JPM custody is building digital wallets and connecting to DTCC. Binance showed that exchange wallets are a monetizable distribution asset: Circle pays for USDC balances there. Exchanges holding large stablecoin balances now have a new revenue line to negotiate.

  • Treasury-bill demand from reserves. GENIUS requires stablecoins to be backed one-to-one by cash and short-term Treasuries, so issuers are natural buyers of T-bills. Three views this week:

  • The host take. Matt Diemer of Daily Crypto News (commentator) laid out an explicitly "unofficial" theory of a Bessent Treasury plan: lean on short-term bills, with stablecoin issuers as a "giant natural buyer." He cited issuers already holding "over a hundred-something billion" of T-bills and projections of "a trillion dollars... by 2030" [DIRECTIONAL]. Thinking Crypto relayed reports that the US "is considering a plan to promote dollar-backed crypto stablecoins worldwide" (Daily Crypto News, Sep 23; Thinking Crypto, Sep 24).

  • The skeptic. Economist Saifedean Ammous (commentator) cited research showing a sixfold rise in stablecoins, from about $250B to $1.5T, lowers Treasury yields by "only about 20 basis points" (20–40bps across studies). He added the CBO estimate that each 10bp drop cuts cumulative 2027–2036 deficits by about $379B. His contrarian point: stablecoins that replace offshore dollar cash swap "a 0% liability" for "a 4% liability." He puts the cost at "$12 billion a year" if 30% of offshore cash migrates (The Bitcoin Standard Podcast, "344. Can Stablecoins Save the Dollar?", Sep 22). [Note: the transcript says "$100 trillion" of offshore cash, but the $12B-a-year math only works on roughly $1 trillion; treat the headline figure as a slip.]

  • The rate backdrop. Lance Roberts of The Real Investment Show (investor) said stablecoin T-bill demand is "billions of dollars, not trillions... not large enough to move the needle" yet. On rates, which drive issuer income: "if oil prices go to 150, then you'll be at five and a quarter on the 10-year" (The Real Investment Show, Sep 23).

  • The new competitor for the reserves. Tokenized money market funds, per JPMorgan's custody chief and Franklin Templeton.

What changed vs last week

  • The re-vote hope is gone. Last week Armstrong floated a possible second CLARITY vote "within one to two weeks." This week the Senate is heading out in early October until after the midterms. Collins expects the bill to "come back next year," perhaps "rewritten" (Bitcoin.com News, Sep 25). Thinking Crypto's host: "I don't think anything's happening before the midterms" (Thinking Crypto, Sep 24). Update: the rewards loophole is safe into 2027 by default, and the midterms (Sherrod Brown's race above all) are now the key political risk.

  • The incumbents went from quiet to loud. Last week's quiet list included MA, SOFI, MoneyGram, Anchorage, Stripe/Bridge and Fireblocks. This week every one of them appeared with a live product or deal, and JPM went from a one-line mention to its own podcast. Last week's story was the banks losing in Washington. This week's is the banks building anyway. That is the most important shift in the debate since the summer.

  • The GENIUS timetable firmed up. Last week: "rules take effect in January." This week: final rules expected in November, Circle working to "Jan 18th, 2027," a Fed proposal on issuers, and SEC guidance in progress.

  • Circle's distribution costs rose. Last week's Circle story was its ARC blockchain and the Fed hike lifting reserve income. This week it added a paid second distributor, Binance. Growth is up, and so is the share of reserve income going out the door.

  • The rate tailwind, still unconnected. Last week we flagged the Fed's 25bp hike to 3.75–4.00% as a quiet gift to issuers. Again this week, no podcast tied rates directly to issuer income. That link remains our own [DIRECTIONAL].

  • No change: Citi and the payment-processor middle tier stayed silent.

Bottom line: last week the banks lost the vote. This week they showed they never needed it. The yield war is on hold until 2027, and meanwhile the incumbents are putting stablecoins inside their own networks: SoFi on Mastercard, JPM Coin, Canada's big six. The independent issuers are winning the global dollar market but paying more for distribution. The question for the next quarter is not whether stablecoins win. It is whose balance sheet they run on.