The Morgan Stanley Investment Management (MSIM) has launched the Stablecoin Reserves Portfolio (MSNXX), a new government money market fund that aligns with the stablecoin reserve investment requirements set by the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act (GENIUS Act).

 

The new stablecoin reserve fund aims to offer payment stablecoin issuers an eligible money market fund option in which they can invest their stablecoin reserves backing their payment stablecoins. 

 

According to Fred McMullen, Co-Head of Global Liquidity at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, the reserve fund offers stablecoin issuers investment solutions that allow them to safely and securely invest the reserve assets backing the stablecoins they hold.

 

With this stablecoin reserve fund, stablecoin issuers can safely and efficiently preserve their reserve capital while maintaining daily liquidity and competitive interest yields. Since the fund only invests in cash, Treasury bills, notes, and bonds with maturities of about 93 days or less, stablecoin issuers are not required to manage complex regulatory compliance processes or continuously audit reserves to demonstrate sufficient liquidity backing their stablecoins.

 

Speaking on the launch of the stablecoin reserve fund, Amy Oldenburg, Head of Digital Asset Strategy for Morgan Stanley, said that the launch of the MSIM Stablecoin Reserves Portfolio is another step toward modernizing Morgan Stanley’s financial infrastructure and is a key step in improving the firm’s institutional client experience.

 

"Creating opportunities for all client segments as markets evolve will make the next phase of finance possible and more broadly accessible," Oldenburg added.

 

Morgan Stanley Expands Its Digital Assets Offerings

The launch of the Stablecoin Reserves Portfolio (MSNXX) is part of Morgan Stanley’s efforts toward expanding its digital asset offerings and comes shortly after Morgan Stanley Investment Management, early this month, launched the Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust (MSBT), a spot exchange-traded product that tracks the price performance of Bitcoin.

 

Upon launching on the New York Stock Exchange, the MSBT fund drew approximately $34 million in net inflows on its first day, processing more than 1.6 million shares and significantly outperforming older exchange-traded funds.

 

Eric Balchunas, one of Bloomberg’s notable ETF analysts, ranked it in the top 1 percent of all ETF launches, describing it as “arguably the biggest bitcoin ETF launch in the history of the spot bitcoin ETF market.” Balchunas also projects that the MSBT fund will reach $5 billion in assets under management within the next year.

 

 

The U.S. Department of the Treasury, specifically the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), has frozen $344 million in USDT allegedly linked to Iran.

 

In a Friday post on X, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the crypto seizure. The move, according to Bessent, is part of the U.S. effort to systematically degrade Tehran’s ability to generate, move, and repatriate funds.

 

 

“We will follow the money that Tehran is desperately attempting to move outside of the country and target all financial lifelines tied to the regime,” Bessent wrote.

 

While the announcement from Bessent confirmed the freeze and the imposition of sanctions on the owners of the wallets involved, the technical action of the freeze itself was carried out by stablecoin issuer Tether. The stablecoin issuer had earlier stated that it was supporting OFAC and law enforcement agencies in freezing the $344 million linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Hezbollah militant group.

 

Following the announcement, Tether blacklisted two specific wallet addresses on the Tron blockchain, holding $213 million and $131 million in USDT respectively. This move by the U.S. Department of the Treasury follows a similar action in February, when OFAC sanctioned more than 30 individuals and entities allegedly linked to Iran’s oil shipping network.

 

Tether Expands Blockchain Development Efforts

Tether has consistently pushed forward with innovative blockchain developments. Just this month, it launched tether.wallet, its self custodial wallet that brings Tether’s global financial infrastructure within reach of those who have been left unbanked by the traditional financial system.

 

In an effort to enhance the utility of its stablecoins, Tether last month invested 5.2 million dollars into Ark Labs, supporting the building of Arkade, an infrastructure layer that brings programmable, instant transactions directly to the Bitcoin network. Through the Arkade network being built by Arkade Labs, we might see the introduction of stablecoins, including USDT, into Bitcoin.

 

Tether, for the first time, expanded USAT, its US regulated stablecoin, to the Celo blockchain. Since Celo is an Ethereum Layer 2 network optimized for payments, the expansion of USAT to Celo enabled the integration of USAT into Opera MiniPay and Google Cloud infrastructure.

 

 

Singapore-based fintech company Nium has partnered with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase to integrate the USDC stablecoin into its global payment network.

 

The integration, announced this week, leverages Coinbase’s custody, liquidity, and wallet infrastructure, allowing Nium’s clients and users to perform cross-border payments in USDC and settle transactions in either stablecoins or local currencies.

 

 

As Coinbase will provide the wallet infrastructure, Nium clients will be able to fund accounts in USDC within a Coinbase wallet embedded in the Nium platform. The USDC can then be converted to fiat currency by Coinbase and paid out through Nium, all within a single workflow on the platform.

 

Through this partnership, Nium will enable end-to-end stablecoin-to-fiat payment flows that allow users to send, receive, and convert stablecoins into fiat across more than 190 countries within a single platform.

 

Speaking about the partnership, Prajit Nanu, CEO of Nium, said it is aimed at providing clients with a more efficient way to move and manage money globally. He added that the collaboration improves capital efficiency while supporting a future in which stablecoins play a central role in Nium’s payment stack.

 

About Nium 

Based in Singapore, Nium is a cross-border payments company that allows users, including retail and institutional clients, to perform cross-border remittances and transactions.

 

Apart from being a core traditional finance company, Nium has in the past made several pro-crypto moves, especially in the stablecoin space.

 

In March of this year, it launched a stablecoin card issuance platform that allows companies holding stablecoins to issue spending cards on both the Visa and Mastercard networks through a single API integration on its platform. To enable USDC settlements on its platform, Nium last year participated in Visa’s stablecoin settlement pilot, which eventually made it possible for the company to settle cross-border transactions using stablecoins across different supported blockchain networks.

 

Like Nium, several other Singapore-based traditional finance companies have taken pro-crypto steps in recent times, integrating blockchain technology and crypto support into their platforms. Notable among them is DBS Bank, Singapore’s largest bank, which launched the DBS Digital Exchange, a platform for asset tokenization, crypto trading, and custody.

 

Cryptocurrency exchanges, including Kraken, OKX, Binance, and Bybit, have also partnered with traditional finance institutions to help bridge the gap between traditional finance and decentralized finance.

 

 

DoorDash, the food delivery platform that processed nearly $75 billion in merchant sales last year, is partnering with Tempo, the blockchain built by payments giant Stripe and crypto investment firm Paradigm, to roll out stablecoin-powered payouts. The move represents one of the most significant deployments of crypto payment rails by a consumer-facing tech company to date, and it signals just how serious mainstream firms are getting about on-chain money movement.

The announcement, made Tuesday in a Tempo blog post, puts DoorDash alongside Stripe itself, Coastal Community Bank, and Latin American fintech ARQ as companies now running or preparing to run parts of their payment operations on stablecoin rails through Tempo. DoorDash is focusing initially on cross-border flows, where settlement speed and cost are the biggest pain points. Exact timing for when those payouts go live has not been disclosed.

 

What Is Tempo?

Tempo is not just another blockchain project. It launched publicly last month after a private testnet phase, backed by a $500 million funding round that valued the company at $5 billion. Stripe and Paradigm are the founding investors, with Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang leading a dedicated team. The chain is engineered specifically for payment workloads, targeting over 100,000 transactions per second with sub-second finality. Fees can be paid in any stablecoin rather than a native token, something that sets it apart from general-purpose chains like Ethereum or even high-throughput alternatives like Solana, which Stripe CEO Patrick Collison has said do not meet the company's throughput or payment-specific requirements.

 

The chain is EVM-compatible and built on Reth, an Ethereum execution client developed by Paradigm. It includes dedicated payment lanes, opt-in transaction privacy, support for memos and access lists, and an enshrined automated market maker to ensure stablecoin neutrality. No single issuer gets a home-field advantage on Tempo's rails, which is important for institutions wary of becoming dependent on any one stablecoin ecosystem.

 

Why DoorDash, and Why Now

DoorDash operates in more than 40 countries, and getting money across borders has historically meant dealing with fragmented regional banking rails, slow settlement windows, and fees that eat into merchant margins. Stablecoins offer a straightforward fix for that, at least in theory. "There's real promise with stablecoins transforming financial infrastructure," DoorDash co-founder Andy Fang said in a statement tied to the announcement.

 

Beyond merchant payouts, Tempo is also working with DoorDash on a separate option that would let delivery workers get paid directly in stablecoins. That would be a notable shift for the gig economy, where payroll timing and cross-border income access are persistent problems for workers in markets outside the U.S.

 

Stripe's Bigger Blockchain Play

This deal sits inside a much larger strategic bet Stripe has been building for a while. The company acquired stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge for $1.1 billion in 2024, then bought crypto wallet provider Privy. It launched stablecoin financial accounts in 101 countries in May 2025, and has since introduced stablecoin subscription payments for U.S. businesses through USDC on Base and Polygon. Stripe processes close to $2 trillion in payment flows annually, and its head of Connect and money management, Neetika Bansal, has framed Tempo as the vehicle for making global payments "fast, cheap and borderless."

 

Tempo went live on mainnet last month with infrastructure partners including Mastercard, UBS, Klarna, and Visa already on board. Klarna even launched a bank-issued stablecoin on Tempo to enable cheaper cross-border settlement. The chain is also part of Stripe's pitch for agentic payments, the idea that AI systems will eventually need to transact autonomously at high volume, and that existing financial rails simply aren't built for that.

 

Stablecoin Interest Is Exploding

Stablecoins are now a $300 billion asset class, and the broader interest from corporate America is unmistakable. Meta, Google, and X are all reportedly exploring stablecoin integrations of their own. Circle, the issuer of USDC, recently completed a successful initial public offering, giving the sector another credibility boost. Tempo is also launching a Stablecoin Advisory service to offer hands-on support for firms looking to move payment flows on-chain, with what the company describes as "forward-deployed" engineers working directly inside client organizations.

 

Visa, OnePay, Felix, Fifth Third Bank, and Howard Hughes Holdings are also among the companies bringing payment operations onto Tempo's rails, according to information shared with Fortune. The competition is building too. Fireblocks launched a network in late 2025 positioning itself as a stablecoin SWIFT for institutions, and Google is developing its own Universal Ledger for financial assets.

 

For DoorDash, the bet is fairly straightforward: better rails mean cheaper, faster payouts for merchants and workers, which is a competitive advantage in a market where delivery platforms are fighting hard for both. No one can say if this stablecoin deal moves the needle, but the economics are pretty hard to argue with.

 

Coinbase dropped a new public discovery tool aimed at making it easier for both people and AI agents to find and use paid online services that settle instantly with crypto micropayments.

 

The platform went live today at agentic.market and works as an open directory for thousands of services built on the x402 protocol. You can jump in and browse immediately without login, API keys, nothing like that required. It pulls fresh data straight from real payments moving through Coinbase’s Developer Platform, so you see live pricing, how much volume each service is actually getting, how many different users are paying, and the latest activity timestamps. This release picks up right where Coinbase left off with its Agentic Wallets back in February, which first let AI agents hold their own funds and spend them independently. 

 

The x402 Bazaar is where paid online services show up once they’re set up with the right discovery info and start receiving payments, so you don’t have to submit a separate listing. It acts as x402’s backend index, tracking what’s available, how it’s priced, and what’s happening on-chain, while Agentic.Market turns that into a public marketplace where people and AI agents can easily search, compare, and plug these services into their workflows. This includes things like AI model runs, data and analytics feeds, media tools for images and video, search and scraping services, social and messaging integrations, core infrastructure like storage and compute, and even trading tools for moving assets around. Coinbase says the protocol is built so both humans and machines can pay programmatically for things like paid APIs, pay‑per‑call tools, and agents buying access at runtime, so the whole setup is really about making it simple.

 

 

Coinbase noted that the x402 protocol already has more than 165 million transactions and moved roughly 50 million dollars in volume, with over 480,000 agents actively taking part across around 100,000 services. The directory puts the busiest and most reliable ones front and center, which helps both humans and machines figure out what is actually getting real traction day to day. 

 

This is about smoothing out the little daily frictions that slow down building, and rolling out useful agents that can move naturally between on-chain steps like shifting assets or chasing better yields and off-chain jobs like running inference or grabbing fresh data, all paid for through in stablecoins. Teams handling internal automation or tools that face customers now have one, clean spot with data to check out providers without digging through random docs or dealing with payment mismatches. Work in DeFi or tokenization gets clearer ways to add agent driven logic that works natively instead of forcing awkward bridges or extra steps.

 

This is still early, so real momentum will come down to more services jumping on the x402 standard and agents getting better at handling payment details and safety checks on their own. Even with that, the way it indexes itself automatically and stays completely open shows Coinbase leaning toward letting the ecosystem expand through actual use rather than any kind of control. Groups that start implementing x402 features into their agents today could end up in a much better spot, as these machine-to-machine payments become normal.

 

 

Aleo is revolutionizing zero-knowledge technology use-cases well beyond the whitepaper and it could help benefit millions. The privacy-focused Layer-1 blockchain announced this week that it has launched a pilot program in Colombia designed to deliver stablecoin aid to displaced communities without ever exposing their personal data. It is, by most measures, one of the more ambitious real-world tests of privacy-preserving blockchain technology to date.

 

The project was developed alongside Mercy Corps, market-making firm GSR and its affiliated Foundation GSR, and implementation partner Humanity Link. Together, they have built a system that runs on Aleo's programmable blockchain and distributes funds using USDCx, a privacy-enabled version of USDC developed in collaboration with Circle. The stablecoin launched on mainnet in January 2026, following a testnet rollout in late 2025.

 

Why Colombia, and Why Now

Colombia is not a random choice. Mercy Corps has delivered humanitarian assistance to more than 514,000 people in the country since 2019, focusing on Venezuelan refugees, Colombian returnees, and host communities stretched thin by years of conflict and economic strain. Over 30 percent of Colombia's population lacks sufficient income to cover basic needs like food and housing. In that context, the friction involved in traditional aid pipelines, identity registration, exposure of personal data, and the risk of retaliation that can follow, is not just inefficient. It can be dangerous.

 

That is the problem Aleo's system is designed to solve. Using zero-knowledge proofs, the network can verify whether someone is eligible to receive aid without revealing who they are. Beneficiaries register through WhatsApp and collect funds using a QR code. There is no crypto wallet setup, no public transaction history, and no permanent record of their identity tied to a blockchain ledger. For populations already navigating difficult circumstances, that distinction matters.

 

The Role of USDCx

Central to the Colombia pilot is USDCx, which Circle and Aleo positioned from the start as a stablecoin built for real-world institutional use. Unlike privacy coins such as Zcash or Monero, which offer anonymity but carry significant volatility and regulatory risk, USDCx is pegged to the US dollar and includes what Circle calls a configurable compliance layer. That means every transaction carries a compliance record accessible to Circle in response to legitimate law enforcement requests, while remaining opaque to outside observers.

 

Aleo co-founder Howard Wu described the broader design logic plainly: transparent blockchains force users to leak financial data every time they transact. USDCx is meant to offer a middle path, the settlement speed and global reach of blockchain infrastructure, with the confidentiality that institutions and vulnerable populations alike tend to require.

 

Pilots Expanding Beyond Colombia

The Colombia rollout is not moving along by itself. A separate pilot is already underway with the Danish Refugee Council, and a second deployment is expected shortly through GOAL Global, an international humanitarian response agency. Both expand the geographic and organizational footprint of what Aleo and its partners are positioning as a scalable, privacy-first model for humanitarian cash transfers.

 

This is a big moment for the aid sector. Blockchain-based cash transfer programs have been discussed for years, but uptake has remained slow, partly because public ledgers create their own transparency problems. Donor organizations and beneficiaries both have legitimate reasons to want transaction data shielded. Aleo's argument is that zero-knowledge infrastructure finally makes that possible without sacrificing auditability or regulatory compliance.

 

ZK Tech Moves Off the Whitepaper

Aleo is a Layer-1 blockchain built with privacy as a native feature rather than a bolt-on. Its architecture separates off-chain computation, where zero-knowledge proofs are generated, from on-chain verification, where validators confirm correctness without seeing the underlying data. The network's native programming language, Leo, is designed to abstract away the cryptographic complexity for developers building privacy-preserving applications.

 

The project raised a $200 million Series B in 2022 at a $1.45 billion valuation, backed by SoftBank's Vision Fund 2, Andreessen Horowitz, and others. It launched its mainnet in September 2024. The Colombia pilot represents something of a maturation moment: a transition from infrastructure buildout toward use cases that can be pointed to in the real world.

 

Whether this particular deployment scales is an open question. But the architecture being tested here, private stablecoin transfers routed through a zero-knowledge network, accessed via smartphone messaging apps, targeted at populations with no existing crypto infrastructure, is an unusual combination. If it holds up in Colombia, the implications stretch well beyond the country's borders and could successfully benefit under-represented communities across the globe.

 

AllUnity, a regulated European stablecoin issuer, is bringing EURAU, its Markets in Crypto-Assets compliant stablecoin, to major decentralized exchanges.

 

The announcement, made recently by the issuer, will see the introduction of AllUnity’s EURAU stablecoin in two trading pairs across multiple chains. These include the EURAU/USDT pair on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains via Uniswap and Raydium, as well as the EURAU/USDT0 trading pair on the Tempo blockchain via Uniswap.

 

To support this expansion initiative, Flowdesk, a regulated digital asset trading firm, will serve as the main liquidity provider for the EURAU rollout across the different decentralized exchanges. This move is expected to improve EURAU’s integration and utility in decentralized finance, enabling traders to swap between EURAU and USDT with reduced slippage.

 

According to Rupertus Rothenhäuser, Chief Commercial Officer at AllUnity, the expansion represents a key step toward building a robust and accessible euro liquidity layer. He added that it will enable seamless euro to dollar trading and empower institutions and liquidity providers to participate in deep and efficient markets.

 

Dollar-pegged stablecoins continue to dominate

Stablecoins tied to the U.S. dollar continue to maintain the largest share of the more than $320 billion stablecoin market cap. According to a report, USD pegged stablecoins make up about 99 percent of the total global stablecoin supply, with Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC being the largest by market cap.

 

Euro pegged stablecoins account for a small share of the global supply, with a market cap of about €450 million to approximately $1 billion, representing less than 0.3 percent of the total.

 

Despite remaining a niche segment of the crypto market, euro pegged stablecoins have seen some institutional adoption in recent months. In February this year, Société Générale, one of Europe’s largest banks, expanded its euro pegged EURCV stablecoin to the XRP Ledger and the Stellar blockchain.

 

In December last year, about twelve of Europe’s largest banks, including ING, UniCredit, BNP Paribas, and CaixaBank, formed Qivalis, a joint consortium to launch a euro pegged stablecoin. The consortium has engaged in regulatory dialogue with the Dutch National Bank and has entered advanced talks with cryptocurrency exchanges regarding the launch, which is expected this quarter. 

 

 

Global payments giant Visa has launched a validator node on Tempo’s Layer 1 blockchain network, enabling it to participate directly in the verification and processing of transactions on the network.

 

The validator role follows a six month collaboration between Visa and Tempo’s engineering team, which worked to integrate Visa’s secure infrastructure into the Tempo network. According to Visa, the validator will be configured and managed in house.

 

With the integration of Visa’s infrastructure into the Tempo network, Visa joins Stripe and Zodia Custody as the first external validators to verify and process transactions on the Tempo blockchain, with more validators expected in the future.

 

 

Since Visa processes billions of transactions globally, its role as an anchor validator places it in a crucial position in securing Tempo’s blockchain and strengthening its resilience, reliability and performance for stablecoin payment use cases.

 

Speaking on the collaboration, Cuy Sheffield, head of crypto at Visa, said the move highlights Visa’s role in supporting the development of stablecoin payment systems and its commitment to reliability, security, and trust in blockchain networks.

 

What is Tempo Layer-1 Blockchain? 

Tempo is a purpose-built Layer 1 blockchain designed for large-scale stablecoin payments and other real-world financial applications. Although Tempo was initially incubated by Stripe and the crypto venture capital firm Paradigm, it became an independent company with its own team, Tempo Labs, in September 2025.

 

Unlike most Layer 1 blockchains, which are designed for general-purpose decentralized finance activity, the Tempo blockchain was designed for fast, low-cost, and reliable stablecoin transfers that traditional blockchains often struggle to support under high load.

 

The Tempo blockchain was also designed for agentic and machine-to-machine commerce. Through Stripe’s Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), the Tempo network enables autonomous AI agents to make payments and conduct other real-world commerce activities without human intervention.

 

Visa Intensifies Push for Blockchain Adoption

Visa remains one of the few traditional finance (TradFi) giants spearheading global adoption and integration of blockchain technology into TradFi payment infrastructure. Similar to its most recent Tempo validator role, in March of this year, Visa became the first major payment company to serve as a super validator on Canton Network, a privacy-focused institutional blockchain network, with plans to also become one of the validators on Circle’s Arc blockchain.

 

It has also expanded its push for blockchain-based payments, including the launch of USDC settlement on Solana for US residents, enabling support for four stablecoins on its platform, and powering over 130 stablecoin card programs in more than 40 countries.

 

 

 

Blockchain infrastructure company Paxos Labs has raised 12 million dollars in a strategic funding round led by Blockchain Capital, with participation from Robot Ventures, Maelstrom, and Uniswap.

 

According to Paxos Labs, the funds will be used to accelerate the development of Amplify, its new financial utility platform across three integrated modules: Earn, which offers institutional-grade yield on digital assets, Borrow, which enables digital asset-backed lending, and Mint, which supports branded stablecoin issuance.

 

According to Chad Cascarilla, chief executive officer of Paxos, Amplify is the infrastructure that makes it possible for users to benefit from the digital assets they hold, be it earning yields on stablecoins, offering crypto-backed borrowing or launching a branded stablecoin. So, by a single integration, Amplify allows users to use and benefit fully from the digital assets they own.

 

How Amplify Works

Amplify is Paxos Labs’ flagship product that enables enterprise fintech and crypto platforms to turn users’ idle digital assets into active on-chain crypto products. To use Amplify, enterprises need to integrate Amplify’s software development kit (SDK) into their platforms.

 

Once integrated, platforms can configure and activate any of the three modules available on Amplify. Paxos Labs, through Amplify, handles all behind-the-scenes activities, including compliance and enterprise controls, after which it programmatically shares a portion of the revenue generated from user activity back with the integrating platform.

 

Through this strategic seed round, Paxos aims to scale the Amplify suite, expand the platform’s capabilities, and onboard more partners, in addition to some of its institutional partners, including privacy-focused blockchain project Aleo, Toku, and neobanking platform Hyperbeat. Hyperbeat surpassed $510,000 in assets under management within days of going live on Amplify. Paxos Labs has processed over $180 billion in tokenization volume for its institutional clients.

 

Enterprise DeFi Utilities Face Growing Competition

DeFi lending has continued to gain momentum, particularly among institutions and large enterprises. At the start of the year, on-chain lending TVL reached $64.3 billion, accounting for 40 to 55 percent of the total DeFi TVL. Like Paxos, several institutional DeFi lending platforms have expanded their DeFi services.

 

In March of this year, Anchorage Digital expanded its Atlas institutional network to include full collateral management services for crypto-backed lending and credit providers. It also integrated with the Solana-based platform Kamino to allow institutions to use natively staked SOL as collateral without leaving qualified custody.

 

Maple Finance, an institutional DeFi lending platform, also launched on the Base network to bring institutional-grade on-chain credit and yield products to the Coinbase ecosystem, with the aim of targeting exchanges, fintechs, and neobanks within that ecosystem.

 

Most recently this month, Aave passed a binding “Aave Will Win” vote that granted Aave Labs $25 million to accelerate development, including V4 upgrades, permissioned markets, and institutional products.

 

 

Tether has never been shy about playing offense. And in the wake of one of the worst hacks to hit Solana's DeFi ecosystem, the world's largest stablecoin issuer saw an opening, and took it.

 

On April 16, Tether announced a recovery package worth up to $127.5 million for Drift Protocol, the Solana-based perpetual futures exchange that was drained of roughly $285 million on April 1 in a sophisticated hack attributed to North Korean operatives. Combined with $20 million pledged by other partners, the total rescue fund comes to nearly $150 million. But the dollar figure is almost secondary to what Tether actually got in return.

 

The Real Prize: Kicking USDC Off Solana's Biggest Perp DEX

As part of the deal, Drift will swap out Circle's USDC for Tether's USDT as its core settlement asset. That means 128,000 users and more than 35 ecosystem teams, including Gauntlet, Neutral, and M1, all migrate to a USDT-based trading environment. On a network where USDC has historically dominated, this is huge play.

 

On Solana, Circle's USDC carries a market cap of around $8.1 billion, compared to Tether's $3.05 billion. That's a more than 2.6-to-1 advantage for Circle on the chain. In global terms, the picture is reversed: USDT's circulating supply tops $185 billion versus roughly $79 billion for USDC. Tether has always dominated the overall stablecoin market; it just hasn't had much luck on Solana. Until now, maybe.

 

Paolo Ardoino, Tether's CEO, framed the intervention in fairly lofty terms. "Tether's role in the digital assets ecosystem is to provide a platform for individuals and institutions alike that is ready to step forward to help the industry in the moment of darkness," he said in a statement.

 

That said, analysts aren't exactly reading this as pure altruism. As one observer put it, the Drift exploit was, for Tether, an "operational window" to buy market share at a moment of maximum vulnerability. The funding structure itself reinforces this reading: repayments to affected users are tied to future trading activity on the relaunched platform, meaning Tether's money goes further the more Drift succeeds as a USDT venue.

 

Circle Gets the Blame, Tether Gets the Spoils

Tether saw the opening and definitely took it. Circle finds itself under intense scrutiny in the days following the Drift hack, after attackers transferred more than $230 million in USDC from Solana to Ethereum using Circle's own cross-chain transfer protocol. Critics, including on-chain investigator ZachXBT, pointed out that Circle had a window of at least six hours to blacklist the relevant wallets and freeze the funds, and did nothing.

 

Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire later defended the company's position, saying that USDC wallets are only frozen when directed by law enforcement or courts, not unilaterally during active hacks. The argument tracks with Circle's broader regulatory strategy, which prioritizes institutional alignment and compliance above all else. Whether that's the right call is debatable. What's less debatable is that a class action lawsuit has reportedly been filed against Circle in the aftermath, alleging the firm knowingly allowed attackers linked to North Korea to offload stolen funds through its own infrastructure.

 

Tether, by contrast, has a long history of freezing funds tied to hacks and illicit activity quickly, often without waiting for court orders. That operational difference has real consequences for platforms that care about protecting users when things go wrong.

 

How Drift Gets Back on Its Feet

The April 1 attack was a serious one. Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis estimates losses at approximately $285 million. According to Drift's own postmortem, the attackers used a combination of social engineering and a technical method known as "durable-nonce pre-signing" to obtain privileged administrative access, a scheme that reportedly began at least six months before the exploit was executed. From there, the attackers deposited worthless CVT tokens as fake collateral, then withdrew real USDC, SOL, and ETH.

 

Drift's TVL, which was above $550 million before the attack, has since fallen to around $242 million. The protocol's recovery framework targets $295.7 million in outstanding user losses, a figure that actually exceeds its current TVL. To bridge that gap, the plan leans on future trading fee revenue flowing into a dedicated recovery pool. Users will also receive a separate recovery token representing their claim on that pool, transferable and distinct from the DRIFT governance token.

 

The market responded well to the announcement: DRIFT token surged roughly 22%, climbing from $0.045 to $0.055 on the day, after having fallen as much as 30% in the immediate aftermath of the exploit.

 

A Stablecoin War Fought One Bailout at a Time

The Drift deal lands at a time when competition in the stablecoin market is genuinely heating up. USDC has made real headway in institutional and DeFi use cases over the past couple of years, partly by positioning itself as the "clean" option for regulated environments. Circle's IPO plans have only reinforced that narrative.

 

Tether still holds a commanding global lead, but the gap in on-chain activity has been narrowing. Coindesk data shows USDC transaction volumes outpaced USDT's in recent months, and Circle's market share has been expanding. This makes Solana, where USDC has been strongest, a particularly important front in what is increasingly looking like a full-scale stablecoin war.

 

Whether the Drift bailout actually converts into lasting USDT dominance on Solana remains to be seen. Relaunch is contingent on Drift completing two independent security audits, and rebuilding trust with users after a $285 million heist takes more than a well-funded recovery plan. But Tether, at least for now, holds a key piece of Solana's DeFi architecture. And it didn't exactly have to do much begging to get it.

 

Société Générale-FORGE (SG FORGE), the digital asset subsidiary of Société Générale, one of France’s largest multinational banks, has partnered with Consensys to bring its Markets in Crypto Assets Regulation (MICA)-compliant USD CoinVertible (USDCV) stablecoin into MetaMask.

 

The partnership, announced in a recent press release, will see USD CoinVertible (USDCV), one of the few regulated stablecoins issued by a major traditional bank, among the few shortlisted stablecoins available on MetaMask.

 

 

To appeal to all kinds of users, including retail and institutional users, the USDCV stablecoin is fully regulated and compliant, with full reserves and one to one backing to the US dollar. It is backed by cash and cash equivalents, with BNY Mellon serving as its reserve custodian.

 

Apart from helping bridge the gap between traditional finance and decentralized finance, the integration also creates a robust, secure, and transparent environment for users, including retail and institutional users looking to conduct blockchain transactions and decentralized finance interactions.

 

With support from global payments infrastructure company Transak, users will be able to perform on ramp and off ramp activities with the USDCV stablecoin within the MetaMask app, while also being able to trade crypto assets with it.

 

Speaking on the integration, Jean Marc Stenger, CEO of Société Générale FORGE, said the integration is aimed at accelerating the emergence of an interoperable financial system that combines the advantages of blockchain technology with the security and compliance of an European Union regulated stablecoin supported by one of Europe’s largest banks.

 

SG-FORGE Ramps Up its Crypto Efforts

Société Générale, through its digital asset subsidiary SG FORGE, has continued to bridge the gap between traditional finance and decentralized finance, integrating its EUR CoinVertible (EURCV) and USD CoinVertible (USDCV) stablecoins across different traditional finance and crypto ecosystems.

 

In January of this year, SG FORGE, in partnership with payments giant SWIFT, ran an interoperability test on SWIFT’s payment system, using its EURCV stablecoin as a means of exchange and for tokenized bond settlement, an experiment that was marked as successful.

 

In November last year, SG FORGE integrated its EURCV and USDCV stablecoins into the system of Deutsche Börse Group, one of the world’s leading financial market infrastructure providers. This integration enabled token based cash solutions, settlement, and a broader use of stablecoins at institutional grade, closing the gap between core crypto users and traditional capital markets.

 

SG FORGE stablecoin assets have been integrated across other blockchain infrastructures, including decentralized finance lending platform Morpho and decentralized exchange Uniswap. The EURCV and USDCV stablecoin assets have also been deployed on some layer-1 chains, notably Ethereum, Solana, XRP Ledger, and Stellar, supporting a wide variety of blockchain use cases.

 

 

Most Fed chair nominations generate debate about interest rate philosophy, inflation targets, and balance sheet management. Kevin Warsh's confirmation is going to involve a lot of that, sure, but it is also going to involve a fairly lengthy conversation about DeFi lending protocols, Ethereum Layer 2 networks, and a Bitcoin Lightning Network startup.

 

Warsh, President Trump's nominee to chair the Federal Reserve, cleared the last bureaucratic hurdle before his Senate confirmation hearing when he submitted his required financial disclosure to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. The filing reveals combined assets with his wife of at least $192 million. But it's the crypto positions scattered throughout the document, held through a web of venture fund structures, that are drawing the most attention from the digital asset industry right now.

 

Not Just A Casual Holder

Warsh did not just pick up some bitcoin through a Coinbase account during the 2021 bull run and forget about it. Through two fund structures, DCM Investments 10 LLC (via a vehicle called Abstract Holdings) and a series of funds labeled AVF I, AVF II, AVF III, and AVGF I and II, he holds equity positions in more than two dozen blockchain and digital asset companies. The breadth is notable: DeFi lending, decentralized derivatives, Layer 1 and Layer 2 networks, prediction markets, crypto neobanks, and Bitcoin payments infrastructure.

 

On the DeFi and trading side, the portfolio includes Compound, one of the foundational algorithmic crypto lending protocols, alongside dYdX, a decentralized derivatives exchange, and Lighter, a decentralized exchange protocol. On the infrastructure side, he has exposure to Solana, the high-throughput Layer 1 blockchain, Optimism and Blast, two Ethereum scaling networks, and Zero Gravity, a Layer 2 AI blockchain platform. Bitcoin-specific holdings include Flashnet, a Lightning Network trading platform, and a direct position in the Lightning Network itself.

 

There are also positions in Polychain and Scalar Capital, two prominent crypto investment firms, plus Polymarket, the prediction market platform, and several crypto-enabled neobanks including OnJuno and Lemon Cash. Rounding it out: Dapper Labs (best known for NBA Top Shot), Friends With Benefits, a Web3 community platform, and Crossmint, an NFT developer tools company. Warsh also previously held a stake in Bitwise Asset Management, the issuer of one of the spot Bitcoin ETFs, though that position does not appear in the current filing.

 

Selling liquid token positions is straightforward. Unwinding LP stakes in Polychain or venture fund structures is not, and federal ethics rules generally impose a one-year cooling-off period on matters directly affecting recently divested financial interests. That creates a potentially awkward situation given what the Fed has on its plate.

 

Congress is actively working through stablecoin legislation that would define which institutions can issue and custody stablecoins, directly affecting DeFi protocols and crypto neobanks of the type in Warsh's portfolio. The Fed's supervisory stance on whether banks can custody digital assets remains one of the most contested open questions in the industry. And while political appetite for a U.S. CBDC has cooled considerably, the Fed's ongoing research in that area intersects with the payment network infrastructure Warsh holds exposure to through Lightning Network and Solana.

 

Could Be Some Complications

The broader financial profile adds another layer. Warsh earned $10.2 million in consulting fees from Duquesne Family Office, the investment arm of Stanley Druckenmiller, one of the more prominent macro investors in the crypto space. Additional consulting income came from GoldenTree Asset Management ($1.55 million), Cerberus Capital Management ($750,000), and Brevan Howard ($750,000), all firms with meaningful digital asset trading operations. His speaking fee circuit in just the first half of 2025 alone topped $780,000 from firms including TPG, State Street, and Warburg Pincus. Combined with spouse Jane Lauder's estimated $1.9 billion net worth, Warsh would enter the Fed as one of the wealthiest chairs in the institution's modern history.

 

Senate Banking Committee chair Tim Scott said Tuesday that a confirmation hearing is scheduled for next week. However, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina is blocking any final vote until the Justice Department drops its criminal investigation of current Fed Chair Jerome Powell, whose term expires May 15. The crypto portfolio will almost certainly come up in questioning.

 

On one hand, a Fed chair who has personally sought out exposure to DeFi protocols and blockchain infrastructure is unlikely to approach crypto with the indifference or hostility that has characterized past leadership. On the other, the mandatory divestiture and recusal obligations could actively limit his ability to influence policy in the industry's favor during his first year in office, precisely when some of the most consequential regulatory decisions are expected to land. It is a double-edged sword, and the confirmation hearing will be the first real test of how Warsh plans to navigate it.