The Stable Scoop: 140 Firms Launch OUSD, the FCA Finalizes UK Rules, and BNY Custodies USDC

Editor - Alex

July 4, 2026

🌍 Macro: 140+ firms move on the stablecoin float, the BIS pushes back, and supply holds near $309B

More than 140 companies launched OUSD, a shared stablecoin built to take the float away from Circle and Tether

• Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock, Coinbase, BNY, Google, Shopify, and Western Union are among 140+ partners behind Open Standard, a consortium issuing a new dollar stablecoin called OUSD, led on an interim basis by Bridge co-founder Zach Abrams.

• The pitch inverts the industry’s economics: minting and redemption are free, there are no volume caps, and most reserve income is shared back to participating firms instead of kept by the issuer. Stripe says OUSD will become the default stablecoin for businesses on its platform, Coinbase is bringing it to Base, and the coin is slated to go live later this year on Solana, Stellar, Base, and Polygon. Circle’s stock closed down about 18% on the day of the announcement.

• For five years the stablecoin business model has been “hold the float, keep the yield.” If the companies that own distribution now demand that yield, every issuer’s treasury economics, and every business’s choice of settlement coin, gets renegotiated.

CRCL daily closes, June 5 – July 2. Source: Yahoo Finance.

The BIS used its annual report to argue stablecoins fall short as money - The Bank for International Settlements’ Annual Economic Report, published in full on June 28, says the $316B stablecoin market fails its tests of singleness, elasticity, and integrity, and pushes a central-bank-anchored unified ledger instead; a useful counterweight to a week when banks kept building on stablecoin rails anyway.

Total stablecoin supply is holding near $309B - DefiLlama puts total supply at roughly $309 billion, down about $2B on the week, with USDT and USDC still about 83% of the market between them.

USD-pegged circulating supply, July 2025 – July 4, 2026. Source: DefiLlama.

🔍 Policies: The UK's rulebook goes final, MiCA's grace period expires, and OFAC puts issuer freezes to work

The FCA published its final crypto rulebook, giving UK stablecoin issuers real dates to plan around

• The FCA released its final policy statements for the UK crypto regime on June 30, covering stablecoin issuance, custody, capital, and market integrity, and completing the roadmap it has been consulting on since 2023.

• The authorisation gateway opens September 30, 2026 and runs to February 28, 2027, with the full regime in force October 25, 2027; a joint FCA and Bank of England statement sets out how issuers that HM Treasury designates as systemic will move under Bank of England co-supervision.

• The UK now joins the EU and the U.S. with a complete, dated stablecoin framework. Anyone planning a GBP coin or serving UK clients has an application window on the calendar, not a consultation to watch.

  

MiCA’s last grace periods expired on July 1, and the EU market is now fully permissioned

• The final national transitional periods under MiCA ran out on July 1, meaning any firm serving EU clients without a CASP licence is now operating in breach, with roughly 102 licensed CASPs and about 30 authorized stablecoin issuers on the register.

• Tether never sought e-money-token authorization, so USDT remains off MiCA-licensed venues, while USDC, EURC, and the new wave of bank-issued euro coins are fully compliant.

• The EU is the first major market where the compliant-versus-noncompliant line decides which stablecoins businesses can actually touch. Treasury and payment teams with European counterparties should be routing through licensed venues and authorized coins as of this week.

OFAC added 134 ISIS-K crypto wallets to its sanctions list, and Tether froze all 131 TRON addresses - The July 1 designation covered wallets that received about $1.4M since 2023, and Tether’s same-day freeze is a live demonstration of the issuer-level enforcement the GENIUS Act now expects as standard equipment.

California’s crypto licensing law took effect July 1 - The Digital Financial Assets Law requires exchanges, custodians, and stablecoin issuers serving Californians to hold or have applied for a DFPI license, with penalties up to $100,000 per day and monthly reserve attestations for issuers; a state overlay on top of the federal GENIUS regime.

South Korea says it will speed up its won-stablecoin law, even as passage this year looks unlikely - The FSC’s vice chairman pledged to accelerate the Digital Asset Basic Act on July 2, while the central-bank turf fight and a floated rule requiring banks to own at least 51% of won-stablecoin issuers keep the timeline slipping.

Mark July 18: GENIUS final rules are due - Federal agencies face the one-year statutory deadline to finalize GENIUS Act implementing rules in two weeks, and the five-agency customer identification proposal for stablecoin issuers is open for comment through August 21.

🔥 Biz Beats: BNY opens USDC custody, Standard Chartered puts mint and redeem in the bank, and Kraken's parent closes Reap

BNY made USDC the first stablecoin on its custody platform, with mint and burn built in

• BNY announced on June 29 that clients can now hold USDC in BNY digital asset custody wallets and instruct Circle to mint and redeem directly through the bank, the first stablecoin supported on the platform.

• The move extends BNY’s existing role as primary custodian of USDC reserves, and the bank says more issuers and digital cash workflows will follow. BNY oversees $59.4 trillion in assets under custody or administration.

• America’s largest custodian putting the full stablecoin lifecycle inside standard institutional workflows removes one of the last operational excuses for corporate treasuries to stay out.

Standard Chartered became the first G-SIB to offer clients integrated USDC minting and redemption

• Standard Chartered and Circle launched a service on July 2 that lets the bank’s institutional clients mint and redeem USDC through their existing StanChart onboarding, with no direct Circle account required.

• The service starts through the bank’s Dubai (DIFC) operations with more markets planned, and it makes StanChart the first Global Systemically Important Bank to offer this; notably, the same bank is also an OUSD launch partner, hedging both sides of the issuer race.

• Bank-intermediated access folds stablecoin operations into KYC, custody, and governance that institutions already trust, which is how on/off-ramp friction actually disappears for corporates.

🌍 Banks are wiring stablecoin custody and minting into their core platforms; AllScale does the same for the business side, with checkout, invoicing, payroll, and settlement on stablecoin rails with compliance built in. See how AllScale can help your team pay, invoice, and scale globally.

Kraken’s parent closed its acquisition of Reap, valued at up to $600M - Payward completed the deal on July 1, folding the Hong Kong stablecoin-native card issuing and cross-border payments firm into its B2B stack as a standalone brand.

BlackRock is reported to be wiring Ethena into Aladdin - Per The Block, USDe is being integrated into BlackRock’s Aladdin risk platform while the BUIDL tokenized Treasury fund becomes the default reserve asset for Ethena’s white-label stablecoins, backed by a $100M liquidity facility via Securitize.

Compliance vendors are pairing up around stablecoin risk - Infinite and Sardine launched a two-way integration that feeds Sardine’s real-time fraud and risk signals into Infinite’s stablecoin compliance and payments infrastructure.

💡Rollouts: Crédit Agricole's euro stablecoin, MetaMask's money account, and Cloudflare meters AI agents in stablecoins

Crédit Agricole launched EURXT, a MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin, and settled a tokenized fund with it on day one

• Crédit Agricole launched EURXT on July 1, an ERC-20 e-money token on Ethereum issued by its CACEIS asset-servicing arm, backed 1:1 by euro cash held at CACEIS Bank.

• The first issuance settled a subscription into a tokenized Amundi money market fund, which CACEIS calls a European first for a euro-stablecoin-settled UCITS subscription; the coin is initially available to CACEIS’s institutional and corporate clients.

• A top-10 European bank building the euro settlement leg for tokenized funds is direct competition for EURC, and exactly the kind of regulated non-USD coin MiCA was designed to produce.

MetaMask turned stablecoin balances into a checking-account replacement

• MetaMask launched Money Account on June 30: one self-custodial balance that earns up to 4% variable APY on its mUSD stablecoin and spends anywhere Mastercard is accepted, with up to 3% cashback.

• Yield comes from DeFi lending vaults run by Veda on Morpho, mUSD reserves sit with Stripe-owned Bridge, and the rollout is global except the UK and EU. MetaMask claims more than 30 million users.

• The largest self-custody wallet bundling earn, spend, and settle into one stablecoin balance is a real test of whether consumers will hold dollars in a wallet instead of a bank account.

Cloudflare opened the waitlist for a gateway that charges AI agents in stablecoins

• Cloudflare’s Monetization Gateway lets any site behind its network charge AI agents per request for pages, datasets, APIs, and MCP tools, with settlement in stablecoins over the x402 protocol.

• Cloudflare sits in front of roughly a fifth of the internet, and the move follows AWS plugging x402 into CloudFront in June; pricing and a launch date are still to come.

• Machine-to-machine payments have no card in the loop and no human at checkout, so if agentic traffic gets metered at the edge, stablecoins are the default rail by construction.

Circle shipped native USDC, EURC, and CCTP V2 on Cronos - Cronos became the first chain to get both native Circle stablecoins and cross-chain transfer simultaneously, replacing wrapped assets across the Crypto.com ecosystem.

OKX opened a beta marketplace where AI agents get hired and paid in stablecoins - The exchange’s new agent marketplace lets autonomous agents list services, take tasks, and settle in USDT or USDG through escrow or instant pay-per-call.

👋 That’s your stablecoin scoop for the week!

Until next time — AllScale Weekly

👉 Learn how AllScale can help your team pay, invoice, and scale globally