Crypto World
The fed chair who owned crypto just ruled out saving it
Kevin Warsh held stakes in a stablecoin venture and a dozen protocols, called Bitcoin the new gold, and became the friendliest Fed chair crypto has ever had. Then Congress asked whether the Fed would rescue the sector in a run, and he said the one word the industry was not expecting.
Summary
- On July 14, in his first congressional testimony as Federal Reserve chair, Kevin Warsh told the House Financial Services Committee the Fed will not rescue crypto or stablecoins if the sector faces a run.
- His exact words carried weight because of who said them: before confirmation, Warsh disclosed venture stakes in a Bitcoin payments startup, Bitwise, a stablecoin venture, and more than a dozen protocols, all divested under Fed ethics rules.
- The line came with a hedge. In the same exchange he pledged to mitigate extraordinary risks over the next four years, and he declined to rule out any future step-in, which is where the real policy lives.
- The context sharpens it: the stablecoin market sits near $310 billion, a New York Fed report finds stablecoin stress can transmit to banks, and crypto’s only rescue to date, the 2023 SVB intervention that restored USDC’s peg, was accidental.
- Four days after Warsh said the Fed was racing to publish its GENIUS Act rules on time, every agency missed the deadline, leaving the sector with a disclaimed backstop and an unfinished rulebook at the same moment.
The most consequential sentence in crypto this month was not said by anyone in crypto. It was said in a House hearing room on July 14 by a Federal Reserve chair two months into the job, answering a question from a congressman who has spent years as the industry’s most reliable antagonist. Representative Brad Sherman asked Kevin Warsh whether the Fed would backstop failing digital-asset firms the way it supported money market funds in 2008. Warsh, who sat inside the Fed during that crisis and helped design those rescues, answered: “We do not want to be in the bailout business, full stop.” He then added that the goal is a position where nobody gets bailed out, crypto included. The industry has spent a decade assuming that if the worst happened, the safety net underneath the traditional system would stretch, however grudgingly, underneath the digital one. The friendliest chair in Fed history just said it will not, and the fine print of how he said it matters more than the headline.
The man making the promise
Warsh’s biography is what makes the statement land, in both directions at once.
He took office on May 15 and presided over his first FOMC meeting in June. Before that, he was the youngest Federal Reserve governor in history during the 2008 crisis, serving under Ben Bernanke, where he helped construct the emergency programs he now disavows. He spent the following years as one of the loudest internal critics of the Fed’s expanding footprint, opposing large-scale asset purchases and the 2020 pandemic lending facilities. A chair who designed bailouts, watched what they did to incentives, and concluded the institution should never do them again is not making a casual remark when he says full stop. He is stating a career position.
The crypto side of the biography is what makes it remarkable. Before his confirmation, Warsh disclosed venture stakes in a Bitcoin payments startup, the crypto index manager Bitwise, and a stablecoin venture, plus exposure to more than a dozen blockchain protocols, all divested under the Fed’s ethics rules. He has called Bitcoin the new gold for investors under 40, and said at his April confirmation hearing that cryptocurrencies should not exist outside the financial system, a line the industry read, correctly, as an invitation inside. This is not a Powell-style institutionalist keeping crypto at arm’s length or a Warren ally hunting it. This is the closest thing to a crypto-native ever to run the world’s most important central bank, and he is precisely the official now telling the sector that its risk is its own.
That combination cuts both ways, and the market should hold both edges. From a sympathetic chair, no bailout reads as respect: the sector is mature enough to bear its own losses, and pre-committing against rescue is how you prevent the moral hazard that turns markets into wards of the state. From any chair, it reads as notice: the presumptive federal backstop that firms, custodians, and issuers have quietly priced in has been publicly disclaimed, by the one person with authority to disclaim it.
The hedge inside the full stop
The headline sentence was absolute. The full exchange was not, and the gap between them is where every serious question lives.
Immediately after the full stop, Warsh told lawmakers the Fed will do everything it can to mitigate extraordinary risks if and when they arise over the next four years. Pressed on the scenario Sherman actually posed, a run on one issuer spreading across a $310 billion sector, Warsh declined to offer an absolute pledge, and observers including American Banker noted that he did not rule out any future step-in. He also avoided specifics on the Fed’s Section 13(3) emergency lending authority, the legal machinery through which every modern rescue has actually flowed.
Read as a lawyer would, the position is: no bailouts as policy, discretion preserved as fact. That is not hypocrisy; it is how central banks talk, because a chair who genuinely forecloses intervention in all states of the world is writing a suicide note for some future crisis. But it means the practical content of the testimony is narrower than the market’s first reading.
What Warsh disclaimed is the routine expectation of rescue, the assumption that a large custodian or issuer failing would automatically summon the 2008 playbook. What he retained is the option to act when a failure stops being a crypto story and starts being a systemic one.
The dividing line, then, is the word extraordinary, and nobody knows where it sits. A mid-sized issuer breaking its peg and burning its own holders is, on this testimony, on its own. A run on the largest stablecoins, transmitting into the Treasury bills and repo markets where their reserves live, forcing fire sales that move the assets banks and money funds also hold, starts to look like exactly the sort of spillover a central bank exists to contain.
The New York Fed’s own staff work this year found that stablecoin activity can transmit liquidity stress to banks, which is the analytical groundwork you lay when you think the extraordinary scenario is possible. Warsh’s testimony draws a bright line for small failures and a deliberately blurry one for large ones, and the blur is the policy.
The history that tests the promise
The reason to take no bailout seriously, and the reason to doubt it, live in the same two precedents.
The first is 2008 itself, which Warsh watched from the inside. The lesson he draws from it is the standard post-crisis critique: rescues beget rescues, backstops get priced in, and institutions grow to the size of the guarantee behind them. The money market fund support Sherman cited is the perfect example, because it converted a product that promised to be cash-like into one the government actually made cash-like, and the industry spent the next decade fighting the reforms meant to prevent a repeat. A chair determined not to let stablecoins become the next money market funds, growing enormous on an implicit guarantee, has exactly one tool: refuse the guarantee loudly, early, and before the crisis, which is what July 14 was.
The second precedent points the other way, and crypto lived it. In March 2023, Circle disclosed that $3.3 billion of USDC’s reserves sat at the failed Silicon Valley Bank, and the coin fell to roughly 87 cents. What restored it was not crypto infrastructure or arbitrage; it was the FDIC’s systemic risk exception making SVB’s depositors whole, a rescue aimed at regional banking that happened to catch a stablecoin in its net. Crypto’s only bailout to date was an accident, a spillover benefit of the traditional system saving itself. The uncomfortable reading is that this is precisely how the next one would happen too: not as a decision to save crypto, but as a decision to save something crypto is plugged into, with the sector’s exposure riding along. Warsh can refuse to rescue crypto and still end up rescuing it, because the plumbing is now shared, which is the thing his own staff’s research keeps documenting.
The GENIUS Act complicates the picture further, in a direction that supports his position.
The law requires full liquid reserves and pays stablecoin holders ahead of other creditors in an issuer failure, which is a resolution regime, the thing you build so that failures can happen without rescues. On July 15, at Senate Banking, Warsh urged the agencies to coordinate their GENIUS rulemaking to prevent regulatory arbitrage and was described as racing to publish the Fed’s piece on time. Three days later, the statutory deadline passed with no agency finished. The sector is therefore in the strangest possible configuration: the backstop has been disclaimed, the resolution rulebook that justifies disclaiming it is unfinished, and the effective date that makes the rulebook binding, January 18, 2027, is fixed. No net, no manual, timer running.
What it means for who
For stablecoin holders, the testimony plus the FDIC’s confirmation that stablecoin wallets carry no pass-through deposit insurance settles the hierarchy of protection. A holder’s safety rests on the issuer’s reserves and the GENIUS priority rule, not on any federal guarantee, and the difference between those things is the difference between a strong legal claim in a bankruptcy and money that is simply there. Full reserves make failure unlikely; nothing now makes it costless.
For custodians and centralized platforms, the message is sharper. These are the entities whose business models most resemble the institutions 2008 actually rescued, and they are the ones whose presumptive backstop was disclaimed by name. The era in which counterparty risk on a large crypto platform could be waved off with an assumption of federal intervention, an assumption FTX’s creditors can testify was always fiction, now has a chair’s testimony attached to its falsity.
For self-custody, nothing changed, which is the point its advocates will make loudly and correctly. An asset held in your own keys was never inside the perimeter of rescue and never needed to be. The testimony is, among other things, an inadvertent advertisement for the sector’s founding design.
And for the Fed itself, the statement is a bet. If the next crypto failure is contained, Warsh banks the credibility of a promise kept cheaply. If the next failure is large enough to reach the banks, the money funds, and the Treasury market, he faces the choice every no-bailout chair has eventually faced, between the promise and the panic, and the historical record of that choice is not on the promise’s side. Bernanke did not want to be in the bailout business either. The business came to him.
The moral hazard ledger
Underneath the exchange with Sherman sits a genuine economic argument, and it deserves to be laid out straight rather than through slogans, because where you land on it determines whether the testimony reads as discipline or as bluff.
The case for the full stop is the moral hazard ledger from 2008, which Warsh watched being written. A backstop, once revealed, gets priced. Money market funds promised cash-like safety for decades; when the promise broke in 2008 and the government made it true retroactively, the sector internalized the guarantee, fought the reforms designed to remove it, and grew for another decade on an implicit subsidy. The same mechanism, applied to stablecoins, is easy to sketch: let the market believe the Fed stands behind the largest issuers and those issuers become utilities in expectation, their coins trade as insured deposits without the premiums, their reserve managers reach for yield the guarantee lets them reach for, and the eventual failure is larger for every year the belief compounds. On this ledger, the cheapest moment to refuse a bailout is now, loudly, before any crisis makes the refusal expensive, and a chair with Warsh’s history is exactly the official who would insist on paying early.
The case against taking the full stop at face value is the same ledger read forward. No-bailout doctrines have a specific historical property: they hold until the afternoon they do not. The Fed had no intention of rescuing investment banks until Bear Stearns, no appetite for insurers until AIG, and the 2023 regional banking episode, the one that accidentally rescued USDC, began with official assurances that the system was sound and no extraordinary measures were contemplated. The doctrine is real as a preference and soft as a constraint, because the constraint is tested precisely when the cost of honoring it is highest. Markets know this, which produces the uncomfortable equilibrium: a disclaimed backstop that everyone suspects still exists functions almost identically to an acknowledged one, except that nobody pays for it and nobody regulates against it.
What breaks the equilibrium, in theory, is a resolution regime credible enough that failures can actually happen. This is the deep connection between the testimony and the missed GENIUS deadline, and it is why the two stories are one story. The Act’s holder-priority rule and full-reserve requirement are the machinery of lettable failure: if an issuer can die in an orderly way, with holders paid first from segregated liquid reserves, then the Fed’s refusal to intervene is credible, because non-intervention no longer implies chaos. But that machinery lives in the unfinished rules. Until redemption mechanics, custody standards, and supervisory triggers are final, an issuer failure would be resolved through improvisation, and improvisation is the environment in which every no-bailout doctrine in history has died. Warsh’s promise is, in the most literal sense, only as strong as the rulebook his fellow regulators just failed to deliver on time. He drew the line four days before the deadline proved the ground under it was still wet.
What to watch
Where the rules land. The unfinished GENIUS rulebook is the substance behind the rhetoric. A finished regime with real reserve, redemption, and resolution mechanics makes no bailout credible, because failures become processable. A rulebook still floating next year makes the disclaimer a bluff the market may eventually test.
Concentration in the reserve chain. The transmission channel the New York Fed flags runs through where stablecoin reserves live: T-bills, repo, and bank deposits. The more the largest issuers grow, and the market is near $310 billion with two issuers dominating, the more a run stops being a crypto event and starts being a money market event, which is the category Warsh’s hedge was built for.
The first mid-sized failure. The clean test of the doctrine is not the catastrophe; it is the medium disaster, an issuer or platform large enough to make headlines and small enough to be genuinely lettable-fail. If the Fed and Treasury stand back, the promise has teeth. If official statements of reassurance start flowing within hours, the market will conclude the old regime never left.
The full stop was real, and so was everything after it. Crypto now operates under the most explicitly stated no-rescue doctrine in its history, delivered by the most crypto-fluent chair in the Fed’s history, with a hedge exactly wide enough to drive a crisis through. The sector asked for years to be taken seriously by the institution at the center of the dollar system. On July 14 it was, and being taken seriously turned out to mean being told the losses are yours.
Disclaimer: This article is for information and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. It describes central bank statements and pending regulation, both of which can change, and no outcome discussed here is guaranteed. Nothing in this article is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any asset. Always do your own research. Information is accurate as of July 20, 2026.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did the Fed chair actually say?
Testifying before the House Financial Services Committee on July 14, 2026, Kevin Warsh was asked by Representative Brad Sherman whether the Fed would backstop failing digital-asset firms as it supported money market funds in 2008. Warsh said the Fed does not want to be in the bailout business, full stop, and that the goal is a position where nobody, including crypto, gets bailed out.
Did he leave any room for intervention?
Yes, and it is the most important detail. In the same exchange he pledged to do everything possible to mitigate extraordinary risks over the next four years, declined to offer an absolute no-rescue pledge for a sector-wide run, and avoided specifics on the Fed’s Section 13(3) emergency lending authority. The practical position is no routine rescues, with discretion preserved for systemic events.
Why does Warsh’s background matter here?
Because he is simultaneously crypto’s most sympathetic chair and a career bailout skeptic. Before confirmation he disclosed stakes in a Bitcoin payments startup, Bitwise, a stablecoin venture, and more than a dozen protocols, all divested under ethics rules, and he has called Bitcoin the new gold for younger investors. He was also the youngest Fed governor during the 2008 crisis and later opposed quantitative easing and the 2020 emergency programs.
Has crypto ever actually been bailed out?
Once, by accident. In March 2023, $3.3 billion of Circle’s USDC reserves were trapped at Silicon Valley Bank and the coin fell to roughly 87 cents. The FDIC’s systemic risk exception made SVB depositors whole, which restored the peg. The rescue targeted regional banking, and USDC’s recovery was a spillover, which illustrates how a future intervention could reach crypto without being aimed at it.
Are stablecoin holders protected without a Fed backstop?
Partly. The GENIUS Act requires issuers to hold full reserves in liquid assets and pays stablecoin holders ahead of other creditors if an issuer fails. However, the FDIC has confirmed stablecoin wallets carry no pass-through deposit insurance, and the detailed rules implementing the law remain unfinished after regulators missed the July 18 statutory deadline. Protection rests on reserves and legal priority, not on any guarantee.
What is the systemic concern with a $310 billion stablecoin market?
Transmission. Stablecoin reserves sit in Treasury bills, repo, and bank deposits, and a New York Fed staff report this year found stablecoin activity can transmit liquidity stress to banks. A run on a major issuer could force rapid asset sales in markets that banks and money funds also depend on, converting a crypto event into a money market event, which is the scenario Warsh’s extraordinary-risk hedge appears designed for.
How does this connect to the GENIUS Act deadline?
Directly. On July 15, Warsh urged regulators to coordinate their GENIUS rulemaking to prevent regulatory arbitrage, with the Fed described as racing to publish on time. Three days later, all the relevant agencies missed the law’s one-year rulemaking deadline. The sector is therefore operating with a disclaimed backstop and an unfinished resolution rulebook simultaneously, ahead of the law’s fixed January 18, 2027 effective date.
What should investors take from this?
That the assumption of a federal safety net under large crypto platforms and issuers has been explicitly disclaimed, and risk should be priced accordingly. Reserve quality, redemption mechanics, and legal structure now carry the full weight of protection. Self-custodied assets are unaffected by the change, since they were never inside any rescue perimeter. This is not investment advice, and individual circumstances vary.
With stablecoin supply above $300 billion and payment use reaching an estimated $390 billion in 2025, more than twice the previous year, competition increasingly centres on distribution, liquidity, reserve income, and access to payment networks.
Open USD has brought these commercial forces together through a consortium of more than 140 participants, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase, and BlackRock. Participating companies will be able to distribute the asset through exchanges, wallets, merchant products, and payment services while receiving a share of reserve earnings.
The model places Open USD against established issuers and smaller competitors seeking partnerships with the same financial companies.
BeInCrypto spoke with Louisa Bai, Head of Stablecoins at Mysten Labs, Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon Labs, and Kevin Cui, Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer of OSL Group, about stablecoin competition, regional use cases, currency demand, and blockchain settlement.
Open USD Links Distribution With Reserve Income
Open USD gives participating companies a financial incentive to support adoption through their own products. Reserve earnings can be returned to consortium members, linking token distribution to commercial revenue.
“OUSD is primarily built to share stablecoin reserves across its partners, including Visa, Stripe, Coinbase, Mastercard, and leading blockchains such as Sui,” said Louisa Bai, Head of Stablecoins at Mysten Labs. “Its partner network and revenue-sharing model could increase competition in a market with deeply entrenched incumbents.”
USDT and USDC retain an advantage built through liquidity, trading pairs, exchange listings, and widespread use across crypto markets.
“Their moat comes from liquidity depth and years of exchange listings,” Bai said. “Mid-sized issuers face the greatest pressure because they lack the liquidity of USDT and USDC and the partner economics offered by OUSD.”
Open USD also depends on cooperation between companies with different commercial priorities. Decisions covering reserves, governance, supported networks, and distribution will require agreement across banks, payment companies, exchanges, and crypto firms.
Its progress will depend on whether shared reserve income produces sustained adoption across participating products.
Different Stablecoins Will Serve Different Products
Stablecoin control will remain divided between issuers, payment companies, exchanges, applications, and blockchains.
Issuers manage reserves and redemption, while payment companies control merchant access and customer distribution. Exchanges provide liquidity, and blockchains determine transaction speed, fees, and settlement capacity.
“Different stablecoin assets aimed at different use cases will coexist, together with different forms of control,” Bai said.
PYUSD remains closely connected to PayPal and its consumer products, while Open USD may develop around business payments and merchant settlement. Exchange-backed coins can focus on trading, while bank-supported assets can serve treasury management and institutional transfers.
This division allows stablecoins to develop around specific commercial environments rather than a single dominant operating model.
Regional Demand Splits Between Dollar Access and Local Settlement
Stablecoin adoption follows currency stability, remittance costs, regulation, and access to banking. Latin America currently provides some of the strongest examples of stablecoins functioning as everyday money across savings and cross-border payments, according to Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon Labs.
“Latin America, and it’s not close,” Boiron said. “When a currency loses value overnight and sending money home costs 6% and takes three days, a digital dollar is a household decision.”
Boiron pointed to the Mexico-US and Brazil-US corridors as major sources of current volume. He described the Gulf as an early regulatory leader, Japan as a careful builder of bank-connected products, and the US as a market gaining more room for regulated issuance and payments.
Emerging markets such as Argentina, Brazil, and Pakistan use dollar stablecoins as protection from inflation and currency depreciation.
In Nigeria, Paga plans to use Sui-based stablecoin payments to support international transfers for freelancers and businesses paying overseas suppliers.
Local-currency coins serve a different economic need. Markets with trusted currencies and regulators seeking domestic settlement onchain have stronger incentives to develop assets denominated in yen, dirhams, euros, or other local units.
“A stablecoin inherits the reputation of the currency behind it,” Boiron said.
He expects dollar coins to lead in markets where people seek protection from inflation, while local-currency stablecoins can develop in places such as Japan and the Gulf, where domestic currencies retain public trust.
Business adoption depends on liquidity and reliable fiat conversion, while distribution and licensing determine how easily merchants and exchanges can support a new asset. Boiron said businesses need coins already present in the wallets and payment services they use, backed by issuers acceptable to banks and auditors.
“It comes down to liquidity, distribution, and whether there is a licensed issuer standing behind it,” he said.
Europe follows MiCA rules covering issuance, authorization, reserves, and distribution. Exchanges have restricted several assets, including USDT, while providers adjusted their offerings to European requirements.
The resulting market divides between dollar access in weaker-currency economies and local settlement in regions where domestic units retain trust.
Dollar Stablecoins Will Retain Their Lead
Dollar coins still dominate supply and liquidity, while local-currency assets are developing around domestic settlement and regional trade.
“Non-dollar stablecoins remain concentrated in foreign-exchange trading within DeFi,” Bai said. “Locally denominated assets such as JPYC will continue to develop, while USD is likely to remain dominant in the near term.”
Meanwhile, Cui expects local-currency stablecoins to grow alongside dollar coins as companies adopt them for domestic payments and regional trade.
“Local-currency stablecoins are developing a durable role alongside dollar coins by reducing FX exposure and allowing businesses operating in euros, reais, or yen to retain their own unit of account,” said Kevin Cui, Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer of OSL Group.
Local coins may gain adoption where companies earn and spend in the same currency, while dollar coins continue serving international settlement and savings demand.
Blockchains Provide the Settlement Base
Blockchains determine how efficiently stablecoins move between users, companies, and financial applications.
Boiron offered a complementary view of the chain’s role, arguing blockchains create more value by supporting widely used assets across many products than by issuing coins tied to one ecosystem.
“The most valuable stablecoin is the one everyone else already accepts,” Boiron said.
Chains therefore compete through transaction performance, developer tools, and support for several major stablecoins.
“Sui’s role in stablecoin growth is settlement, with fast execution built for the transaction volumes mass adoption requires,” Bai said. “Stablecoins need fast finality, capacity for large user numbers, stable fees, and strong user experience.”
Sui introduced gasless stablecoin transfers in May 2026, allowing users to send supported assets without holding SUI separately for transaction fees. Confidential transfers entered public beta in June, allowing issuers to conceal balances and transaction values while preserving access for compliance and auditing.
Sui also recorded more than six million transactions per second during a July public experiment using programmable tunnels. These offchain payment and state channels process activity away from the main network before settling final results on Sui.
Such features can support payroll, merchant payments, treasury transfers, and institutional settlement.
Open USD shows how stablecoin competition is expanding beyond issuance. Reserve income, distribution partnerships, payment access, and blockchain performance will influence which assets gain adoption.
Dollar coins will retain their advantage in global markets, while local assets develop around domestic payments and regional commerce. The strongest providers will combine reliable reserves with liquidity, distribution, and efficient settlement.
The post Open USD Raises Competition in the Global Stablecoin Payments Market appeared first on BeInCrypto.
Bitget has integrated Siebly.io software development kits covering two API systems and multiple trading products as the exchange seeks to reduce the work required to build crypto applications.
Summary
- Bitget has added Siebly SDKs for its V3 Unified Account and V2 Classic APIs.
- Developers can build spot, futures, copy-trading and market-data applications with less integration work.
- The partnership supports Bitget’s strategy of connecting crypto, tokenized equities and real U.S. stocks.
According to Bitget, the developer platform now provides SDKs for its V3 Unified Trading Account API and V2 Classic API. The software gives JavaScript and TypeScript developers ready-made access to spot trading, futures, copy trading, live market data and private account functions.
The integration is intended for teams building trading bots, automated strategies and market-data applications. Bitget explained that the SDKs remove the need to create every exchange connection from the beginning, a process that can consume development time and introduce technical errors.
Developers can also use Bitget’s WebSocket API through the toolkit. Unlike repeated HTTP requests, a WebSocket maintains an active connection between an application and the exchange, allowing market updates and responses to move with less network overhead.
Security options include HMAC, RSA and Ed25519 authentication, according to the exchange. These methods let developers choose how their applications verify requests when accessing trading accounts or other protected parts of Bitget’s infrastructure.
Siebly SDKs cut integration work
Siebly has designed the Bitget toolkit around a consistent development structure used across the exchanges it supports. According to both companies, this format can make it easier for software teams to move projects between trading venues without rebuilding every part of the integration.
“Developers building automated trading systems need SDKs that are consistent, secure, and tested in production environments,” Siebly.io lead developer Tiago Siebler said. “By collaborating with Bitget, we are making it easier for developers to integrate with one of the industry’s leading trading ecosystems.”
Automated trading systems depend on APIs to retrieve prices, place orders and monitor account activity without constant manual input. Bitget and Siebly positioned the pre-built libraries as a way to simplify those connections while retaining access to public feeds and private trading functions.
The V3 integration also supports Bitget’s Unified Exchange, or UEX, strategy, which places several asset classes and trading products within the same platform. Bitget CEO Gracy Chen linked the SDK partnership to the exchange’s effort to serve both traders and the developers creating tools for them.
“UEX is about delivering a better trading experience for users and developers worldwide independent of the assets they trade,” Chen said. “Collaborating with Siebly makes it easier to build reliable tools across Bitget’s unified account architecture, helping traders spend less time on integration and more time building strategies on Bitget.”
Bitget is connecting crypto and stock products
Earlier in July, Bitget launched a Cross-Asset Unified Account that places cryptocurrencies and tokenized U.S. equities inside one margin system, as previously reported by crypto.news. Bitget said the structure supports more than 370 eligible assets, including 100 tokenized U.S. equities called rTokens.
Under the account model, customers can hold eligible stock tokens and use them as margin for futures or margin trades, according to Bitget’s announcement. The exchange also allows supported rTokens to be pledged as collateral for stablecoin loans, enabling users to access funds without first selling those positions.
The Siebly integration gives developers another route into the account architecture behind those services. While Bitget has not disclosed a launch target for applications built with the new SDKs, the supported functions cover several products already available through the exchange.
Bitget has also introduced Stock+, a product within its Stocks 2.0 offering that lets eligible customers purchase real U.S. shares with cryptocurrency. According to the exchange, deposited digital assets are converted into Circle’s USDC stablecoin before the share purchase is processed.
Unlike synthetic stock products or derivatives, Stock+ gives customers ownership of the underlying shares through regulated brokers, Bitget said. Eligible holders can receive cash dividends and adjustments from stock splits, while orders follow U.S. pre-market, regular-session and after-hours schedules.
The exchange had tested the combined-product model through a global trading competition announced in June. Crypto.news reported that Bitget’s two-month UEX Futures League offered 240,000 USDT in prizes and allowed participants to trade crypto futures and traditional-market contracts for difference from one account.
Bitget divided the contest into two monthly rounds, each carrying 120,000 USDT. The crypto futures stage ran from June 1 through June 30, while the CFD round was scheduled from July 1 to July 31, with team rankings determined by return on investment.
According to the exchange, the eight highest-ranked teams from each stage would advance to the invitation-only UEX Global Alpha Tournament. Bitget planned to bring 16 teams to an undisclosed location, where the three leading traders from each group would take part in live sessions.
Taken together, Bitget’s announcements place the Siebly SDK rollout within an existing product expansion that spans automated crypto systems, unified collateral, tokenized equities and direct stock ownership. The immediate change for developers is access to standardized tools for connecting applications to those trading and account functions.
Morpho has officially launched its fixed-rate lending protocol Midnight on Base, adding a new credit layer to its onchain lending network as it seeks to bring fixed-rate, fixed-term borrowing closer to traditional financial markets.
Summary
- Morpho has launched Midnight on Base, bringing fixed rate and fixed term lending to its onchain credit network.
- The protocol allows lenders and borrowers to negotiate loan terms directly instead of relying on variable rate pricing models.
- Morpho said Midnight is built to support institutional and retail lending, with more than $11 billion already deposited across its lending network.
The Block reported that Midnight is now live after Morpho first introduced the protocol through its white paper in May, expanding the project’s lending stack beyond Morpho Blue, its variable-rate lending protocol. The rollout begins on Base, with Morpho planning to extend support to additional blockchain networks over time, although the company has not provided a timeline.
Unlike most decentralized lending protocols that rely on floating interest rates, Midnight allows borrowers and lenders to negotiate loan terms directly, including interest rates, maturity dates, and counterparties. Morpho co-founder and CEO Paul Frambot said the protocol was built to mirror the structure of traditional credit markets, where fixed-rate borrowing remains the standard.
“Fixed-rate lending is fundamental to how global credit markets operate,” Frambot said. “Without it, onchain markets remain incomplete.”
According to Morpho, Midnight complements rather than replaces Morpho Blue. While Blue continues to provide variable-rate lending through isolated lending markets, Midnight introduces fixed-rate, fixed-term credit using an intent-based peer-to-peer matching system that separates pricing and risk management from onchain execution.
Midnight introduces a different lending model
Morpho said lenders and borrowers can negotiate their own loan conditions instead of relying on pricing formulas embedded within a protocol. The company said the design is intended to support institutional and retail participants while enabling financing backed by tokenized real-world assets, structured credit products and repo-style transactions.
Responding to questions about competing protocols including Pendle Finance, Term Finance and Notional Finance, Frambot told The Block that earlier fixed-rate products were largely built on top of variable-rate lending systems.
“In past attempts, fixed rates were built on top of variable rates, which was imperfect,” Frambot said. “The right approach is to build fixed rates at the primitive level, and layer variable-rate products on top.”
Morpho had already outlined this approach when it published the Midnight white paper in May. At the time, the project described Midnight as an intent-based primitive for peer-to-peer lending that introduces customizable loan terms while remaining noncustodial and open source. Unlike Morpho Blue’s pool-based architecture, Midnight matches lending intents directly between participants and externalizes both pricing and risk management.
The protocol’s documentation also described fixed-term loan positions as transferable assets, allowing secondary markets to form around existing credit positions instead of keeping loans locked until maturity. Morpho argued that this structure could make onchain credit markets behave more like conventional bond and term loan markets.
Existing network provides early liquidity
Morpho believes Midnight’s architecture addresses one of the main problems faced by previous fixed-rate lending protocols.
In an earlier blog post, the project said previous designs required lenders to commit capital before borrowers arrived, leaving liquidity fragmented across different maturities. According to Morpho, Midnight instead uses an offer-based system where lenders continue earning variable yields through Morpho Blue until their fixed-rate offers are accepted.
Once an offer is matched, liquidity is sourced only for that transaction, while positions sharing the same maturity remain fungible. Morpho said this allows users to enter or exit positions before maturity without dividing liquidity across separate markets.
Frambot also identified the protocol’s offer-book architecture as another distinguishing feature. Because Midnight launches within Morpho’s existing lending ecosystem, he said the protocol can immediately connect with more than 30 independent curators already managing billions of dollars through Morpho Blue. He added that multi-market offers, programmable compliance tools and callback functionality allow capital to remain productive in variable-rate markets until a fixed-rate match occurs.
Institutional lending remains a key focus
Midnight arrives as Morpho continues expanding its institutional lending business.
In June, Morpho Association raised $175 million in one of decentralized finance’s largest funding rounds, with Paradigm, a16z Crypto and Ribbit Capital leading the investment alongside Apollo Funds, Circle Ventures, VanEck, Ledger Cathay and several other investors. Fortune reported at the time that the transaction valued Morpho at approximately $2 billion, although the company did not disclose a valuation in its official announcement.
Morpho said the funding would support technical development, commercial integrations and wider adoption of its open credit infrastructure. Frambot said at the time that the project was building an open credit network capable of connecting capital providers with borrowers without relying on fragmented lending systems.
The company also said its lending network now holds more than $11 billion in deposits. According to Morpho, companies including Coinbase, Kraken, Bitwise Asset Management and Société Générale’s regulated digital asset subsidiary, SG Forge, already use its infrastructure to build onchain credit products. Earlier company announcements also listed Binance, Anchorage Digital and Galaxy Digital among organizations integrating Morpho’s lending software.
Coinbase’s onchain lending product already operates on Morpho Blue. Asked whether the exchange intends to integrate Midnight into that service, a Coinbase spokesperson told The Block that the company has nothing to announce at this stage.
Although Coinbase did not comment further, Frambot said multiple platforms, institutions and partners have expressed interest in using Midnight.
Yesterday, crypto exchange OKX appointed to its board Andrew Cuomo — the New York governor whose administration created the BitLicense that OKX never received.
Maybe that’s what it takes to finally get that state license.
Cuomo and his administration created the BitLicense back in 2014, and OKX, the world’s fourth largest crypto exchange, has been chasing one ever since.
However, despite having well over a decade to apply, OKX still doesn’t appear on the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) register. Somewhat embarrassingly, competitors, including Coinbase, Gemini, Mastercard, MoonPay, and other crypto companies, do.
With yesterday’s news, however, the path for OKX to win its approval might finally have opened up.
Tough to get, even for the world’s fourth largest crypto exchange
The license is famously difficult to obtain.
Kraken, facing the same daunting application in 2015, called the BitLicense “a creature so foul, so cruel that not even Kraken possesses the courage or strength to face its nasty, big, pointy teeth” and left the state.
Fortune, for context, reported that the BitLicense’s first three years of availability produced just four licensees.
OKX founder Star Xu boasted that Cuomo’s new board seat will help him build “the world’s most trustworthy large digital asset exchange.” This is something that could take some work.
Indeed, between 2018 and early 2024, US customers conducted more than $1 trillion worth of transactions through OKX, even though OKX’s official policy at that time prohibited US persons from transacting on the exchange.
In fact, one OKX employee advised an American in 2023: “I know you’re in the US, but you could just put a random country and it should go through.”
For its part, OKX blamed the episode on “legacy compliance gaps.”
Read more: Flaws in New York regulator’s BitLicense operation prompt action
OKX gets Cuomo plus a BitLicense enforcement superintendent
While Cuomo is certainly OKX’s most influential BitLicense-related hire, he’s not the first.
Bloomberg previously reported that Cuomo, then a paid OKX adviser regarding the federal probe, had urged the exchange to add former NYDFS superintendent Linda Lacewell to its board.
Around that time, lo and behold, Lacewell joined OKX and even became the exchange’s chief legal officer by March 2025, five weeks after OKX’s guilty plea.
The company said her promotion would “bolster our global regulatory presence and reinforce OKX’s position as a licensing juggernaut.”
The NYDFS is the agency that granted the BitLicense OKX does not have.
‘Certain regulatory approvals’ are forthcoming
In June 2026, Intercontinental Exchange, owner of the New York Stock Exchange, announced a 50/50 joint venture with OKX, co-chaired by Cuomo.
The venture expects to operate a US broker-dealer and futures firm, pending “certain regulatory approvals.”
Those “certain regulatory approvals” aren’t difficult to imagine.
Cuomo said in the release, “The next chapter of financial markets will be defined by how well innovation and government regulation can move forward together.”
Well, the chapter before this one ended in a guilty plea for OKX for New York financial misconduct. The next one probably will not, if Cuomo can help.
A BitLicense application costs $5,000 while operating an unlicensed money transmitting business in New York and other states cost OKX more than $500 million in federal penalties.
What OKX is paying the two New Yorkers who oversaw that licensing regime, the company hasn’t disclosed.
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Ethereum’s market dominance climbed back above 10% on Tuesday after weeks below that level, while the token outperformed every other top-10 cryptocurrency with an almost 9% gain in the last seven days.
The move has rekindled bullish sentiment around ETH, even though one analyst is cautioning that no single event appears to have triggered the latest rally.
ETH Retakes 10% Market Share as Sentiment Improves
Data from CoinGecko shows Ethereum’s market cap at around $233.2 billion, with the total crypto market up nearly 2% and valued at just over $2.34 trillion. That put ETH’s share of the market at slightly more than 10%, a figure BIT analyst Markus Thielen described as a “psychologically important” threshold in a July 21 update.
Thielen also noted that when ETH dominance rose in the past, it often coincided with conditions that favored bullish traders. Indeed, at the time of writing, ETH had gained over 4% in 24 hours, but according to the analyst, there was “no immediate catalyst” behind the rise in dominance.
Some big names in the market appear to have picked up on the changing mood, with BitMEX co-founder and avid crypto trader Arthur Hayes spending over $2.5 million on 1,332.5 ETH earlier today. That was his second multi-million dollar splurge on the token in a week after earlier buying 1,293 others for a similar amount on June 16.
BIT’s weekly market watch, also published on July 21, argued that last week’s softer-than-expected US inflation data had reversed a rough start to the week, one that had briefly pushed Bitcoin (BTC) under $62,000 after conflict between the US and Iran flared again. BTC closed that week above $65,000, up almost 4%, while ETH added over 7% in the same period, ending up above $1,900 and marking its second consecutive week of outperforming Bitcoin. This also lifted the ETH/BTC ratio to 0.0293 from a June low of 0.0264.
Institutional Positioning Shifts Toward Ethereum
At the time of writing, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency was still trading well over the $1,900 mark, having gained about 8.8% in one week and more than 12% in the last 30 days.
That weekly performance was the best among the top ten digital assets by market cap, with XRP and BTC following closely after jumping more than 6% in XRP’s case and about 5.7% in BTC’s case in that period. ETH’s daily trading volume also saw a huge uptick, adding more than 31% to the previous day’s amount to hit $11.6 billion.
Beyond spot prices, BIT’s report said perpetual funding rates have remained close to neutral despite ETH’s gains, while implied volatility stayed relatively subdued.
It also noted that institutional investors appeared to favor call options, with buy-call activity accounting for more than three-quarters of Ethereum block trades, while retail participants largely opted for call spreads to gain upside exposure with limited cost.
The post Ethereum Reclaims 10% Market Dominance as ETH Outperforms Top Cryptocurrencies appeared first on CryptoPotato.
Russia’s State Duma passed legislation establishing the country’s first comprehensive framework for regulating cryptocurrencies with most of the new rules set to take effect on Sept. 1.
The law creates a legal framework for crypto exchanges, depositories and other digital asset providers, while setting rules for who can buy crypto and under what conditions, Russia’s state-owned news agency TASS reported Tuesday.
Only organizations included in a special registry will be permitted to operate as cryptocurrency exchanges, although firms will be allowed to continue operating without registration until July 1, 2027.
Under the new law, banks will be required to refuse transfers if they suspect an unauthorized entity is operating a cryptocurrency exchange.
The legislation also guarantees judicial protection for holders of digital currencies regardless of whether the assets were previously declared.
Retail investors will be allowed to buy the most liquid cryptocurrencies through licensed intermediaries, subject to an annual limit equivalent to roughly $3,800 per intermediary. Qualified investors will be able to purchase any crypto without restrictions.
Onchain lending just gained a new option on Base: Morpho has launched Morpho Midnight, a fixed-rate, fixed-term lending market that sits alongside its existing variable-rate venue, Morpho Blue. The move introduces an intent-driven model where loans are structured around competing offers—rather than being priced by a protocol-defined utilization curve.
According to an announcement shared with Cointelegraph, Midnight is live on the Base mainnet and begins by supporting cbBTC and USDC across multiple maturity dates. Morpho says the rollout is intentionally contained to support a progressive deployment focused on security.
Key takeaways
- Morpho Midnight brings fixed-rate, fixed-term borrowing to Base, complementing Morpho’s variable-rate Blue pools.
- Loan pricing is offer-driven: lenders and borrowers propose interest rates, maturities, and other terms instead of relying on algorithmic pool utilization curves.
- Midnight is positioned to better match needs found in traditional credit markets, where funding costs and repayment schedules are known in advance.
- The initial deployment supports cbBTC and USDC with multiple maturity dates, and Morpho says additional integrations and features may come as the rollout expands.
Fixed terms arrive on Base, but with a different pricing engine
DeFi lending has historically struggled to replicate the predictability offered by conventional finance. In many onchain markets, borrowing costs rise or fall with changing utilization—meaning lenders and borrowers face pricing that can shift over time.
Morpho’s Midnight is designed to address that gap by shifting from pool-based algorithmic pricing to a marketplace of offers. As Morpho explained to Cointelegraph, the system lets participants propose interest rates, maturities, and other loan parameters. Instead of relying on a continuously running utilization curve, Midnight issues loans as fixed obligations matched through competition among offers.
For institutions and businesses, this matters because fixed repayment schedules can make it easier to manage funding costs, expected returns, and risk exposure. While the DeFi sector can approximate fixed income through complex strategies, a dedicated fixed-rate lending venue can reduce reliance on workarounds.
Morpho also emphasized that Midnight is not intended as a replacement for Morpho Blue. Blue remains focused on open-ended, variable-rate lending pools, while Midnight is structured to externalize loan risk, interest rates, and duration to market participants—turning those elements into negotiated terms.
How Morpho framed the “Midnight” design before launch
Morpho first discussed the fixed-rate approach as part of a broader “Morpho V2” roadmap. In a 2025 post referenced by Morpho’s development timeline, the protocol described an intent-based, peer-to-peer marketplace where users could submit custom offers. In that framing, capital could continue earning variable yield until it becomes matched to a fixed-rate offer—before locking into the fixed obligation.
In April, Morpho named the fixed-rate system Midnight and clarified again that it would complement, not replace, Morpho Blue. Later, Morpho released Midnight’s whitepaper and codebase in May. In connection with that release, Morpho said the “offered capital” model was meant to avoid a recurring problem in fixed-rate DeFi: liquidity lockups and fragmentation across maturity dates.
That design goal is important because fixed-rate markets can face an inherent mismatch—capital providers may not always want to commit for the exact maturities demanded by borrowers. By centering loan terms around offers, Midnight aims to make maturity selection more market-responsive while still offering borrowers defined terms.
Rollout status: live on Base with cbBTC and USDC
According to the Morpho spokesperson who spoke to Cointelegraph, Midnight is already live on the Base mainnet. The first version supports cbBTC and USDC, and it offers loans across multiple maturity dates.
Morpho said it kept the launch deliberately contained as part of a progressive rollout strategy, prioritizing security. The spokesperson also told Cointelegraph that crypto-native lenders, borrowers, and curators active on Morpho Blue have shown interest in moving into Midnight’s fixed-term environment.
Beyond existing Morpho participants, Morpho indicated that several enterprises and institutions are building products on the protocol in beta. Morpho did not provide details of those initiatives at this stage, saying announcements are expected as those products go live.
Where this fits in Morpho’s broader growth and DeFi lending trends
Midnight’s launch arrives after a period of rapid expansion for Morpho. Earlier in June, Morpho announced a $175 million funding round led by Paradigm, with participation from a16z crypto (Andreessen Horowitz) and Ribbit Capital. At the time, Morpho said it planned to expand integrations with banks, asset managers, and large platforms, while adding features associated with traditional credit markets—an aim that aligns with Midnight’s fixed-rate proposition.
Morpho’s infrastructure is already used by major crypto platforms for variable-rate lending. In April, Cointelegraph reported that Coinbase launched Morpho-powered USDC loans for United Kingdom users. Those loans reportedly allowed borrowers to take positions against Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), and cbETH on Base, using variable rates and with no fixed repayment schedule—an example of the open-ended borrowing model that Midnight is designed to complement.
In other words, Midnight extends Morpho’s toolkit toward a segment of lending that may feel more familiar to legacy finance workflows, where counterparties often value certainty in pricing and maturity. Still, the practical impact for users will depend on liquidity at specific rates and maturities, as well as how quickly lenders and borrowers coordinate around those offer terms.
Readers should watch how Midnight’s liquidity develops across maturity dates and whether more assets beyond cbBTC and USDC are added as the rollout expands. The key uncertainty is whether fixed-term demand can consistently find matching offers at attractive terms—because the economics of fixed-rate lending live and die by market participation.
In Solana news today, the network’s total stablecoin market cap crossed $15Bn for the first time, according to Token Terminal data. The question the number forces onto the table is whether this supply base holds structural depth or remains tethered to cyclical retail flows.
USDC accounts for a large share of Solana’s stablecoin supply, with DeFiLlama reporting USDC at $7.09Bn and total Solana stablecoins at $15.16Bn. Circle’s $250M USDC minting on Solana has been reported as part of a pattern of supply growth contributing to the $15Bn milestone.
This Stablecoin surge across the Solana network comes as SOL USD spiked +3% over the past 24-hours, reaching over $78, with a daily trading volume of $1.94Bn.
Solana News: Beyond USDC/USDT and the New Stablecoins on the Block
The more structurally significant development sits outside the USDC/USDT duopoly. The non-USDC/USDT stablecoin segment on Solana hit an all-time high of $4.81Bn, driven by USD1 and USDG, according to SolanaFloor data. That segment now accounts for nearly one-third of Solana’s total stablecoin market cap.
USD1, a dollar-pegged stablecoin associated with World Liberty Financial, and USDG (Global Dollar) are the primary drivers of that growth.
USDT sits at $2.91Bn on Solana per DeFiLlama, leaving the remaining $4.81Bn distributed across these newer entrants. The diversification of the issuer base matters: it signals that dollar liquidity on Solana is no longer a two-party dependency.
Anchorage Digital’s USDGO reached a $1Bn market cap on Solana, up approximately 20x since January 2026. USDGO is a regulated, USD-pegged stablecoin launched on Solana in February 2026.
Two Demand Drivers, One Supply Stack
JUST IN: Total stablecoin market cap on @solana surpasses $15B, marking an all-time high.
Leading currencies: USD, EUR, & more
Leading assets: USDC, USDT, USD1, USDGO, & more
Leading issuers: Circle, Tether, Paxos, & more
~5% of all stablecoins are currently issued on Solana. pic.twitter.com/pGrojYxwfP— Token Terminal
(@tokenterminal) July 20, 2026
Solana’s stablecoin boom is being driven by two overlapping forces that reinforce each other but do not depend on each other. The first is renewed retail activity: DEX trading volume on Solana rose 13.1% week over week, daily transactions climbed 17.3%, and TVL expanded 12.5%, per DeFiLlama metrics.
Memecoin cycle activity is generating real on-chain dollar demand, with Jupiter and Raydium as notable liquidity venues. More than $900M in new stablecoins were minted in a single 24-hour window per Token Terminal.
The second driver is settlement-layer adoption. BlockEden reports Solana processed $650Bn in adjusted stablecoin volume in February 2026, surpassing Ethereum and Tron combined. That figure predates the current $15Bn supply milestone by several months, implying settlement throughput has likely expanded further since then.
DeFi protocols on Solana benefit directly from deeper stablecoin liquidity, tighter spreads, higher utilization rates, and more capital-efficient collateral pools, all of which follow from a larger on-chain dollar base. The growing dominance of Solana in tokenized assets, which hit a record $6Bn in Q2, compounds this dynamic: real-world asset settlement and stablecoin liquidity are co-locating on the same chain.
The regulatory context is not peripheral here. Stablecoin legislation moving through Congress, including a Crypto Clarity Act framework discussed toward a Senate vote, could create clearer rules of the road for stablecoin issuers. A clear federal standard accelerates institutional issuance and removes regulatory ambiguity that has kept some treasury desks from deploying at scale on public chains.
Discover: The Best Token Presales
What the $15Bn Figure Does and Does Not Confirm
In other Solana news, the $15Bn supply level confirms that Solana has accumulated a dollar base large enough to sustain serious DeFi and settlement activity independent of any single issuer.
It does not confirm that this base is cycle-resistant. A meaningful portion of current stablecoin demand on Solana is memecoin-adjacent, speculative liquidity that migrates when retail attention rotates.
The non-USDC/USDT segment’s 15x growth since January 2025 is impressive, but some of that reflects specific product launches (USDGO’s February debut, USD1’s expansion) rather than purely organic demand accumulation.
The credible bear case is a memecoin cycle cooling combined with stalled stablecoin legislation, which would simultaneously slow both retail-driven USDC minting and institutional USDGO deployment.
The bull case is that institutional settlement demand, evidenced by USDGO’s trajectory and Solana’s stablecoin volume market share, provides a structural floor that persists through retail drawdowns.
Circle’s aggressive minting cadence and Anchorage Digital’s institutional positioning suggest at least one major issuer is betting on the latter.
Discover: The Best Crypto to Diversify Your Portfolio
The post Solana News: Stablecoin Supply Hits $15Bn With New Issuers Reshaping the Mix appeared first on Cryptonews.
A decentralized exchange (DEX) backed by Robinhood is expanding into tokenized stocks and derivatives as platforms compete to build onchain markets for traditional assets.
Arcus, a DEX built by the team behind decentralized trading platform dYdX and backed by Robinhood Crypto, launched tokenized stocks and perpetual futures on Robinhood Chain on Tuesday, according to an announcement shared with Cointelegraph.
The company previously launched spot markets when Robinhood Chain went live on July 1. Arcus offers more than 95 stock tokens, perpetual markets and crypto assets through a self-custodial trading account, with Paxos-issued stablecoin USDG serving as its primary collateral and settlement asset.
The launch comes as crypto companies and financial platforms increasingly compete to build infrastructure for tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), while regulatory questions around access and product structure remain a key challenge for the sector.
Related: Bernstein raises Robinhood price target, cites tokenization and prediction markets
Self-custody shapes approach to onchain trading
Arcus’s launch includes tokenized versions of stock in major US companies such as Nvidia, Tesla, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon, as well as perpetual markets tied to equities, exchange-traded funds, commodities, indexes and crypto assets.
The platform uses a self-custodial model, allowing users to retain control of their assets rather than deposit them with a centralized exchange. Arcus uses Privy, a wallet infrastructure company that helps applications create and manage crypto wallets, allowing users to sign up through email or social logins.
Source: Robinhood Chain
Users who already hold crypto can connect existing self-custodial wallets, including MetaMask, Ledger and WalletConnect, with the company citing support for additional Ethereum-compatible wallets.
Tokenized stocks face regulatory questions
Arcus said its stock tokens are unavailable in the US, Canada, the UK and other restricted jurisdictions, highlighting the different regulatory approaches to tokenized securities across markets.
Cointelegraph contacted Arcus for clarification on the restrictions but did not receive a response by publication time.
Regulators in markets including the US and UK have been examining how blockchain-based representations of traditional assets fit within existing financial frameworks, with questions around custody, ownership and market structure being addressed.
The launch adds another player to the growing race to build infrastructure for tokenized assets, with platforms including Coinbase-backed Base exploring ways to bring traditional financial products onchain.
Magazine: Is Robinhood Chain’s success bullish or bearish for ETH the asset?
Circle is building a four-layer financial stack around Arc, its new blockchain. Tether still controls the digital dollar most of crypto actually uses.
Investors still see Circle as a stablecoin issuer. The numbers mostly agree. Reserve interest produced 94% of its first-quarter revenue.
Inside Circle’s Four-Layer Financial Stack
Circle calls Arc an economic operating system. It settles in under a second. Fees are paid in USDC, and privacy is optional and built in.
The layers stack like this. Assets such as USDC, EURC, and the yield-bearing USYC sit on the base chain. Developer products like wallets and the Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) come next. Circle’s own apps, including Mint and StableFX, sit on top.
Circle’s report says more than 100 firms joined the Arc testnet after its October 2025 launch. Goldman Sachs, Mastercard, and Visa are among the early partners. The testnet handled roughly 15 million transactions in the week ending July 15.
Big money is following. Circle’s first-quarter results revealed a $222 million ARC token presale at a $3 billion valuation. BlackRock, a16z crypto, and ARK Invest joined the raise.
Why the rush? Reserve income of $653 million made up 94% of Circle’s $694 million first-quarter revenue. Other revenue doubled in a year yet reached just $42 million. The stack is Circle’s escape plan.
Circle’s final OCC approval for a national trust bank adds regulatory muscle. The license comes from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
Why Tether Still Owns Crypto’s Dollar
Tether’s USDT market cap stands near $184 billion. USDC holds $73 billion. It has slipped from $77 billion since the end of March.
The trading gap is wider still. USDT turned over roughly $48 billion in the past day. That is four times USDC’s total. Tron alone carries some $89 billion in dollar-pegged stablecoins, DefiLlama data shows. That single chain outweighs USDC’s entire supply.
History explains the loyalty. USDC fell to $0.88 in March 2023. Some $3.3 billion of its reserves sat frozen at the collapsed Silicon Valley Bank. Traders remember.
Tether also moves fast when Washington calls. It froze Iran-linked USDT worth $131 million within hours of new US sanctions this month. Circle, meanwhile, faces a Wisconsin criminal complaint for refusing to recover a scam victim’s funds without a court order.
Circle has one strong counter. USDC handled 63% of stablecoin transaction volume in the first quarter, per Visa Onchain Analytics figures in its results.
The stock market is not sold yet. Circle shares have collapsed roughly 76% from their post-IPO peak. A split market may be forming.
The GENIUS Act, America’s 2025 stablecoin law, steers regulated money to USDC. Offshore trading keeps USDT. Arc’s mainnet launch will test whether new rails can pull liquidity from a dollar Tether still owns.
The post Circle Wants to Own Crypto’s Financial Stack, but Tether Still Owns the Dollar appeared first on BeInCrypto.
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