Tether and Circle built their businesses by keeping the interest on the dollars behind their coins. A new kind of stablecoin, run and owned by a group instead of a single company, shares that money instead. Here is how the consortium model works and why it is spreading.

A consortium stablecoin is a digital dollar, or other fiat-pegged token, that is issued and governed collectively by a group of companies rather than controlled by one. The defining idea is shared ownership of both the decisions and the economics: a board drawn from the partner companies sets the rules, and the income earned on the reserves backing the coin is distributed among those partners instead of kept by a single issuer. That structure is a deliberate break from the model that built the stablecoin giants, and it has become one of the most important trends in digital money.

This explainer covers what makes a stablecoin a consortium stablecoin, why the model is emerging now, the leading examples, and the risks that come with running a coin by committee.

Consortium versus single-issuer stablecoins

To understand the consortium model, start with the model it is reacting against. Most of today’s major stablecoins are single-issuer coins. One company creates the token, holds the dollar reserves that back it, collects the interest those reserves earn, and keeps the profit. Tether, which issues USDT, and Circle, which issues USDC, are the dominant examples, and together they control roughly 80 percent of a stablecoin market worth more than $300 billion. Their businesses are simple and enormously profitable: take in dollars, park them in safe assets like Treasury bills, and keep the yield while the token circulates freely.

That reserve income is the heart of the matter. When interest rates are meaningful, the interest on billions of dollars of reserves adds up to billions in revenue. The single issuer keeps that money, which is what makes issuing a large stablecoin one of the best businesses in finance. A partial exception is USDC, where Circle shares a large portion of the economics with Coinbase in exchange for distribution, a hint of the shared-economics idea taken further by the consortium model.

A consortium stablecoin rearranges this in two ways. First, no single company controls the network; a group governs it collectively through a shared board. Second, the reserve income is not kept by one issuer but distributed among the participating companies, usually after a management fee that funds operations. The coin still works the same way for a user, redeemable one-for-one for a dollar held in reserve, but the ownership of the decisions and the money behind it is spread across many hands instead of being concentrated in one. That is the essential difference.

The two defining features: shared governance and shared economics

Every consortium stablecoin rests on the same two pillars, and it is worth being precise about each. The first is shared, neutral governance. Instead of one company setting the token’s rules, its reserve policy, its supported chains, and its product roadmap, a board made up of the partner companies makes those decisions collectively. The stated aim is neutrality: no single participant can steer the coin to serve its own interests at the expense of the others, which is meant to make the token trustworthy as shared infrastructure rather than one firm’s product. For businesses wary of building on a competitor’s rails, that neutrality is a selling point.

The second pillar is shared economics. In a consortium model, the interest earned on the reserves is returned to the partners who adopt and distribute the coin, minus a management fee for operating costs. This directly inverts the incumbent arrangement where the issuer keeps the yield. The logic is incentive alignment: if a payment company, bank, or platform earns a share of the reserve income by supporting the coin, it has a direct financial reason to promote adoption. The coin’s growth becomes a shared commercial project instead of one issuer’s private revenue stream.

Together, these two features aim to solve problems the consortium model’s backers say businesses face with existing stablecoins. Companies often pay fees to mint or redeem at scale, do not share in the reserve revenue their volume helps generate, and have little influence over an issuer’s roadmap. A neutral, revenue-sharing, collectively governed coin is pitched as the answer to all three. Whether it delivers depends on execution, but the structure is a coherent response to the incumbents’ weaknesses.

Why consortium stablecoins are emerging now

The consortium model is not new in concept, but it has gained momentum for specific reasons in the mid-2020s. The first is regulation. In the United States, the GENIUS Act, signed into law in 2025, created a federal framework for dollar-backed stablecoins, setting standards for reserves and licensing. That clarity lowered the legal uncertainty that had kept large, regulated institutions on the sidelines, and it drew banks, payment networks, and major enterprises into a market they had previously watched from a distance. A consortium of household-name financial firms is far more plausible once the rules of the road are defined.

The second reason is the sheer size and trajectory of the market. The stablecoin sector has grown past $300 billion, and some projections see it reaching into the trillions by the end of the decade as tokens move from crypto trading into cross-border payments, merchant settlement, and corporate treasury operations. A market that large attracts competitors who want a share, and it makes the reserve income at stake enormous.

When the prize is that big, the incentive to build an alternative to the incumbents grows accordingly.

The third reason is the economics itself. As the interest income earned by single issuers has become widely understood, partners have increasingly asked why they should drive adoption of a coin whose reserve revenue flows entirely to one company. The competitive frontier has shifted from simply issuing a token to controlling the underlying network and sharing its economics. Consortium stablecoins are the natural expression of that shift, giving a broad group of participants both a say in the network and a cut of the money it generates. The result has been a wave of consortium and shared-revenue projects entering the market.

The leading examples

The clearest way to understand the model is through the projects putting it into practice. The most prominent is Open USD, or OUSD, announced in 2026 by an independent company called Open Standard and backed by a consortium of more than 140 businesses spanning payments, banking, technology, and crypto, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, BNY, Coinbase, and Google. Open USD lets businesses mint and redeem the token with no fees and no volume limits, and it shares the reserve income with participating partners after a management fee, governed by a board drawn from those partners. It is positioned as a direct challenge to Tether and Circle, and its announcement sent Circle’s stock down sharply as the market priced in the competitive threat.

Open USD is not the first of its kind. The Global Dollar Network, built around the USDG token and led by the regulated issuer Paxos, uses a similar shared-revenue structure, distributing reserve income to partners such as Robinhood, Kraken, and Galaxy Digital to encourage broad adoption. In Europe, a group of major banks including BNP Paribas, ING, UniCredit, and SEB formed a venture called Qivalis to launch a euro-pegged stablecoin, initially focused on crypto trading before expanding, as financial institutions seek shared digital-payment infrastructure they collectively control. These projects differ in detail, but they share the consortium DNA of collective governance and shared economics.

What unites the examples is a strategic bet: that the future of stablecoins is a fight over infrastructure and network control rather than individual tokens, and that a broad, aligned coalition can win it against entrenched single issuers. The breadth of the coalitions, spanning card networks, banks, technology platforms, and crypto firms, is meant to translate into real-world acceptance that a lone issuer would struggle to build. Whether that bet pays off is the open question, and history offers a cautionary example.

A cautionary precedent: the Centre Consortium

The consortium model has been tried before at the heart of the industry, and the result is instructive. When USDC launched in 2018, it was governed not by Circle alone but by the Centre Consortium, a governance body co-founded by Circle and Coinbase to oversee the coin as a neutral standard. In its early years, USDC was the shared project of two of crypto’s most important companies, with governance and economics split between them, a genuine consortium arrangement at the center of the stablecoin market.

That arrangement did not last. By 2023, Circle and Coinbase dissolved the Centre Consortium, with Circle taking full control of USDC’s issuance and governance and buying out Coinbase’s stake, replacing the shared structure with a revenue-sharing commercial agreement instead. The neutral, jointly governed body gave way to a single issuer with a distribution partner. The episode showed that a consortium can fracture, that aligning even two large partners over the long term is hard, and that the pull toward single-issuer control is strong once a coin becomes valuable.

The lesson for today’s consortium stablecoins is sobering but not disqualifying. Coordinating two founding partners proved difficult; coordinating 140 is a far larger challenge. At the same time, the Centre experience taught the industry a great deal about how to structure governance and economics, and the newer projects are designed with that history in mind. The precedent is a warning about durability, not a verdict that the model cannot work. It simply means the hardest part of a consortium stablecoin may not be launching it, but keeping the coalition together as the stakes rise.

Why the model matters

Consortium stablecoins matter because they attack the core economics of the incumbents and could reshape how digital dollars are built. By sharing reserve income, they threaten the single-issuer business model that has made Tether and Circle so profitable, and they put pressure on every issuer to justify keeping the float that stablecoins quietly earn. If businesses can earn a share of that income by supporting a shared coin, the competitive logic of the whole sector shifts, and that pressure is real regardless of which specific consortium succeeds.

The model also changes the incentives around adoption. A single issuer has to persuade partners to distribute its coin; a consortium gives those partners a financial stake in the coin’s success, turning distribution into a shared interest. Combined with neutral governance, this can make a consortium coin more attractive to businesses that do not want to depend on, or enrich, a single competitor. The breadth of backers in projects like Open USD is meant to convert that aligned interest into faster real-world acceptance across payments, banking, and commerce.

For the broader market, the rise of consortium stablecoins is part of a larger story in which crypto is replaying the history of banking, where whoever holds the deposit, or the digital dollar, ends up with more durable economics than whoever merely moves the transaction. The consortium model is an attempt to distribute that durable position across a coalition instead of concentrating it in one firm. That makes it a structurally significant development, not just another product launch, even though its ultimate success is far from guaranteed.

The risks of the consortium model

For all its appeal, the consortium model carries distinct risks that anyone evaluating it should weigh. The most fundamental is coordination. Aligning the interests of a large group of companies, each with its own priorities and competitors within the same coalition, is genuinely hard, and decision-making by committee can be slow and prone to deadlock. The Centre Consortium fractured with only two partners; a coalition of many faces a much steeper coordination challenge, and governance disputes could stall the roadmap or splinter the group.

A second risk is that consortiums have historically struggled to ship and sustain products. A launch-day roster of famous names is not the same as a working, widely adopted coin, and many industry consortiums across finance and technology have announced ambitious shared ventures that underdelivered. At announcement, a new consortium stablecoin typically has unproven contracts, reserves, and real-world usage, so the gap between a strong partner list and durable adoption is wide. The coin still has to win against the deep liquidity and entrenched network effects of incumbents like USDT and USDC, which will not stand still.

There are subtler concerns too. Concentrating governance among a group of large, powerful incumbents raises its own questions about who really controls the network and whose interests it ultimately serves. Regulatory clarity that favors well-capitalized entrants can entrench the biggest players instead of broadening competition. And a win for the consortium as a business does not automatically translate into benefits for the users, chains, or tokens associated with it. The consortium model is a serious and well-reasoned challenge to the single-issuer status quo, but it is an experiment whose durability will be settled by execution and by whether coalitions can hold together once the money at stake grows large.

Where consortium stablecoins fit among stablecoin types

To place the consortium model correctly, it helps to see the wider map of stablecoin designs, because the consortium approach is a variation on one branch of that map instead of a wholly separate species. The most common type is the fiat-backed stablecoin, where each token is backed by reserves of cash and safe assets like Treasury bills held by an issuer. Within that category sit the familiar single-issuer coins such as Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC, where one company holds the reserves and keeps the income. A consortium stablecoin is still a fiat-backed stablecoin; what changes is who governs it and who receives the reserve income, not what backs it.

Other branches of the map work differently. Crypto-collateralized stablecoins, such as those built on decentralized protocols, are backed not by dollars in a bank but by other cryptocurrencies locked in smart contracts, usually over-collateralized to absorb volatility. Algorithmic stablecoins attempt to hold their peg through supply-adjusting mechanisms instead of full reserves, a design that has repeatedly proven fragile and, in notable cases, collapsed. Yield-bearing stablecoins add a return for the holder on top of the peg, sharing reserve income or on-chain yield directly with users. These are distinct mechanisms for achieving or funding a stable value.

Seen against that backdrop, the consortium model is best understood as a governance-and-economics innovation layered onto the fiat-backed design. It does not change the fundamental promise, one token redeemable for one dollar held in reserve, and it does not introduce a new stability mechanism. What it changes is the ownership of the network: collective governance instead of a single controller, and shared reserve income instead of a single beneficiary. In that sense it sits alongside, not opposite, the single-issuer fiat-backed coins, offering the same product with a different distribution of power and profit.

This placement matters for how users should evaluate a consortium stablecoin. Because the backing is the same fiat-reserve model, the safety questions are the same ones that apply to any fiat-backed coin: what exactly is in the reserves, who holds and audits them, and what regulatory framework governs them. The consortium structure adds considerations about coordination and governance, but it does not remove the need to scrutinize reserves and compliance. A consortium coin is not safer or riskier by virtue of its governance alone; it is a fiat-backed stablecoin whose distinctive feature is shared control, and it should be judged on the fundamentals every stablecoin shares.

Frequently Asked Questions

Disclaimer: This article is for information and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or legal advice. The stablecoin sector is evolving rapidly, and the status of specific projects can change. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell, or use any asset or product. Always do your own research and consult a qualified professional before making financial decisions. Information is accurate as of July 2, 2026, and may change.

UK regulators are calling for tokenization and “new forms of digital money” to be part of the core infrastructure of the country’s future retail payment ecosystem.

In a Thursday update to the government’s roadmap for modernizing retail payment systems, HM Treasury on behalf of the Payments Vision Delivery Committee said that including tokenization and digital money would advance its efforts to create a “diverse multi-money ecosystem.”

“Programmable payments, including those that rely on tokenization,” were named as potential “product-level arrangements” that may support payment innovation in the country, the agency update said.

The update of November’s National Payments Vision document calls for infrastructure that enables emerging forms of digital money to interact with traditional payment systems. 

The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) earlier this week published its landmark crypto regulatory framework and said that the licensing window for crypto companies will open from September until Feb. 28, 2027, before the regime goes live on Oct. 25, 2027.

Under that framework, cryptocurrency firms, including trading platforms, custodians, stablecoin issuers, staking companies and other intermediaries, must obtain FCA authorization to operate in the UK under the new framework. 

Illustrative diagram of roles and responsibilities outlined in Payments Vision Delivery Committee update. Source: HM Treasury

UK plans payments overhaul to support tokenization, stablecoins

In April, the UK government said it would revisit its payments rulebook to support the adoption of new payment technologies, including stablecoins and tokenization.

It said that would include a consultation on reforms for payment services and electronic money rules to create a single framework for traditional and tokenized payments, including stablecoins and tokenized deposits, according to an April 21 announcement by HM Treasury and Economic Secretary to the Treasury Lucy Rigby. 

Related: Aave Labs’ Push gains UK FCA crypto registration

The following month, the Bank of England (BoE) proposed extending operating hours for its core settlement infrastructure toward near-24/7 availability, as part of a broader push with the FCA to prepare UK wholesale markets for tokenized finance. 

The BoE said the expanded operating hours would support cross-border payments and new payment and settlement models as tokenization develops. The central bank is seeking public feedback on the proposal until July 3 and plans to publish a feedback statement in the summer.

Call for input on the future of tokenization in UK wholesale markets. Source: FCA

The FCA said just days earlier that tokenization and distributed ledger technologies could make fund management more efficient and support the innovation of the UK asset management sector.

Magazine: How crypto laws changed in 2025 — and how they’ll change in 2026

Strategy has become one of the largest corporate holders and buyers of bitcoin, with 847,363 BTC on its balance sheet. Its aggressive accumulation strategy has made the company a major source of demand for the cryptocurrency, meaning any shift toward selling the digital asset, even occasionally, could influence market liquidity, price dynamics and investor sentiment by introducing a new source of supply.

Demand for U.S. spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), the largest source of institutional crypto buying since their 2024 debut, has weakened sharply in recent months. The funds saw a record $4 billion in net outflows in June after a 13-day redemption streak pushed year-to-date flows into negative territory for the first time.

The bank said bitcoin came under pressure in late May and early June after Strategy disclosed in a June 1 regulatory filing that it sold 32 BTC between May 26 and May 31 to fund dividend payments. The sales compounded pressure from a broader repricing of Federal Reserve interest-rate expectations that had already weighed on bitcoin and gold.

JPMorgan noted that Michael Saylor’s Strategy has become one of bitcoin’s largest buyers, purchasing roughly $13.7 billion worth of the cryptocurrency year to date, about 70% of the bank’s estimate for total net digital asset inflows. The company holds around 4% of bitcoin’s total supply.

On 30 June, Prime Minister Keir Starmer unveiled the Defence Investment Plan, which includes a £15 billion increase in defence spending as part of a nearly £300 billion four-year budget. The market reacted quickly: on 1 July, shares of Babcock, BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce gained between 1.1% and 5.2%, providing support for the FTSE 100 during the session. Offsetting this strength, healthcare and energy stocks came under pressure, with AstraZeneca and GSK falling 1.7% and 2.5%, while Shell and BP lost more than 2% as oil prices declined. As a result, the index closed the day 0.2% lower. Over a longer-term horizon, investors remain focused on the Bank of England’s meeting on 30 July. The central bank has kept the base rate at 3.75%, while inflation risks remain elevated amid energy price dynamics and geopolitical tensions in the Middle East.

Technical Outlook

On the daily chart, the FTSE 100 (UK100 on FXOpen) has formed a symmetrical triangle, with price fluctuations narrowing between the February high and the March low. In recent sessions, the index has attempted to break above the pattern, but the move has so far been capped by the upper boundary of the current market profile at 10,520, making it too early to confirm a breakout. The key resistance level is located around 10,700, while major support lies near 9,900.

Should the index decline from current levels, the nearest support could come from the POC zone at 10,340 and the lower boundary of the market profile at 10,160. It is worth noting that trading volume remains firm, suggesting the current range may continue to develop. The RSI + MAs indicator currently reads 53, 53 and 51. All three values remain in neutral territory, confirming the current lack of directional conviction.

Summary

The narrowing price range within the symmetrical triangle points to declining volatility in the index amid a mixed fundamental backdrop. Geopolitical uncertainty surrounding US-Iran negotiations is coinciding with expectations ahead of the Bank of England’s upcoming meeting. The POC zone remains a key reference point within the current market structure.

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This article represents the opinion of the Companies operating under the FXOpen brand only. It is not to be construed as an offer, solicitation, or recommendation with respect to products and services provided by the Companies operating under the FXOpen brand, nor is it to be considered financial advice.

Most crypto investors still obsess over price charts. But in 2026, a growing share of attention is shifting back to improving the fundamentals of the protocols.

Ethereum, Solana and Avalanche are preparing some of their largest protocol upgrades in years, while Coinbase’s Base network rolled out its Beryl hard fork last Friday in a bid to streamline the network, with a native token standard and shorter withdrawal windows.

Bitcoin development however, remains frozen, with developers still arguing over controversial covenant proposals and post-quantum computing upgrades.

Tim Sun, a senior researcher at Hong Kong-based asset manager HashKey Group, told Cointelegraph that protocol upgrades have historically focused on adding features, speed and throughput.

However, in 2026, he said the emphasis is shifting toward reliability, predictable governance, and institutional-grade infrastructure that can support large-scale financial use cases.

Here are the top five major blockchain upgrades to watch in the second half of 2026.

Ethereum: Glamsterdam

Glamsterdam is arguably the most consequential upgrade this year, and its already being tested on devnets. According to Ethereum’s public roadmap, Glamsterdam is designed to improve scalability, harden the layer-1, and make the network easier to use, with a mainnet launch expected sometime in the second half of 2026.

Sun said the upgrade should improve processing speeds by allowing more transactions to be processed simultaneously, expand capacity so Ethereum can handle more data at higher throughput, and reduce database bloat. Those changes should make the chain better suited for stablecoin settlement and real-world asset use cases, he said.

Related: Ethereum’s much-hated staking ‘tax’ may already be obsolete

Holly Atkinson, chief product and technology officer at 1inch, told Cointelegraph that Glamsterdam is viewed by many as Ethereum’s most significant upgrade since The Merge in September 2022, which transitioned the blockchain from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.

Glamsterdam. Source: Ethereum.org

She said enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS) is a key change because most validators still depend on a small set of specialized builders and relays, which concentrates control over transaction ordering.

That setup amplifies maximal extractable value (MEV), censorship and centralization risks, she said. ePBS is designed to pull block building and proposing back into the protocol and make the process more transparent and accountable.

Pavan Kaur is a Solana Foundation judge and founder of RuleSpark, a compliance engine for digital asset marketing. She told Cointelegraph that ePBS is better understood as one step in Ethereum’s broader roadmap and does not eliminate MEV or fully solve builder centralization. “Practices like sandwich attacks may therefore migrate rather than disappear,” she said.

Solana: Alpenglow

Solana’s biggest change this year is Alpenglow, a consensus upgrade that reworks the network’s core protocol. Alpenglow has been billed by many, including Solana ecosystem lead David Liang, as the chain’s “most significant consensus upgrade yet.”

After being overwhelmingly approved through a governance process in September 2025, Alpenglow remains under development but is expected to ship alongside the Agave 4.1 validator client release later in 2026.

Arun Krishnakumar, vice president of institutional capital at R3 enterprise software firm, told Cointelegraph that Alpenglow will be a major tailwind that will reinforce the ‘internet capital markets’ thesis even more strongly.

Solana Network Updrades. Source: Solana

At its core, Alpenglow is designed to dramatically speed up how quickly the network reaches finality. Instead of relying on Solana’s existing TowerBFT-based consensus mechanism, it introduces a redesigned system built around a new voting component called Votor.

Related: Solana treasury firms resist Forward Industries’ consolidation push

The practical impact is a major reduction in confirmation times, with finality targeted at roughly 100-150 milliseconds in optimal conditions, compared to around 12.8 seconds today.

Beyond speed, the upgrade also removes onchain vote transactions, which currently account for a significant portion of network activity. By streamlining how validators communicate and agree on the state of the chain, Alpenglow is intended to make Solana both lighter and more efficient under load.

Hadley Stern, board director, DeFi Development Corp, told Cointelegraph that removing onchain vote transactions is the “real story” for institutional allocators because it “cleans up validator economics and gives you honest telemetry, which matters when you’re underwriting SOL as a treasury asset.” 

He said that a network that can migrate its consensus layer as cleanly as is planned, would show the kind of “governed adaptability legacy financial infrastructure can’t match.”

Base: Beryl

Base’s Beryl hard fork went live on Friday, following a short sequencer-related outage, when block production stalled for around two hours following an invalid block that triggered a temporary consensus failure.

Base co-founder Jesse Pollak said user funds were unaffected during the incident. While he stressed that “all funds are safe,” he added that “a halt is not okay” and said that lessons learned from the episode will be used to further strengthen Base as a platform for “global, 24/7 finance.”

Jesse Pollak speaks about the chain halt. Source: Jesse Pollak

According to Base’s documentation, Beryl introduces a set of changes aimed at tightening the network’s performance and reducing friction at the edges. These include the B20 native token standard, a shortening of withdrawal finality from seven days to five, and integration with Reth V2, which is expected to reduce node storage requirements while improving execution efficiency.

Related: Coinbase’s Base resumes block production after 2-hour outage

Sun said Base has been moving toward a more unified “stack” approach, giving it greater control over how the network is built and upgraded, and allowing changes to ship more quickly than under the earlier Optimism Superchain model.

The trade-off, he said, is that liquidity, which once moved more freely across the broader Superchain ecosystem, may become more fragmented, even as Base deepens its integration with Coinbase’s wider user base.

Avalanche: Octane

Avalanche’s next chapter is less about a single branded hard fork than a broader push to improve performance while courting institutions and tokenized asset issuers.

Sun told Cointelegraph that Avalanche’s recent Etna hard fork replaced the old subnet model with sovereign Avalanche L1s, cutting the cost of launching a dedicated blockchain by more than 99% and making the network more attractive to institutional players.

It’s already seen success in this regard. Sun pointed to Progmat, which he said accounts for roughly 63% of Japan’s national security token market, which migrated more than $2 billion in tokenized assets to a dedicated Avalanche L1, as well as the Avalanche Payments Collective backed by firms including Franklin Templeton, VanEck and WisdomTree.

Progmat Migrates $2B+ of its Tokenized Securities to Avalanche. Source: Avalanche

Atkinson said Avalanche is also pushing two upgrades aimed at making its C-Chain one of the fastest Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) environments.

Related: Avalanche Treasury falls 16% as it debuts on Nasdaq

She described Streaming Asynchronous Execution as a way to separate transaction execution from consensus so the chain can run more continuously and size capacity closer to normal demand. For users, she said, the practical effect should be higher throughput and lower, steadier fees during periods of heavy activity.

Bitcoin: OP_CAT

Bitcoin is the outlier here because its biggest developments in 2026 are not scheduled upgrades but a continuation of passionate debates over whether the protocol should become more programmable and how urgently it should be hardened against quantum threats.

Bitcoin has not activated a major soft fork since Taproot in 2020, which upgraded Bitcoin’s scripting to make transactions more flexible and improve privacy.

Since then, discussion around covenant-related proposals such as OP_CAT, CheckTemplateVerify (CTV) and Lightning-focused ideas like LNHANCE has intensified. None of these changes has an agreed path to activation.

Researchers have also been debating BIP-360 and related proposals as ways to make it easier to migrate coins into quantum-resistant spending paths, if and when the quantum computing threat becomes real.

Atkinson described Bitcoin as the wildcard of the group. She said covenant proposals could unlock safer storage and richer scripting, but the subject remains divisive and subject to much debate.

Sun said those proposals could improve self-custody security, fee management and protocols such as Lightning and Ark, while giving institutions more programmable custody logic directly on the L1.

Bitcoin development is infamously slow, and any change to the protocol is pored over from every angle. There is general agreement that no covenant opcode is on track for activation this year, and reaching consensus on proposals like OP_CAT or CTV is still some distance away.

On the post-quantum side, BIP-360’s authors estimate that a full migration to quantum-resistant addresses and signatures would take years even under optimistic assumptions. It seems unlikely at this point that a quantum-resistance upgrade will be implemented before the end of 2026.

Magazine: How AI just dramatically sped up the quantum risk for Bitcoin

Standard Chartered and Circle have announced a new, bank-led workflow for institutional clients to mint and redeem USDC, positioning stablecoin access inside a traditional banking onboarding process. The system is designed to reduce the operational friction of dealing separately with a stablecoin issuer while aligning minting and redemption activities with the bank’s established risk, compliance, and governance controls.

In a press release, Standard Chartered said it will be the first Global Systemically Important Bank (G-SIB) to offer USDC minting and redemption through its own platform. Clients starting with the initial rollout will be able to mint and redeem the US dollar-backed stablecoin without opening additional accounts with Circle, with delivery beginning through the bank’s operations in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC). The banks described the effort as an integrated offering that brings together banking, custody, and digital asset services under a single institutional relationship.

Key takeaways

• Standard Chartered and Circle are building a workflow that lets institutional clients mint and redeem USDC through a bank-led process.
• Standard Chartered says it is the first G-SIB to provide USDC minting and redemption services within its existing banking frameworks.
• The initial rollout is planned via Standard Chartered’s DIFC operations, with expansion to other jurisdictions depending on regulatory approval and client demand.
• The capability targets institutional needs such as on-chain settlement, treasury management, and liquidity management.
• The move reflects intensifying competition over stablecoin distribution, access, and governance as traditional banks deepen involvement in digital asset rails.

A bank channel for USDC minting and redemption

Standard Chartered said its collaboration with Circle embeds USDC access directly into the bank’s institutional offering. Instead of requiring clients to separately manage stablecoin issuance logistics with Circle, minting and redemption can be handled through the bank’s own platform. Standard Chartered framed this as a way to connect stablecoin operations to “banking, custody, and digital asset services” in one integrated setup.

For institutional users, the practical difference is that stablecoin issuance no longer has to be treated as an entirely separate operational track. Bank-led onboarding can also make it easier to map stablecoin activities to existing internal controls—particularly for firms that already depend on banks for custody, compliance, and settlement infrastructure.

Why DIFC first—and what comes next

According to the announcement, the service begins through the Dubai International Financial Centre, reflecting the role that regulated financial hubs often play in digital asset infrastructure rollouts. Standard Chartered also stated it intends to expand the capability to additional markets, but only “depending on regulatory approval and demand from clients.”

That conditional expansion matters for investors and institutional clients because the timeline for stablecoin access typically hinges less on technology than on licensing, regulatory interpretation, and operational approvals in each jurisdiction. Readers should expect further details as new markets are added and as banks refine which client segments and use cases can access the minting and redemption rails.

Institutional use cases now, payment rails later

Standard Chartered and Circle positioned the capability around current institutional workflows. The announcement says it supports on-chain settlement, treasury operations, and liquidity management. These are areas where firms often need predictable operational processes, clear governance boundaries, and connectivity to broader financial operations.

The collaboration also points beyond those immediate use cases. The banks described the system as providing infrastructure that could support payment-related use cases in the future—signaling a longer-term ambition to integrate stablecoin rails with payment and settlement workflows. While the announcement does not specify timelines or concrete payment deployments, the framing is consistent with how stablecoins are increasingly being assessed: not only as standalone tokens, but as components of regulated distribution and settlement stacks.

Stablecoin competition shifts toward distribution and governance

The Standard Chartered–Circle partnership arrives amid heightened attention on who controls stablecoin access and liquidity. Earlier coverage noted that Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire has publicly defended USDC’s network effects while responding to growing competition from new stablecoin entrants such as Open USD (OUSD). In that context, distribution channels and institutional partnerships can become decisive—even when multiple stablecoins are available—because liquidity and redemption pathways influence real-world usability.

Circle’s CEO previously said OUSD works closely with many of the founding members and expects those members to remain “large USDC partners and customers,” underscoring how relationships and access pathways are central to the stablecoin landscape. Standard Chartered’s announcement can be seen as an extension of that same logic: instead of focusing only on issuance, Circle and a major bank are working to embed USDC into an institutional distribution model that emphasizes governance and compliance.

More broadly, the integration trend suggests that traditional banks are not just observers of stablecoin growth. They are moving toward roles that resemble infrastructure providers—setting up onboarding, oversight, custody connections, and controlled minting/redemption access. For market participants, this can change how quickly stablecoin adoption spreads, because regulated, bank-mediated channels may lower barriers for large institutions that previously viewed direct stablecoin interaction as too operationally or compliance-heavy.

What to watch

As Standard Chartered rolls out USDC minting and redemption via DIFC, the key question will be how quickly the bank expands to other jurisdictions and which client segments gain access first. Observers should also watch whether similar integrations accelerate across other major banks, because the stablecoin race may increasingly be won—or slowed—by distribution, governance, and the ability to plug stablecoins into regulated settlement processes.

Key Takeaways

• Shares of Advanced Micro Devices declined roughly 7% this week following reports that Meta could monetize surplus AI compute capacity, potentially impacting future chip orders.
• Analyst Gil Luria from D.A. Davidson maintained a positive rating, emphasizing that global AI compute demand continues to surpass available supply.
• Wells Fargo analysts increased their AMD price projection to $615 from $505, highlighting robust demand for EPYC processors and AI accelerators among hyperscalers.
• UBS elevated its forecast to $670 while Cantor Fitzgerald set a $700 target, designating AMD as their leading compute investment choice.
• Lisa Su, AMD’s chief executive, is scheduled to receive equity compensation valued at $36 million on August 15, alongside awards for additional senior leaders.

Advanced Micro Devices has experienced a significant retreat this week, yet major financial institutions continue to back the semiconductor giant.

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., AMD

Shares of Advanced Micro Devices finished 6.89% down on July 1, 2026, triggered by news that Meta Platforms might begin offering surplus AI computing resources to external customers. The market concern centers on whether Meta’s excess capacity signals reduced appetite for additional chip purchases moving forward.

Despite this week’s pullback, AMD stock has delivered exceptional returns exceeding 150% year-to-date prior to the recent decline.

Gil Luria, covering the stock for D.A. Davidson, recognized the short-term headwinds in his latest research note while reaffirming his positive stance. Luria’s analysis suggests that while Nvidia maintains dominance in AI silicon, AMD continues capturing meaningful business from clients diversifying their supplier base. Crucially, he emphasized that worldwide AI infrastructure requirements still far exceed current capacity, supporting the investment thesis over the longer horizon.

Wall Street Analysts Boost Price Projections

Aaron Rakers at Wells Fargo increased his valuation target to $615 from a previous $505 while keeping his Overweight recommendation. His optimism stems from accelerating adoption of AMD’s EPYC server chip family as hyperscale cloud operators expand their AI infrastructure footprint. Rakers projects AMD could achieve earnings exceeding $20 per share annually ahead of consensus forecasts.

Timothy Arcuri from UBS raised his target significantly to $670 from $455, maintaining his Buy recommendation. Arcuri anticipates the emergence of agentic AI applications will fuel additional server CPU demand, positioning AMD to capture incremental market share as Intel works through its operational and technological challenges.

Cantor Fitzgerald holds the most optimistic view among major firms. Analyst C.J. Muse pushed his target price to $700 from $500 while reiterating an Overweight rating, naming AMD his preferred pick in the compute sector. Muse forecasts sustained momentum in AI chip and semiconductor tooling demand extending multiple years forward.

Executive Compensation Highlights Strong Performance

In a separate development, regulatory filings disclosed that CEO Lisa Su will be awarded equity compensation totaling $36 million on August 15, 2026, pursuant to the company’s 2023 Equity Incentive Plan. Additional senior executives will also receive substantial grants—CTO Mark Papermaster is set for $10 million, CFO Jean Hu will get $9 million, Chief Sales Officer Forrest Norrod receives $8 million, and EMEA President Darren Grasby gets $7.5 million.

These compensation decisions align with AMD’s impressive financial momentum. The company reported revenue growth of 38% year-over-year, reaching $10.25 billion during fiscal Q1 2026.

Based on TipRanks data, AMD holds a Strong Buy consensus rating derived from 28 Buy recommendations and seven Hold ratings.

The Street’s average price objective stands at $509.75, suggesting approximately 5.76% potential downside from present trading levels—indicating that even after the recent correction, valuations aren’t universally considered attractive.

In extended trading following Tuesday’s session, AMD stock declined an additional 1.19%.