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:
Tether goes direct-to-consumer with a self-custodial wallet, competing with the same exchanges and wallets that distribute USDT today
Ep 28: Stablecoins Need a Clearing Layer w/ Sam Broner (Better Money Company)
Product launches, partnerships and funding news from Deutsche Börse, Superstate, Paxos Labs, Pharos, eToro, Visa, Stripe and more.
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🏆 Top Stories
Tether Goes Direct-to-Consumer With Self-Custodial Wallet
Tether launched tether.wallet, a self-custodial mobile app that puts USDT, USAT, tokenized gold (XAUT), and Bitcoin directly in users' hands. The wallet supports Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Bitcoin (including Lightning Network). Users transact via human-readable @tether.me usernames and pay fees in the asset being transferred, removing the need to hold separate gas tokens. The app is built on Tether's open-source Wallet Development Kit (WDK), designed to support wallets for both human users and autonomous AI agents, which already powers Rumble's creator payment wallet.
Why it matters:
The world's largest stablecoin issuer is moving up the stack to own the consumer relationship directly. That puts Tether in competition with some of the same exchanges and wallet providers that distribute USDT today.
Brand recognition is the real asset. Tether can't redirect its distributors' customers into its own wallet. What it can leverage: USDT is the most recognized stablecoin in emerging markets, with $185B in circulation across 570M users in 160+ countries. In Turkey, Argentina, Nigeria, and Vietnam, "Tether" is often synonymous with "digital dollar." That brand awareness gives tether.wallet a starting position that most consumer wallets spend years and millions trying to build.
Infrastructure players are verticalizing. Stablecoin issuers are expanding beyond minting and settlement. Circle launched CPN Managed Payments to serve institutions and businesses. Tether is going the other direction: straight to consumers, with a wallet that bundles digital dollars, gold, and bitcoin in a single interface targeting the same users its infrastructure already serves through third parties.
Two UX decisions signal who this wallet is for. Paying transaction fees in the asset being sent (no gas tokens) and replacing hex addresses with @tether.me usernames remove the two biggest barriers to wallet adoption outside the crypto-native crowd. Tether is going after the masses.
📺 Money Code Podcast
Ep 28: Stablecoins Need a Clearing Layer w/ Sam Broner (Better Money Company)
Swapping one stablecoin for another today works like selling Wells Fargo dollars to buy Bank of America dollars. A dollar should be a dollar, and in stablecoins, it still isn't.
Sam Broner spent nearly three years as an investment partner at a16z crypto evaluating hundreds of stablecoin companies. He kept finding the same gap, so he left to build it himself.
We decode
The clearinghouse case: why stablecoins are replaying a fragmentation problem that banking solved over a century ago, and what one-to-one fungibility actually requires
"Tourists in the Bazaar": Sam's framework for how AI agents pay today vs. how they'll pay once they have credit history
Custom stablecoins and netting: the concrete use case where a company pulls in five different stablecoins and converts them all to one
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
💸 Fundraises and M&A
Deutsche Börse takes 1.5% stake in Kraken for $200 million (read more)
eToro to acquire Zengo crypto wallet in $70 million deal (read more)
Paxos Labs raises $12 million, launches Amplify platform for onchain financial products (read more)
Superstate expands partnership with Invesco as it joins $82.5M Series B (read more)
Tether backs Stablecoin Development Corporation's $134 million private placement to acquire SKY tokens (read more)
Brix raises $5.5M to tokenize emerging market assets on MegaETH (read more)
Pharos raises $44M Series A for real-world asset tokenization, led by Sumitomo and Chainlink (read more)
Aave DAO approves $25 million grant to Aave Labs in binding vote (read more)
🚀 Product Announcements & Partnerships
Breez SDK adds dollar balances to Bitcoin Lightning, powered by Brale's USDB stablecoin (read more)
Calastone token network puts UK asset manager's $68 billion of funds on-chain (read more)
Coinbase adds DeFi trading to UK offering in drive to become an everything exchange (read more)
Fireblocks intros stablecoin lending for institutional clients (read more)
Polygon launches six global stablecoin pairs with frxUSD as the base dollar pairing (read more)
Rakuten to allow XRP to be used as payment method by its 44 million customers (read more)
Ripple partners with Kyobo Life to tokenize government bond settlement in South Korea (read more)
Societe Generale-Forge partners with Consensys to expand global access to its USD Coinvertible stablecoin into MetaMask (read more)
Stripe, Visa and Standard Chartered (Zodia Custody) become validators on Tempo's payments blockchain (read more)
Tether launches tether.wallet, extending its financial infrastructure to end users (read more)
Y Combinator settles first all-stablecoin funding round in USDC on Solana (read more)
⚖️ Regulatory Developments
Bank of Korea nominee backs central bank-led digital currency, sees limited role for stablecoins (read more)
Circle CEO says he won't freeze USDC without a court order even as hackers walk away with millions (read more)
ClearBank secures MiCA approval, targets Circle euro and dollar stablecoins for institutional clients (read more)
Crypto bill negotiations enter critical week as lawmakers return amid pressure to resolve stablecoin rewards (read more)
HSBC and Anchorpoint Financial gain first Hong Kong stablecoin issuer licenses (read more)
Pakistan lifts seven-year crypto ban, allows banks to serve licensed virtual asset providers (read more)
SEC says software allowing crypto wallet transactions not considered broker (read more)
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