U.S. Bank, the fifth-largest commercial bank in the United States, has completed a live cross-border payment using its proprietary USBDC stablecoin on the Stellar blockchain.

The pilot moved funds between U.S. Bank entities in North America and Europe, with USBDC issued and transferred on the public Stellar network. It also tested the stablecoin’s minting, redemption, freezing and clawback functions while integrating with the bank’s existing risk, compliance and operations systems.

The transaction validated U.S. Bank’s internally developed Digital Asset Platform, which connects tokenized assets with its traditional banking infrastructure, the bank said Wednesday. The Minneapolis, Minnesota-based bank is exploring additional uses including cross-border treasury operations, liquidity management and moving collateral onchain.

The pilot builds on U.S. Bank’s broader push into digital assets. In October 2025, the bank established a dedicated Digital Assets and Money Movement unit focused on stablecoin issuance, crypto custody, asset tokenization and digital money movement.

The country’s sixth-largest financial institution by assets, U.S. Bank has been testing custom stablecoin issuance on Stellar since at least November 2025, working alongside PwC and the Stellar Development Foundation.

Related: Jack Dorsey’s Block seeks US trust bank charter for Bitcoin, stablecoin

Banks deepen stablecoin push

While American banks have pushed back against allowing stablecoin issuers and crypto platforms to offer yield or rewards, some of the industry’s largest lenders are moving ahead with stablecoin projects of their own.

On Sept. 1, 21 major financial institutions, including Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and UBS, announced plans to form a company to issue stablecoins.

The group plans to launch a US dollar-denominated stablecoin in the first half of 2027 before expanding to other G7 currencies. The token is expected to target wholesale, institutional and retail markets, including cross-border payments and digital asset settlement.

Fidelity also entered the market in February with its Fidelity Digital Dollar (FIDD), issued through Fidelity Digital Assets, its national trust bank, and available to retail and institutional investors. FIDD had about $50 million in circulation at the time of writing, according to DefiLlama data.

FIDD market cap. Source: DefiLlama

Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs has doubled its valuation to $2 billion following an expansion of its Series C funding round led by Blockchain Capital. The company did not disclose the size of the latest investment but said its annual recurring revenue has quadrupled over the past three years, according to an announcement Wednesday.

The expansion follows a $70 million Series C in February, also led by Blockchain Capital. TRM provides blockchain intelligence and investigation software used by more than 600 government agencies and private-sector institutions across 75 countries, the company said.

Prior to the February round, the company was valued at $930 million, according to data compiled by Traxcn. It breached the $1 billion valuation mark in the round that included Citi Ventures and Galaxy among the investors.

TRM said its AI-powered tools are used to investigate fraud, money laundering, sanctions evasion and other forms of digital crime.

Digital crime losses reported to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center rose to $21 billion in 2025 from $16 billion in 2024, while TRM said criminal adoption of AI has risen 40% year over year in 2026, citing its AI-in-Crime Adoption Index.

The new valuation comes about two months after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) awarded TRM a roughly $95 million, one-year contract for forensic software and support services for Homeland Security Task Force investigations.

Rival Chainalysis challenged the sole-source award in federal court later that month, alleging ICE’s decision was “arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable.”

Magazine: Is Bitcoin too volatile to risk your retirement on?

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U.S. Bank has completed a live cross-border payment that uses its proprietary USBDC stablecoin on the Stellar blockchain, the bank announced this week. The pilot transferred funds between U.S. Bank entities in North America and Europe, with USBDC issued and moved on Stellar’s public network.

Beyond the transfer itself, U.S. Bank says the exercise also tested core stablecoin capabilities—minting, redemption, and administrative controls such as freezing and clawback—while connecting the process to the bank’s existing risk management, compliance, and operational systems. The goal is to validate whether a stablecoin-based rail can support regulated banking workflows for cross-border treasury and settlement activity.

Key takeaways

• U.S. Bank executed a live cross-border payment using USBDC, a proprietary stablecoin issued and transferred on Stellar.
• The pilot also covered operational features: minting, redemption, freezing, and clawback, integrated with the bank’s risk and compliance infrastructure.
• The bank frames the test as proof of concept for its Digital Asset Platform, which is designed to bridge tokenized assets and traditional banking systems.
• U.S. Bank is building toward additional use cases such as cross-border treasury operations, liquidity management, and onchain collateral movement.

A live test of stablecoin rails across regions

According to U.S. Bank, the transaction involved moving value between bank entities located in North America and Europe. Instead of relying solely on conventional payment systems, the pilot used USBDC on the public Stellar network to effect the transfer.

The significance here is less about the fact that stablecoins can move value—many demonstrations have done that in various contexts—and more about whether a major bank can operationalize that movement under regulated controls. U.S. Bank says it validated the stablecoin’s end-to-end lifecycle functions, including minting and redemption, and exercised administrative mechanisms tied to compliance and risk needs, such as freezing and clawback.

In practical terms, these controls are often central to how financial institutions manage tokenized assets. By testing them alongside risk, compliance, and internal operational systems, U.S. Bank is positioning the pilot as closer to a production-grade workflow than a purely technical experiment.

Digital Asset Platform becomes the bridge to banking systems

U.S. Bank linked the pilot to its internally developed Digital Asset Platform. The platform, the bank says, is intended to connect tokenized assets with its traditional banking infrastructure, allowing stablecoin activity to fit within established procedures rather than operating as an isolated blockchain application.

That integration matters because banks typically face constraints that don’t apply to consumer-oriented crypto services: auditability requirements, operational controls, and governance processes that must connect to legacy systems. U.S. Bank’s announcement also points to the platform as a foundation for future expansion, including cross-border treasury operations, liquidity management, and moving collateral onchain.

From organizational focus to ongoing Stellar testing

This announcement follows U.S. Bank’s broader institutional push into digital assets. In October 2025, the bank created a dedicated Digital Assets and Money Movement unit focused on stablecoin issuance, crypto custody, asset tokenization, and digital money movement, according to the bank’s prior disclosure.

Separately, U.S. Bank has been testing custom stablecoin issuance on Stellar since at least November 2025. The bank said it worked alongside PwC and the Stellar Development Foundation during this testing phase, indicating that the current live payment is part of a longer-running effort rather than a one-off trial.

For investors and market observers, continuity is an important signal. Testing custom issuance and then moving into a live cross-border transaction suggests the project is progressing from design and experimentation toward operational validation.

Broader banking momentum in stablecoins

U.S. Bank’s move sits within a wider industry trend. While some parts of the U.S. banking and crypto ecosystem have raised concerns—particularly around stablecoin issuers and crypto platforms offering yield or rewards—large financial institutions continue to pursue stablecoin strategies of their own.

In early September, reports highlighted an effort by 21 major financial institutions, including names such as Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and UBS, to form a company intended to issue stablecoins. That initiative aimed to enable a U.S. dollar-denominated stablecoin in the first half of 2027, with plans to expand to other G7 currencies afterward. The intended focus included wholesale, institutional, and retail use cases, such as cross-border payments and digital asset settlement.

Meanwhile, other mainstream financial firms have already launched token products aimed at specific market segments. Fidelity, for example, entered the stablecoin market in February with Fidelity Digital Dollar (FIDD), issued through Fidelity Digital Assets and available to both retail and institutional investors. Data cited at the time referenced FIDD’s circulating supply of about $50 million, according to DefiLlama.

Taken together, these developments suggest banks are pursuing stablecoin infrastructure not only for settlement efficiency, but also as a regulated extension of existing money movement capabilities. U.S. Bank’s emphasis on compliance-driven features—minting/redemption and freeze/clawback—aligns with what many institutions will likely consider essential before scaling any onchain dollar representation.

What to watch next for USBDC and institutional stablecoins

U.S. Bank’s next steps, as described in its announcement, center on additional applications like cross-border treasury, liquidity management, and moving collateral onchain. The key question for the market is how quickly the bank can translate pilot controls and integrations into repeatable volumes and broader operational coverage, especially as institutional stablecoin efforts across the industry move from planning into deployment.

Fintech veteran Wojciech Kaszycki has identified three tests for real bank adoption of Bitcoin: client custody balances, credit-funded spot trades and its use as loan collateral, following Standard Chartered’s launch of deliverable BTC and ETH trading for eligible UAE institutions.

Standard Chartered has put Bitcoin trading on existing bank rails

Standard Chartered said on Sept. 3 that eligible institutions can trade deliverable Bitcoin and Ether through its Dubai International Financial Centre branch, making it the first global systemically important bank to offer institutional digital asset spot trading in the UAE.

The service supports BTC/USD and ETH/USD trades through the bank’s existing electronic channels, including interfaces already used for foreign exchange. Clients can choose where their assets settle, either using Standard Chartered’s UAE custody platform or another custodian.

As crypto.news previously reported, the bank introduced the UAE service more than a year after launching the same trading model through its UK branch in July 2025. Standard Chartered had already begun offering regulated digital asset custody in the UAE in September 2024, initially supporting Bitcoin and Ether with Brevan Howard Digital as its first client.

Wojciech Kaszycki, founder and chairman of Mobilum and a strategy advisor to Warsaw-listed BTCS S.A., told crypto.news that placing digital assets on a bank’s foreign exchange interface only removes one small obstacle for institutions.

According to Kaszycki, treasury teams care more about the identity of their counterparty, internal risk approval, custody standards, auditor acceptance, and the way each trade enters the company’s accounting system.

“Nobody on a treasury team ever says: ‘I’d buy bitcoin if only it looked like my EUR/USD ticket.”

A meaningful system, in his view, would connect Bitcoin trades to the credit lines, limits, confirmations, and back-office processes that institutions already use for currencies. Such integration would let a treasury department treat crypto as a regular balance-sheet item instead of running it as a separate project.

“If it’s just a new ticker in the GUI and everything behind it is manual, it’s a demo,” Kaszycki said.

Drawing on his work with a listed Bitcoin treasury company and a Dubai family office, he added that trading against a bank credit line without sending funds to a venue in advance would make it easier to secure board approval.

Bitcoin collateral would offer a clearer adoption test

Spot volume provides a poor measure of institutional adoption because trading activity can rise without showing whether companies or funds intend to hold digital assets, according to Kaszycki.

He instead pointed to custody balances held at banks for clients outside the crypto industry. Such balances would show that conventional companies, funds, and other institutions have chosen to hold Bitcoin through regulated banking relationships rather than merely trade it.

His second indicator is bank credit for spot purchases. Removing the need to prefund a trade would indicate that a bank’s risk department has assessed the asset, set exposure limits, and approved it within the institution’s credit framework.

Bitcoin entering bank lending books would provide the strongest signal, he said, especially if lenders disclose the haircuts applied to the collateral. A haircut reduces the value that a bank assigns to pledged property when calculating how much it will lend.

“When a bank has to price it, custody it, and liquidate it if needed, that’s adoption. Everything else is marketing,” Kaszycki said.

Banks in the United States have already started moving in this direction. An August report on JPMorgan collateral cited Bitcoin haircuts of 30% to 50%, meaning $1 million in pledged BTC could support between $500,000 and $700,000 in loan proceeds, depending on the borrower and loan terms.

According to the report, accepting Bitcoin as collateral also creates liquidation risk because a steep price decline could trigger margin calls and forced sales. Lenders therefore need rules for valuation, custody, collateral monitoring and liquidation before placing BTC alongside assets such as bonds, equities or gold.

Kaszycki also pointed to listed companies whose auditors approve Bitcoin holdings on their balance sheets. BTCS holds Bitcoin as a treasury asset on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, and he said the audit process requires more work than completing the trade itself.

Separate custody leaves a settlement problem

Allowing clients to use their preferred custodian offers flexibility, but Kaszycki said splitting execution and custody creates a familiar settlement risk. One party may need to transfer first, prefund the transaction, or use an escrow provider trusted by both sides.

Deliverable spot trading requires the buyer to receive the underlying Bitcoin or Ether rather than a cash-settled contract linked to its price. When the digital asset and cash travel through separate systems, completion of one leg can occur before the other.

Kaszycki compared the setup with foreign exchange settlement in 2005. In his assessment, Bitcoin can reach final settlement in under an hour at any time, while the dollar transfer may remain tied to SWIFT processing, bank opening hours, and payment cutoffs.

“The slow leg is fiat,” he said.

Tokenized bank deposits or regulated stablecoins could place the cash and asset legs on compatible systems, allowing payment-versus-payment settlement in which both transfers complete together, according to Kaszycki. Custodians would also need conditional release functions instead of waiting to confirm receipt of a wire before releasing the crypto.

For transactions between several banks, he said a netting network modeled on CLS could reduce the gross amounts that counterparties exchange bilaterally. Without such a system, banks must rely on credit lines, approved wallet lists, settlement windows, and staff monitoring blockchain explorers.

Standard Chartered has already tested ways to separate exchange activity from asset storage. Under a collateral-mirroring arrangement introduced by OKX in April 2025, institutions can keep eligible assets with the bank while their value appears in an exchange trading account. The framework later added BlackRock’s BUIDL tokenized U.S. Treasury fund as eligible collateral in April 2026.

Banks could win regulated flows while exchanges retain liquidity

Large banks can capture more institutional crypto trading because corporate treasuries, investment funds, insurers and Gulf sovereign institutions often prefer counterparties that already support their compliance and credit requirements, Kaszycki said.

Clients may accept a higher spread in return for access to a bank’s balance sheet, documentation, and established relationship. Kaszycki expects banks to source prices from crypto-native markets before adding a spread for institutional customers.

Crypto exchanges would retain several advantages under such a structure. Their markets operate continuously, including weekends, while banks remain organized around business hours and existing staffing models. Native venues also offer more assets and deeper derivatives markets, where much of crypto price discovery still occurs.

“At BTCS, we already do most of our size OTC with market makers rather than on order books, exactly for settlement flexibility,” he said. “Banks are just the next step in that same logic.”

U.S. rules now give national banks room to participate in several parts of the process. A December 2025 report on OCC guidance explained that national banks may conduct matched crypto transactions as riskless principals, provided they offset the exposure and comply with trading, anti-money laundering and third-party risk controls.

Earlier OCC guidance also confirmed that national banks can provide crypto custody and execution or outsource those functions to qualified providers. Banks remain responsible for managing the risks created by sub-custodians and other outside firms.

An August review of the U.S. custody market found that BNY, State Street, Standard Chartered, U.S. Bank, and Citi had launched or were preparing direct digital asset custody services. The report linked increased bank participation to the SEC’s January 2025 withdrawal of Staff Accounting Bulletin 121 and OCC letters confirming banks’ custody authority.

Kaszycki said banks extending spot credit would show that their risk teams had built formal models for Bitcoin, while disclosed collateral haircuts would reveal how lenders value its volatility. On the corporate side, he would count listed companies whose auditors approve Bitcoin holdings, a process BTCS has already completed for its Warsaw-listed treasury.