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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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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…
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China is running two digital-money tracks, and they answer different questions
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Coverage of China’s digital currency tends to mash two separate projects into one story about beating the dollar. They are not one project. China runs a domestic digital-money track and an international one, with different tools, different goals and different problems, and reading them as a single de-dollarization push gets both wrong. The domestic track…
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Why Circle launched USYC: the GENIUS Act split between payments and yield
Tokenized US Treasury funds total roughly $15 billion on-chain in May 2026, up from under $1 billion in early 2024. The headline names are BlackRock’s BUIDL at around $2.9 billion, Franklin Templeton’s BENJI suite at around $2 billion, and Ondo Finance’s combined OUSG and USDY platform at around $3.5 billion. The fastest grower has been…
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Sovereign Bitcoin in 2026: the gap between announcement and balance sheet
Three small open economies have announced sovereign Bitcoin programmes. None of the three is currently buying Bitcoin. El Salvador stopped purchases in February 2025 under its $1.4 billion IMF deal. Bhutan has sold roughly $1 billion in BTC over the past eighteen months. Pakistan’s Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, unveiled at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas, has…
