For most of their existence, stablecoins were something the banking establishment observed from a distance, but the ‘wait and see’ period is now over. Stablecoins processed 33 trillion dollars in transaction volume in 2025, topping the combined 25.5 trillion dollars handled by Visa and Mastercard, according to a State of Stablecoins report from Morph.
Numbers of that scale explain what happened over the past month, when the financial establishment moved to claim the asset class on three separate fronts: a consortium of more than 140 companies launched a shared dollar stablecoin, America’s oldest bank turned itself into stablecoin plumbing, and Japan’s three megabanks committed to issuing one together.
Major institutions have stopped treating stablecoins as a sideshow and started positioning themselves to issue them, custody them, and govern them.
That shift matters because this is no longer a story about crypto-native challengers operating at the edge of the system. It is a story about the system itself moving in. A multinational company might soon settle treasury flows with a bank-backed stablecoin instead of using legacy banking rails.
An institutional client could mint digital dollars and redeem them back into cash through a familiar banking relationship. A domestic payments network could end up running on tokenized cash without the end user ever thinking of it as crypto. The question is no longer whether banks take stablecoins seriously, it is whether they can absorb the model without losing what made it powerful in the first place.
More Than 140 Companies Launch Open USD
End of last month, a consortium including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, BNY, BlackRock, Standard Chartered and Google launched Open Standard, an independent company that will issue a dollar-pegged stablecoin called Open USD.
The design breaks with the model that made Tether and Circle dominant. Businesses will be able to mint and redeem the token with no fees and no volume caps, and most of the earnings on the reserves backing the coin will be returned to participating partners after a management fee, rather than retained by a single issuer. Governance follows the same logic, with Open Standard’s board composed of its partner businesses. Founding CEO Zach Abrams said in the launch statement that businesses need a stablecoin that is “open, low-cost, high-throughput, broadly accessible, and aligned to their interests.” The market treated the launch as a direct competitive threat, with Circle’s share price falling by more than 10 percent on the day of the announcement. The token is expected to go live later in 2026.
BNY Becomes Stablecoin Plumbing
BNY recently announced an expansion of its relationship with Circle that makes USDC the first stablecoin supported on the bank’s Digital Asset Custody platform. Institutional clients can now hold USDC in custody wallets at BNY and, through the bank, instruct Circle to convert US dollars into newly minted USDC or redeem USDC back into dollars.
BNY’s expansion of its relationship with Circle may be the clearest sign that stablecoins are entering institutional banking in earnest. This is not a bank experimenting with blockchain in a lab, it is one of the most established financial institutions in the world making stablecoin services part of a client-facing operating model.
It already acts as primary custodian of the reserves backing USDC, and this move extends that role into active, client-facing stablecoin operations, with the bank saying it plans to support additional stablecoin issuers over time. The full cycle of dollars to digital dollars and back now runs inside a single regulated banking relationship.
Japan’s Megabanks Move As a Bloc
The shift is not an American regulatory artifact. Also in June, Japan’s three largest banking groups, MUFG, SMBC and Mizuho, announced they will jointly issue a stablecoin during the current fiscal year, which ends in March 2027.
The banks have signed a memorandum of understanding to establish a council that will design the operational framework, with the three institutions acting as joint settlors under a trust structure and a trust bank serving as trustee. Japan’s Financial Services Agency signaled its support for the project in November 2025, giving the initiative regulatory backing from the outset.
Three megabanks in the world’s third-largest economy are not each running isolated pilots to learn the technology, they are working together on a joint issuance model, under a trust structure, with regulatory support signaled in advance. That is closer to a coordinated national market architecture than a speculative innovation exercise.
Why This Matters Now
All three developments point to the same conclusion. Banks are no longer asking whether stablecoins matter. They are deciding which part of the stack they want to control: issuance, custody, distribution, settlement, or governance.
Each of these moves answers the same strategic question: if tokenized dollars are going to move money at this scale, the institutions that currently move money want in on the action rather than watch the volume flow elsewhere.
The open question is no longer whether the establishment adopts stablecoins but whether it can run them well. A consortium of 140 companies with competing interests now has to prove that shared governance works in practice, and that test, more than any technology, will shape how the second half of 2026 unfolds.
Disclaimer: The author is an employee at PayPal Inc. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the views and, positions of PayPal Inc. or its affiliates.
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