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:

• Opera MiniPay adds support for USDT and Tether Gold
• Money Code Ep 18: Can Stablecoins Keep Deposits in Banks? w/ Cooper Thompson (Fiserv)
• Product launches, partnerships and funding news from Aave, BBVA, BVNK, Matrixport, MetaMask, Polygon Labs, Ripple, UQPAY, Y Combinator and more.

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🏆 Top Stories

Opera MiniPay Adds Support for USDT and Tether Gold

Tether and Opera announced that USDT and Tether Gold (XAUT, branded XAUt0) are now integrated into MiniPay, Opera Mini’s self-custodial wallet on Celo. Opera’s stock reacted sharply, rising nearly 18% intraday and closing up 13%.

Why it matters:

This is about USDT becoming a first-class default inside a scaled consumer wallet.

• Embedded distribution at scale: MiniPay has 12.6M activated wallets and 350M lifetime transactions, and already makes stablecoins a default feature for mobile users across Africa, LATAM, and Southeast Asia. Now USDT access is more seamless in-product.
• Wallet shelf space beats chain availability: USDT already leads Celo by supply, the change is MiniPay elevating it in UX and rollout, not just supporting it at the protocol level.
• Gold is the true new product: Adding XAUT expands MiniPay from payments and remittances into inflation-hedging savings behavior, especially in high-volatility currencies.
• Market validates the “stablecoins as a feature” thesis: Opera’s share price move shows investors increasingly treat stablecoin distribution as a platform growth driver.

📺 Money Code Podcast 

Ep 18: Can Stablecoins Keep Deposits in Banks? w/ Cooper Thompson (Fiserv)

Most stablecoins park reserves in Treasuries or at GSIBs, which doesn’t work for community banks. But what if you created one that does?

This one was really insightful. Cooper Thompson (Head of Innovation for Embedded Finance and Digital Assets at Fiserv) makes a compelling case; that the bottleneck for bank adoption is optimizing the fiat layer, not the onchain layer.

Fiserv is working hard to build something bank-native for their clients, and FIUSD is their shot at flipping the backing model by keeping reserves as distributed demand deposits across a deposit network, while using the stablecoin as connective tissue between thousands of disconnected bank and merchant ledgers. 

I learned a lot from how they’re thinking about it, and it’s a different approach to stablecoins that I don’t see being talked about.

We decode:

• How do banks use stablecoins without draining the deposits that fund their loans?
• Why did stablecoins innovate everywhere except the fiat backing layer?
• What happens when tokenized deposits unlock liability designs stablecoins cannot offer?

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

Aave's multi-chain strategy thrived as it became the first DeFi protocol to reach $1 billion TVL across six networks simultaneously (read more)

Crypto cards hit a new milestone: over 100k active users in a single month, led by Arbitrum, Scroll, and Solana (read more)

S&P projects 1,600x upper-bound increase in euro stablecoin issuance to $1.3 trillion by 2030 (read more)

Tether Reports Massive $10B Profit in 2025, Becomes Major Treasury Holder (read more)

🚀 Product Announcements & Partnerships

BBVA Joins Qivalis (11-Bank Consortium) to Launch European Regulated Stablecoin (read more)

BVNK and Polygon Labs Target Cross-Border Market for Stablecoin Payments Growth (read more)

Fiserv's Clover POS Now Integrates Crypto Payments Through Lydian Partnership (read more)

Matrixport Launches Direct Stablecoin-to-US Stock Trading Service (read more)

MetaMask adds tokenized US stocks, ETFs, and commodities via Ondo Global Markets (read more)

South Africa Launches ZARU, First Institutional Rand-Backed Stablecoin (read more)

Tether and Opera Expand Financial Access in Emerging Markets Through MiniPay (read more)

UQPAY Launches Commercial Stablecoin Platform with AI Payment Capabilities (read more)

Y Combinator opens stablecoin funding option for startups starting Spring 2026 (read more)

⚖️ Regulatory Developments

Crypto industry, banks not yet close to stablecoin yield deal at White House meeting (read more)

Hong Kong is positioning itself as crypto’s global connector, says lawmaker Johnny Ng (read more)

Hong Kong will start granting stablecoin issuer licenses in March (read more)

Kazakhstan Banks Now Authorized to Trade Digital Assets and Stablecoins (read more)

Ripple secures full EU e-money license in Luxembourg (read more)

UK House of Lords Committee launches stablecoin inquiry (read more)

UK Unveils Comprehensive Crypto Regulatory Framework Coming in 2027 (read more)

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