Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

Welcome to another edition of the Money Code newsletter (fka The Weekly Stable), the essential source of stablecoin news coverage for global fintech professionals, brought to you by This Week in Fintech and Stablecon.

This week we cover:

• China Makes Digital Yuan Interest-Bearing and Bank-Aligned
• FASB to Consider Cash Equivalency for Stablecoins in 2026
• Product launches, partnerships and funding news from BlackRock, Clea, Injective, Nodu, Sberbank, Trip.com and more.

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🏆 Top Stories

China Makes Digital Yuan Interest-Bearing and Bank-Aligned

Starting Jan. 1, 2026, the People’s Bank of China will allow commercial banks to pay interest on digital yuan (e-CNY) balances held in verified wallets. The change reclassifies e-CNY from digital cash into an interest-bearing digital deposit, with balances treated as commercial bank liabilities, included in reserve requirements, and covered by deposit insurance. The overhaul follows a decade of pilots and is part of a broader action plan to scale domestic usage and expand cross-border applications.

Why it matters:

This model is a challenge to private stablecoins. China adopts stablecoin features, always-on settlement, wallet-native money, programmability, controlled yield, while keeping them inside the sovereign perimeter, signaling competition with USD stablecoins on functionality, not governance.

• China has engineered around the “CBDC vs banks” problem by design: By routing yield through banks and keeping e-CNY inside the two-tier system, China reinforces banks rather than disintermediating them.
• Deposit insurance and reserves quietly reclassify e-CNY as real money: Folding balances into the reserve base turns e-CNY from a payments pilot into a regulator-visible, stress-testable monetary instrument.
• The interest rate is irrelevant; the legal signal is decisive: At reported ~0.05%, yield won’t move behavior, but it collapses the wallet-vs-deposit distinction in practice.
• Hybrid architecture enables a controlled migration, not a leap: Account-based compliance paired with selective DLT use bridges legacy banking and programmable money through a centrally managed transition.
• Programmability is positioned as a policy primitive: Smart contracts are framed as tools for compliance, targeting, and leakage reduction, not developer experimentation and open composability.

FASB to Consider Cash Equivalency for Stablecoins in 2026

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) added two crypto-related projects to its 2026 agenda: whether certain digital assets, including some stablecoins, could qualify as cash equivalents, and how companies should account for crypto transfers such as wrapped tokens. The move follows public feedback and recommendations from a White House working group post GENIUS Act, which left accounting treatment unresolved.

Why it matters:

This is a quiet but foundational shift for stablecoins and onchain finance, with real balance-sheet consequences. Regulatory frameworks make stablecoins legal, but accounting standards make them usable at scale. This agenda item is plumbing work, but it determines whether stablecoins sit on balance sheets as money or as risk assets. 

• Enterprise adoption: Accounting certainty reduces audit friction, a prerequisite for broader enterprise and bank usage post-GENIUS Act
• Cash-equivalent classification: If some stablecoins qualify, corporates could treat them closer to cash rather than volatile crypto assets, materially improving liquidity ratios and treasury use cases.
• Transfer clarity: Clear rules for wrapped and receipt tokens would resolve a major GAAP gap around when control actually transfers onchain.

📺 Money Code Podcast 

Happy Holidays! No new Money Code episode this week.

We’re resurfacing a popular conversation with Naveen Mallela (JPMorgan Kinexys) on tokenized deposits vs stablecoins and the real bottlenecks in cross-border payments.

A great listen if you’re thinking seriously about where payments infrastructure is heading in 2026.

Give it a listen and share your feedback by sending me a DM or replying to this email. 

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Read on for a round up of this week’s news:

📊 Market Trends

BlackRock’s BUIDL Makes History: First Tokenized Treasury Fund to Hit $100M in Dividends (read more)

Tokenized Stocks Hit Historic $1.2B Market Cap Milestone (read more)

💸 Fundraises and M&A

London-Based Nodu Raises $1.45M to Bridge Banks with Stablecoin Infrastructure (read more)

Nigerian Stablecoin Startup Clea Launches After $4M+ in Cross-Border Transactions (read more)

🚀 Product Announcements & Partnerships

Injective Adopts x402 Standard for Ultra-Fast Blockchain Payments (read more)

Sberbank Plans to Launch Crypto-Backed Loans in Russia (read more)

Trip.com tests stablecoin payments overseas, offering USDT and USDC for prepaid bookings (read more)

Zoomex Partners with UR to Launch Crypto-Enabled Global Payment Card (read more)

⚖️ Regulatory Developments

Argentina Considers 'Tetherization' as Alternative to Dollarization in 2026 (read more)

China to Allow Interest Payments on Digital Yuan Starting 2026 (read more)

FASB to Consider Cash Equivalency for Stablecoins in 2026 (read more)

RBI Warns: Stablecoins Pose Risk to India's Monetary Sovereignty (read more)

📖 Reads of the Week

In The Prison Of Financial Mediocrity, sysls, provides a long-form socio-economic analysis arguing that blocked wealth ladders, AI anxiety, and algorithmic social comparison push younger cohorts toward high-variance speculation, with implications that value accrues to platforms like Robinhood, Coinbase, and DraftKings, and that for stablecoins, speculation will remain a durable consumer wedge.

Dougie DeLuca, argues that Crypto is Dead, not because it’s disappearing, but because it’s being assimilated. Once a technology is truly adopted, it stops being a category. Like the internet or AI, blockchain becomes an enabling layer rather than the product itself. Most companies won’t be “crypto companies” any more than they are “internet” or “AI” companies. They’ll simply use blockchain because it’s the best rail. That’s what real adoption looks like: boring, embedded, and invisible.