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Bank-issued stablecoins are overtaking crypto-native issuers across three continents
For a decade the stablecoin market belonged to crypto-native firms. Tether and Circle built it, and the assumption was that the next big issuers would look like them: technology companies, not banks. The first half of 2026 broke that assumption on three continents at once. HSBC won a stablecoin licence in Hong Kong, Japan’s three…
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The BIS answered the GENIUS Act with a plan for tokenized central bank money
The Bank for International Settlements published its annual economic report on June 23, and the chapter on the future of money reads as a verdict on the year behind it. Stablecoins, the report argues, fail the test of singleness, the assurance that every form of money in an economy redeems at par against central bank…
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Real-Time Payments, Real-Time Fraud: What Changes When Settlement Is Instant
Instant settlement shortens the window for real-time fraud intervention. Fraud programs increasingly depend on stronger checks before the payment is sent, supported by faster operations when something goes wrong. A Co-branded analysis from GL Insight in collaboration with FIS. Introduction: Instant Settlement Changes the Risk Equation Real-time payment rails are spreading quickly across many markets.…
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New Rails are cutting Africa stablecoin remittance costs to a fraction of the banks’
The case for stablecoins in rich countries is mostly theoretical, a faster rail for payments that already work. In Africa it is arithmetic. Intra-African remittances sent through banks typically cost 7 to 9 percent, among the highest rates in the world, while transfers routed over mobile-money-and-stablecoin rails consistently land at 1 to 3 percent. On…
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M-Pesa and MTN built Africa’s payment rails; stablecoins now threaten their best business
M-Pesa moves more than a billion dollars a day across Africa, and for nearly two decades the mobile-money networks it pioneered have become the default Africa payments rails. They taught hundreds of millions of people to send money by phone, and they built durable businesses on the fees for doing it. Those same networks now…
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The PBOC is recruiting foreign banks into a 24/7 e-CNY network
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On June 16, the People’s Bank of China’s digital yuan international operation centre signed agreements with 26 financial institutions, granting them direct participant status in its Cross-border e-CNY Transfer Services network, known as CBETS. Standard Chartered confirmed it was among the first foreign banks to sign. The network offers around-the-clock connectivity between foreign central banks,…
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Japan’s megabanks chose a trust to issue their joint yen stablecoin
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Japan’s three largest banks are not racing to issue separate stablecoins. MUFG, Sumitomo Mitsui and Mizuho plan to launch a single jointly issued yen stablecoin, with live transactions targeted during the fiscal year ending March 2027. The collaboration itself is notable for a market where these three usually compete on everything. The design they chose…
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Tokenized money market funds get useful the moment they post as collateral
Tokenized money market funds have spent two years being described as the proof that real-world assets work on a blockchain. The description undersells what changed in 2026. The largest of these funds, BlackRock’s tokenized Treasury vehicle, now holds around $2.4 billion and ranks as the biggest tokenized US Treasury fund. More telling than the size…
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JD and Ant asked Beijing for a yuan stablecoin. The answer is the signal
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Two of China’s largest tech firms made a case the government might have been expected to like. JD.com and Ant Group urged the People’s Bank of China to allow an offshore yuan-pegged stablecoin, issued in Hong Kong and later extended to the mainland’s free trade zones. Their argument was geopolitical: a credible yuan stablecoin could…
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Korea is building tokenized securities before it settles the won stablecoin
South Korea is doing digital assets in an order most people did not expect. The tokenized-securities law is done. The stablecoin law is stuck. On January 15, the National Assembly passed amendments to the Capital Markets Act and the Electronic Securities Act that let qualified issuers launch tokenized securities and trade them through brokerages, with…
