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, fintech professionals globally rely on us for clear analysis, thoughtful perspectives, and steady coverage of the stablecoin space—going beyond the news.

This week we dive into the launches of tokenized stocks by Robinhood and Kraken, as well as a round up of product launches, partnerships and regulatory news from Circle, Gnosis Pay, Global Dollar Network, Rain, Ripple, Upbit and more.

Enjoy this week’s news below. 

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🏆 Top Stories

From Stablecoins to Stocks: How U.S. Equities Are the Next Phase of Dollarization

Robinhood has launched tokenized versions of over 200 U.S. stocks and ETFs—including private shares in OpenAI and SpaceX—for its European crypto app users. This follows similar moves by Kraken and Bybit, which now offer over 60 tokenized stocks to users across 140+ countries via Backed Finance’s xStocks platform.

Tokenized equities are quickly moving from concept to product, and from novelty to utility. More than just a new asset class, they could reshape how billions store and grow wealth. Which brings us to the deeper trend:

Tokenized U.S. stocks turn stablecoin wallets into borderless brokerage accounts, extending dollarization from holding dollars to investing in dollar-linked assets.

Stablecoins already gave anyone with a phone access to digital dollars. In markets with volatile local currencies, that was a game-changer. Stablecoins became a permissionless hedge, helping users preserve value in a dollarized world. 

But holding is just the first step. As wealth grows in the global south, the logical progression in consumer financial behavior is clear: hold → save → invest. And for billions, investing in local equities, bonds, or property is too risky, complex, or simply unattractive. The U.S. stock market—home to the world’s most coveted companies—has always been the aspirational destination, but access has been gated.

That gate is now opening. These new offerings will be 24/7, fractional, and withdrawable, meaning a remote worker in Argentina can accumulate $5 slices of Apple alongside their USDT.

For wallets and fintechs, this unlocks the next rebundling: payments, savings, and now investments. All self-custodial, always-on, and global by default. Consumer finance is being rebuilt onchain. U.S. stocks are a powerful wedge to jumpstart adoption—especially in regions where access to high-quality investments remains elusive.

For capital markets, it signals a new phase of international demand for U.S. equities and potentially a drain of capital from local investment opportunities, yet another currency sovereignty problem for local governments to deal with.

While promising, these products still face liquidity and compliance hurdles, particularly around private assets. We’re in the crawl phase, but there are early signs of product market fit: xStocks saw $7.7M of volume on July 2nd with half of that volume being in the S&P 500 index token SPY. This is unsurprising, and signals demand for broad exposure to US equity. 

Tokenization has many benefits, but its most powerful is access. What stablecoins did for dollars, tokenized stocks are now doing for U.S. equities, and an increasing portion of global wealth will be held in US linked assets.

The dollarization engine just got supercharged.

(For more on US dollar hegemony, check out the Reads of the Week below.)

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

🚀 Product Launches

Robinhood Launches Stock Tokens, Reveals Layer 2 Blockchain, and Expands Crypto Suite in EU and US with Perpetual Futures and Staking (read more and here)

Rain, Toku Debut Stablecoin Payrolls for Workers in Over 100 Countries (read more)

Kraken to compete with Venmo and PayPal with new cross-border payments app Krak (read more)

Circle launches Gateway, a developer tool for Chain-Abstracted USDC (read more)

⚡ Stablecoin Adoption 

Tokenized stock trading live on Kraken, Bybit and Solana’s DeFi ecosystem (read more)

South Korean Exchange Upbit to Work on Won Stablecoin With Naver Pay (read more)

Stable, a Bitfinex-backed Layer 1 blockchain using Tether's USDT as a gas token, unveils 'Phase 1' of its roadmap (read more)

Deutsche Bank’s DWS, Galaxy, Flow Traders Venture to Introduce German-Regulated Stablecoin (read more)

Instant Payments Fintech Ivy Adds Circle’s USDC, EURC Stablecoins (read more)

Swiss Bank AMINA Introduces Custody, Trading With Ripple’s RLUSD Stablecoin (read more)

Circle adds Euro-to-USDC onramp with competitive FX rates (read more)

Gnosis Pay reaches 1M payments with the Gnosis Pay Card (read more)

Stablecoin startups surpass 2021 venture capital peak as institutional money pours in (read more)

⚖️ Regulatory Developments

Global Dollar (USDG) Launches in the EU, is now MiCA compliant (read more)

Circle applies for US trust bank charter to manage its USDC reserve (read more and here)

Ripple Seeks a U.S. Banking License, Adding to List of Crypto Companies (read more)

Bank of Korea Halts CBDC Project as Government Submits Stablecoin Bill (read more)

EU Central Bank Commits to Distributed Ledger Technology Settlement Work (read more)

GENIUS Act Lacks ‘Necessary Guardrails’ For Investor Protection, NYAG Letitia James Tells Congress (read more)

💬 Posts of the Week

📖 Reads of the Week

In Stablecoins: Entering their untethered growth era, venture capital firm MMC, argues that stablecoins are entering a phase of exponential adoption driven by institutional uptake, new use cases like micropayments and agentic finance, and infrastructure innovations that abstract away crypto complexity—while simultaneously warning of growing fragmentation and the urgent need for interoperability, compliance, and liquidity to fulfill stablecoins’ mainstream potential.

In Rewriting the Way Money Moves with Stablecoins, Foundation Capital argues that stablecoins are just beginning to reshape financial infrastructure—offering near-zero-cost, programmable payments with global reach—and that the next wave of adoption will come from composable applications, off-chain integrations, and real-world use cases like treasury, credit, and AI payments, with the biggest opportunities lying in startups that connect Web3 capabilities to traditional finance rails.

In How Stablecoins Are Cementing US Dollar Hegemony for Decades to Come, Nicolas Colin and Marieke Flament argue that while stablecoins promise fiscal advantages for the U.S. by boosting Treasury demand and global dollar adoption, they also entrench America's dependency on trade deficits—creating a structural trap that strengthens financial hegemony at the long-term expense of domestic manufacturing and strategic flexibility.

Similarly, in this thread about dollar hegemony, Izabella Kaminska argues that U.S. stablecoin strategy—backed by regulatory ambiguity in the GENIUS Act and operational flexibility via players like Tether—is a calculated geopolitical tool to reassert dollar dominance globally by exporting financial stability on American terms, while Europe, constrained by political fragmentation and rigid regulatory frameworks like MiCA, struggles to mount a credible response through its top-down digital euro approach.