Welcome to another edition of The Weekly Stable, the essential source of stablecoin news coverage for global fintech professionals, brought to you by This Week in Fintech.

This week we cover:

• Tether Seeks $20B at $500B Valuation
• Product launches, partnerships and regulatory news from Bastion, Brale, Bullish, Coinbase, Crossmint, Fnality, Ethena, LINE, Rain, Stable, Shield, Superform, ZeroHash and more.

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🏆 Top Stories

Tether Seeks $20B at $500B Valuation

Tether Holdings, issuer of the $172B USDT stablecoin, is in talks to raise $15–20B via a private placement of about 3% equity, implying a valuation of up to $500B. The El Salvador–based firm reported $4.9B in Q2 profit and claims 99% margins, driven largely by income from U.S. Treasuries. Cantor Fitzgerald is advising, and CEO Paolo Ardoino says the proceeds would scale Tether’s ambitions across stablecoins, AI, commodities, energy, communications, and media.

Why it matters: This is less about funding need and more about signaling. Tether is already one of the most profitable companies in the world, but a $500B raise would reposition it in a new league.

• Global stature: A half-trillion valuation places Tether alongside OpenAI and SpaceX, ensuring it is mentioned as a top private company beyond the crypto sphere.
• Strategic firepower: Extra capital could fuel acquisitions, expansion, and new business lines, while also giving Tether a valuation benchmark for future deals.
• Valuation strain: This valuation implies a ~77x projected $6.2B income (assuming 3.6% Fed funds). Growing into this depends on whether USDT can continue to grow rapidly, dominating in emerging markets despite new competitors, while maintaining a high share of the yield.

With the GENIUS Act, more issuers are set to enter, and pressure to pass yield back to users is growing. Tether’s entrenched presence in emerging markets, combined with its U.S. comeback via USA₮, gives it durable advantages. This raise looks like a move to capitalize on its position of strength before rivals can scale.

In that sense, it is both theatre and power play, cementing Tether’s dominance, signaling ambition, and underscoring that stablecoins are now a financial force measured in hundreds of billions.

📺 Money Code Podcast 

Ep 2: Global Platforms Need Global Partners w/ Farooq Malik (Rain)

What does it take to make stablecoins spendable everywhere?

In this episode, we sat down with Farooq Malik, co-founder & CEO of Rain, to dive into how stablecoins move from speculation to real adoption. Some of the most interesting takeaways:

Global companies need a single global partner: Platforms like Airbnb, Deel, and Fiverr are global by nature but stuck with fragmented banking relationships. Rain’s pitch is one integration that works worldwide, riding on Visa’s acceptance network while using stablecoins as the global settlement layer.

Speculation creates the conditions for utility: Crypto speculation may look frivolous, but like the gold rush and the railroads, it built the treasuries and businesses that needed infrastructure. That demand pulled Rain into building corporate spend, travel, and operational payments for stablecoin-native firms.

Cards unlock stablecoin utility at scale: Interoperability challenges are invisible to users if they can swipe a card and spend any stablecoin balance instantly. Rain designed its infra so users don’t need to care about issuers, chains, or tokens, they just spend dollars.

Traditional finance is adopting through Rain: Broker-dealers and RIAs are using Rain for credit products collateralized by traditional assets, because Rain’s infrastructure is faster to deploy and more flexible globally than incumbent providers. These are not “crypto clients”, they’re mainstream financial institutions choosing the best option.

These are the kinds of shifts that show stablecoins moving from the edges of finance into the center, beyond faster payments to global financial infra that abstract away complexity and start winning in TradFi.

Bonus: Check out the end of the episode for a debate on whether stablecoins will disrupt Visa!

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:

🚀 Product Announcements & Partnerships

Brazilian Fintech Nubank Plans Stablecoin Integration for Credit Card Transactions (read more)

Coinbase now lets users lend USDC onchain (read more)

Coinbase team up with Cloudflare to launch x402 Foundation for machine payments (read more)

DBS, Franklin Templeton and Ripple to merge tokenized collateral with stablecoins (read more)

Kazakhstan launches Evo stablecoin with Solana and Mastercard (read more)

LINE and Kaia to Roll Out Stablecoin Superapp for Global Transfers (read more)

Nine European Banks Join Forces To Issue MiCA-Compliant Euro Stablecoin (read more)

Plasma Beta Mainnet will Launch With $2B+ Liquidity, Ranks 8th in Stablecoin Supply (read more)

Plasma Unveils Plasma One: A Stablecoin-Native Neobank (read more)

Rain announced a strategic partnership with Lithic (read more)

Societe Generale Selects Bullish Europe to Debut Its USD Stablecoin (read more)

Stablecoin, Tokenization Pioneers Unveil STBL Protocol Splitting Principal From Yield (read more)

💸 Fundraises and M&A

Bastion raises $14.6M from Coinbase, Sony and Samsung for Stablecoin Issuance (read more)

Bullish Makes $4 Million Investment into USD.AI, (read more)

Crossmint receive strategic investment from Circle Ventures (read more)

Crypto Giant Tether Seeks $500 Billion Valuation in Major Raise (read more)

Crypto Infrastructure Firm Zerohash Secures $104M Funding Led by Interactive Brokers and Morgan Stanley (read more)

Fnality raises $136M Series C to expand settlement network (read more)

M2 Capital Invests $20M in Ethena to Boost Digital Asset Adoption in the Middle East (read more)

PayPal Invests in Stablecoin-Focused Layer 1 'Stable' to Expand PayPal USD Distribution, Utility, and Liquidity (read more)

Shield Raises $5M to Streamline International Crypto Transactions (read more)

Stablecoin infrastructure provider Brale raises $30M led by Lightspeed (read more)

Superform raises $1.4M on Echo to launch Superform v2, a stablecoin neobank (read more)

⚖️ Regulatory Developments

EU Ministers Map Out Digital Euro, But Launch Still Years Away (read more)

Ex-NAB bankers awarded Australia’s first stablecoin licence (read more)

Stablecoins Can Now Back US Derivatives, Says CFTC (read more)

U.S., UK Form Task Force to Align on Crypto and Capital Markets (read more)

🍻 Upcoming Events

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This Week in Fintech

📖 Reads of the Week

In How to Act Like a GENIUS, Salah Ghazzal, Policy Lead at Variant, provides a policy brief on the GENIUS Act that explains how the first federal statute for stablecoins defines who can issue them, the standards for reserves, redemption, and compliance, and the advantages given to U.S.-based issuers—essential context for founders, banks, and platforms planning issuance strategies in the post-legislation, pre-rulemaking era.

Birdeye’s Stablecoin Evolution Report, co-authored with Perena and MoonPay explores how stablecoins are transforming from DeFi’s backbone to a global payment disruptor. See this thread for highlights.