Hi stable subscribers, 

Welcome to another edition of The Weekly Stable, the #1 source for stablecoin insights brought to you by This Week in Fintech.

Each week, over 90,000 fintech professionals rely on us for clear analysis, thoughtful perspectives, and steady coverage of the stablecoin space—going beyond the news.

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind for the stablecoin space. Operators from across the globe gathered in NYC for Stablecon (see my initial takeaways here), and the energy was palpable—full of sharp debates, bold ideas, and promising partnership discussions. It all builds to today’s Circle IPO, whose timing feels like a culmination of that momentum.

In this edition, we break down the demand dynamics behind Circle’s IPO, offer a framework for understanding global stablecoins, and explore BVNK’s new partnership with Chinese payments giant LianLian. We also round up major product launches, partnerships, and regulatory updates from players like dLocal, Ivy, Kraken, MoonPay, Ripple, Rain, Reveel, Stable Sea, Velocity, Zero Hash, and more.

Enjoy this week’s news below and let us know about any other feedback/suggestions you have.

(Find us online at @chuk_xyz, linkedin/chuk-okpalugo, @thestablecon and linkedin/stablecon)

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🏆 Top Stories

Circle Upsizes IPO Amid Heavy Demand from Wall Street

Circle’s IPO has become a standout moment for the stablecoin space, driven by strong investor appetite and precise execution. The deal was upsized twice, first from 24 million shares at $24 to $26, then to 32 million shares at $27 to $28, and finally priced at $31 for 34 million shares. The total raise hit $1.1 billion, including $358 million to Circle and $538 million to selling insiders. The fully diluted valuation stands at $8.1 billion, with the offering reportedly 25 times oversubscribed.

Investor demand appears real, but the way it was surfaced and communicated deserves credit. ARK Investment’s $150 million commitment and BlackRock’s plan to buy 10 percent of the offering were widely circulated and helped shape the perception of momentum. Bloomberg even updated its article to highlight ARK’s involvement shortly after publication. These signals were not accidental; they helped steer the broader narrative.

Another layer of interest came from weeks of M&A speculation. Rumors emerged that Ripple made a $5 billion offer to acquire Circle, with Coinbase allegedly entering a bidding war. These claims went unchallenged for some time. Only days before the IPO did Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse publicly state that no offer was ever made.

If these acquisition rumors were inaccurate from the beginning, they still served a purpose. The perception of competition, scarcity, and strategic interest from major players likely contributed to the bullish sentiment around the IPO. Whether this was intentional orchestration or strategic silence, the effect was clear.

Among investors I’ve heard from, conviction in the Circle IPO is high. Reasons vary, but many see it as a rare opportunity to get direct exposure to key stablecoin trends of regulatory clarity and financial institution adoption while looking past the interest rate sensitivity for the future promise of fintech revenues and tech multiples.

Circle’s debut on public markets provides visibility and validation for the broader space. It brings attention to stablecoins as core infrastructure, not just as a facilitator of crypto trading. This momentum can and should be used to build new products, serve real-world use cases, and improve financial infrastructure globally.

Congratulations to the Circle team and everyone involved.

Stablecoins are a tale of two cities

One of my biggest observations from Stablecon was the wide variance of views for how USDT and USDC got to where they are.

The world of stablecoins is often viewed as a single market, where different issuers compete on price, UX, or yield. But that framing misses the real story.

USDC and USDT don’t really compete. They dominate two entirely different financial realities.

One world is for dollars that are compliant, programmable, and institution-ready.The other is for dollars that are permissionless and politically adversarial.

One is building the future of financial services.The other has already replaced banks where they’ve failed.

Fintech 3.0 (Global North)

Across the Global North, major financial institutions—JPMorgan, Bank of America, Worldpay, and now Fiserv—are preparing to launch stablecoin infrastructure: custody, wallets, payouts, and peer-to-peer flows.

These are largely reactive moves, triggered by the expectation of regulatory clarity.

What’s emerging is a regulated financial layer: dollars rebuilt for speed, programmability, and democratized yield—but not necessarily broader access.

It’s the next chapter of fintech, and there's enormous opportunity here for developers, institutions, and platforms alike. Simon Taylor's latest piece, “Stablecoins are a new platform” does a great job at articulating this vision.

Permissionless Dollars (Global South)

But a very different story is playing out across the Global South.

In many emerging markets, stablecoins are not a future innovation—they’re a present-day necessity. People rely on them to escape currency collapse, capital controls, and political instability.

In this world, 4% yield matters far less than avoiding a 50% loss in purchasing power.

No KYC. No yield. No trust in institutions. Just dollars that work, without permission. Powering use cases across the moral spectrum. This is where USDT dominates.

Two Worlds, Two Logics

One world wants better infrastructure. The other just wants access.

One bets on policy and partnerships. The other thrives on chaos and failing systems.

Yet many stablecoin builders pursue both markets without fully understanding why stablecoins matter in each context—or who they are really serving.

You can’t scale globally without choosing which market logic to serve:

Regulated programmability or permissionless necessity.

Two systems. Two incumbents. And one strategic choice that defines your path forward.

BVNK and LianLian Partner to Enable Faster Stablecoin-Powered Global Payments

Within two weeks after announcing a partnership with Worldpay, BVNK has partnered with another large payments company for stablecoin infrastructure, Chinese cross border payments company LianLian.

Key Facts

• BVNK processes over $12B in annual stablecoin transactions and raised $50M in Series B funding.
• LianLian and its parent processed $400B of domestic payments and $40B of global payments last year.  They support 130 currencies and serve merchants in over 100 countries.
• Merchants can now fund cross-border transactions using stablecoins, which BVNK auto-converts to USD for routing through LianLian’s global network.

Why It Matters

• Faster settlement: B2B payments is the fastest growing stablecoin payments use case. Funding with stablecoins reduces settlement time from days to minutes, unlocking faster liquidity cycles and more efficient treasury management.
• Increased stablecoin utility: Enabling merchants to fund their existing obligations with stablecoins adds utility to the stablecoins merchants often already hold and makes merchants even more willing to receive them.
• Fiat interoperability: This isn’t a stablecoin sandwich, it’s adding an additional funding method to an existing network. Sometimes the lowest friction path to adoption is to plug into existing infrastructure.
• Taps into the China stablecoin corridor: Chinese merchants are big recipients of stablecoins given their export heavy economy and global buyer base. By tapping into this corridor, BVNK and LianLian can reduce friction on this high volume flow.

📺 Stableminded Podcast 

Single-chain stablecoins are walking dead.

"You no longer can issue a stable coin just on one chain. To start, that's fine. But in the long term, they will not be competitive and they likely will not be successful if they stay on one chain." - Robinson Burkey

That was the overarching theme of Drew Rogers' conversation with Robinson Burkey, Co-Founder of Wormhole Foundation, but they dove into so much more on this Season of Stableminded, Building Stablecoins:

• Why BlackRock chose Wormhole exclusively for their $3 billion fund
• The critical mistake Circle made early on that created chaos for millions of users on Solana with 5 versions of USDC
• How 6-second cross-chain transfers are replacing days-long centralized exchange routes
• Why every major exchange is launching chains and what that really means
• Robinson's concept of crypto's "practical era" - and why it changes everything

This one's worth the full watch if you're thinking about a unified and interoperable future of digital finance.

Thank you M0 for powering this season.

Stableminded S4.2 | Wormhole ft Robinson Burkey

In this episode of Stableminded, This Week in Fintech’s stablecoin-focused series, Drew Rogers sits down with Robinson Burkey, Co-Founder of Wormhole Foundation, builders behind Wormhole, an interoperability protocol that has become critical infrastructure for moving assets seamlessly across blockchains. Robinson brings extensive experience building scalable systems from his time at

This Week in FintechZach Fowler

🚀 Product Launches

Stable Sea Unveils Terminal to Help Businesses Manage and Move Stablecoins Globally (read more)

Paradigm team members introduces Orbital, an automated market maker for pools of 2, 3, or 10,000 stablecoins (read more)

Kraken Partners with Ivy to Offer Instant Bank Payments (read more)

Toku and Mesh Join Forces to Launch the First End-to-End Stablecoin Payroll Rail (read more)

Infini, a stablecoin yield protocol that uses fractional reserve principles, goes live on Ethereum mainnet (read more)

Bitcoin Wallet Firm Exodus Unveils Crypto Debit Card With Baanx (read more)

Fiserv share in earnings call potential plans for stablecoin products (read more)

FCA-registered BCP launches British pound stablecoin (read more)

Reveel launches AI payments on X, powered by stablecoins (read more)

💸 Fundraises and M&A

Stablecoin Firm Circle’s IPO Raises $1.1 Billion in Upsized Deal (read more)

Anduril's Palmer Luckey to invest in stablecoin banking startup Atticus at $1.5-2B valuation (read more)

Global stablecoin bank Limited raised $7M seed round led by North Island Ventures (read more)

dLocal to acquire AZA Finance in possible $150 million deal (read more)

3Jane raised $5.2M seed round led by Paradigm to enable the first scalable credit-based money market on Ethereum (read more)

Velocity, a stablecoin powered business banking firm, announces $10M pre-seed round led by Activant Capital (read more)

⚡ Stablecoin Adoption 

Santander Weighs Crypto Push With Early-Stage Stablecoin Plans (read more)

BVNK Partners With Chinese Cross-Border Payments Firm LianLian (read more)

BCB Markets Strikes Deal with SocGen–FORGE to Distribute Euro-Pegged Stablecoin EURCV (read more)

Fireblocks Integrates Codex — Unlocking Instant, Secure, and Scalable Stablecoin Settlement for Institutions (read more)

Huma Joins Global Dollar Network to Advance Stablecoin Use on Solana (read more)

Rain Expands Stablecoin Visa Cards to Solana, Tron and Stellar as Digital Payment Gains Momentum (read more)

Stripe in Early Talks With Banks About Stablecoins (read more)

CB Insights released coverage of the stablecoin sector with a stablecoin market map (read more)

Tokenized Securities Trading Venue 21X Adds Circle’s USDC Stablecoin (read more)

⚖️ Regulatory Developments

Stablecoin Bills in House and Senate Still Need to Mesh on Several Points: French Hill (read more)

Ripple’s RLUSD Approved by the Dubai Financial Services Authority as Recognised Crypto Token (read more)

MoonPay secures New York BitLicense (read more)

Zero Hash Secures Regulatory Approval to Operate in Argentina, Accelerating Global Expansion (read more)

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💬 Posts of the Week

📖 Reads of the Week

Stablecoin Payments from the Ground Up is comprehensive report on stablecoin payment usage released by Artemis, Dragonfly Capital and Castle Island Ventures (PDF here)

CB Insights Book of Scouting Reports: Stablecon 2025 covers the data on leading stablecoin companies attending Stablecon, including headcount, key partnerships, and recent funding rounds.

FT Partners report Stablecoin Payments: Crypto Finds its Killer App? covers the landscape in depth, with company overviews, interviews and analysis of key use cases.

Billions to Trillions: Stablecoin Use-cases Poised to Expand the Market by the Block & Global Dollar Network is a comprehensive analysis that examines how enterprises are leveraging stablecoins to address real-world frictions in global finance and highlights key barriers that must be overcome for stablecoins to achieve mainstream adoption.

The Future of Blockchain Applications: Reshaping Global Industries by OKX and Blockworks Research explore how blockchain is set to revolutionize finance, technology, consumer brands, sports and entertainment over the next 25 years, with insights from leaders at Visa, Google, Manchester City, and more. 

Stablecoins: The Practitioner’s Guide by Steakhouse Financial, Rebank, Multiliquid and others, is a comprehensive breakdown of stablecoins, their history and their future, with practical insights for would be issuers. 

In How stablecoins become money: Liquidity, sovereignty, and credit Sam Broner from a16z highlights stablecoins as a transformative force in finance, arguing they can achieve liquidity, sovereignty, and credit functions of money by addressing three key issues: universal fungibility, usability in non-dollar economies, and moving beyond treasury-backed models to improve money velocity.

In Stablecoin State of Mind, Alex Johnson shares insights from attending and speaking at Stablecon, moderating a panel on stablecoin regulation, networking with fintech peers, and reflecting on the optimism, regulatory developments, and challenges surrounding stablecoins.