For most of their first decade, stablecoins lived inside crypto, sitting on exchanges as dry powder between trades. Supply rose from $27 billion at the end of 2020 to more than $300 billion today.
A significant portion of that growth now occurs outside the order book. Cross-border flows into the US alone total nearly $127 billion a month, and businesses settled $226 billion in B2B payments in stablecoins last year, according to Artemis Analytics.
The expansion has caught the attention of the institutions it threatened. Banking groups pressed Congress to stop crypto firms from paying rewards on stablecoin balances, arguing that a token paying interest is a deposit in disguise.
The lobbying has not deterred new entrants. Visa, BlackRock, Google, and DoorDash have lined up behind Open USD, a stablecoin set to launch this year, in a market that Tether and Circle still dominate.
So banks have begun asking a different question: whether they need a coin of their own, if only to defend the ground they already hold.
BeInCrypto spoke with experts from Triple-A, ChangeNOW, Infinia, StraitsX, and others about what changed in 2026 and whether a bank coin is actually worth it for customers.
The Banks Stopped Watching
The shift is visible in recent initiatives. On September 1, 21 financial institutions, including Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, and Deutsche Bank, committed to setting up a new company in the second half of 2026 to issue a stablecoin.
The group plans a dollar token for the first half of 2027, with a euro version to follow, and says the product will be compliant with the GENIUS Act and MiCA.
The consortium is not alone. SoFi Bank opened its stablecoin, SoFiUSD, to nearly 15 million members inside its app in May, five months after launching it for enterprise clients. JPMorgan, absent from the 21, runs its JPMD deposit token on Base.
In Hong Kong, HSBC plans to launch a Hong Kong dollar (HKD) denominated stablecoin in the second half of 2026. Something shifted this year to make the trouble of issuing a stablecoin worth taking on.
Tianwei Liu, CEO and co-founder of StraitsX, a Major Payment Institution (MPI) licensed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), says 2026 has been an inflection point for stablecoins, with regulatory clarity and institutional adoption making the cost of sitting out harder to ignore.
“For banks, issuing a stablecoin is a way to stay on the rails as the underlying infrastructure evolves.”
Liu explained that the stablecoin sandwich illustrates this opportunity well. Essentially, a stablecoin effectively sits between two fiat payment systems, connecting them.
The user and merchant don’t necessarily need to hold or interact with the stablecoin directly; it can operate behind the scenes as the settlement asset, making the transaction faster and cheaper.
He added that does put pressure on traditional banking revenues, particularly cross-border payment economics. However, it is not necessarily a major threat to banks themselves.
Ianai Urwicz, co-founder and CEO of Infinia, puts a number on what banks stand to lose.
“In 2025, global B2B stablecoin payments surged 733% year-on-year to $226 billion, proving that corporate treasurers are actively bypassing legacy correspondent banking networks to avoid multi-day settlement delays and high FX friction. This represents an immediate threat of deposit flight: Recent numbers show that up to $1 trillion in emerging-market bank deposits could migrate into stablecoins over the next three years.”
According to Urwicz, traditional banks are realizing that staying on the sidelines means surrendering their most valuable corporate liquidity pools, treasury relationships, and transactional fee revenues to regulated on-chain innovators.
Two other experts traced the change to the GENIUS Act.
Vincent Chok, CEO and co-founder of First Digital, says banks were waiting for regulators to open the doors for them to participate.
“The law changed. The GENIUS Act gave banks a rulebook where there was previously only uncertainty, defining what a stablecoin is and what is required before issuing one…The second reason is volume. Stablecoin transaction volume passed $28 trillion in the first quarter of 2026, settling on networks where banks have historically had limited control or participation. When money moves at that scale outside a bank’s control, it becomes difficult to ignore.”
Alex Witt, founding general partner at Verda Ventures, agrees that the act opened the door.
“GENIUS gave banks a federal perimeter to issue inside, and the market showed them the cost of waiting…The threat is the spread. Stablecoins exposed how fragile the zero-yield deposit model is, which is why the CLARITY yield fight was never about consumer protection.”
Issuing a coin lets banks keep the float. Meanwhile, data from Stablescape, Verda Ventures’ live index of stablecoin companies, suggests they’re entering a consolidating layer. New issuer formation fell 7% in 2025 and is down 34% so far this year.
The Customer’s Side of the Ledger
The case for banks is clear enough. A stablecoin lets them keep the float, hold on to corporate clients, and stay on rails they no longer control. The case for the customer is less obvious.
A business that switches from a bank account to a bank-issued token is not buying speed alone. It is trading one set of protections for another, and the sums involved are not small.
For a business holding $1 million in a bank account for supplier payments, the calculation comes down to two things. How much does the token save on the way out, and what protection disappears the moment the money leaves the deposit account?
Witt draws the line at the border.
“Move it when suppliers are cross-border and settlement time is eating working capital; on-chain, that $1 million recycles several times a day instead of sitting pre-funded for three days. If suppliers are domestic on ACH, don’t bother. What you give up is that a bank stablecoin isn’t a deposit: no FDIC insurance, no yield under current rules, and an issuer freeze-and-burn capability. The trade is yield and insurance for velocity, worth it on the portion that moves and not on the portion that sits.”
How much that speed saves depends on where the money is going. Asked to walk through one live cross-border payment, Eric Barbier, CEO of Triple-A, a global payment institution, picked one from his own client book.
“Take an African car dealer paying a Japanese exporter for vehicles, a real use case from one of our clients. A traditional international wire can cost 3–5% once you include FX spreads and intermediary fees, and it may take several business days. Using stablecoin rails, the value can move in a dollar stablecoin within minutes, while the exporter receives JPY in Japan. On a $100,000 payment, bringing the all-in cost below 1% can save several thousand dollars.”
The savings are real. Where they end up is another matter. Bernardo Brites, co-founder and CEO of Trace Finance, argues the token is the easy half.
“Issuing the token is easy; owning the local FX and settlement leg on the other end is what actually determines the customer’s savings. We move more than one billion dollars a month for multiple large corporate and our margin is a single, disclosed spread because we hold both sides, the digital dollar and the local rail. A bank-issued stablecoin without that local infrastructure just hands the economics to whichever partner does own it. BIS’s interoperability concern is really this same gap, dressed as a technical problem.”
Can the Coin Leave the Bank?
Every bank in the consortium can issue a token. The harder question is whether the token can leave.
Even the BIS, which questions whether stablecoins of any kind can yet do the job of money and favours tokenized deposits instead, sees the same interoperability gap in what banks have built so far.
Speaking at Jackson Hole on August 28, general manager Pablo Hernández de Cos said much of it either sits on closed platforms or is better described as bank-issued stablecoins, and that those tokens share many of the same shortcomings as existing stablecoins. A token that clears inside one bank’s walls is only half a payment rail.
Tim Stanyakin, Head of Growth at ChangeNOW, explained that banks already cooperate through existing payment and settlement infrastructure.
The question is whether their stablecoins will extend that interoperability or create new, closed digital money ecosystems.
“Bank-backed stablecoins could give users something they already understand: a familiar institution behind their digital money, with clearer regulatory recourse. But the real value will depend on what users can do with these tokens beyond the issuing bank.”
The failure mode is easy to picture.
“If Bank A’s stablecoin cannot interact seamlessly with Bank B’s token, public blockchains, or other digital assets, it risks becoming little more than a digitized version of the same fragmented payment system. Ultimately, users will care less about who issues the coin and more about where they can use it, how easily they can move it, and how quickly they can convert it into other forms of digital money.”
Chok of First Digital sees two things standing in the way: acceptance and regulation.
“A competing bank or a third-party payment app has to be willing to hold a token issued by a rival. This is a commercial decision rather than a technical one…The second is regulation. Banks operate under different rules in different countries, and as of today, there is no universally agreed framework for stablecoins across jurisdictions.”
The executive mentioned that until there is greater alignment across commercial acceptance and regulatory frameworks, a token that works only inside the bank that issued it cannot truly become a payment rail.
Witt says the friction is not in the token at all.
“The problem is that the token is fungible and the identity behind it is not: under proposed GENIUS rules, a receiving institution can rely on the sender’s KYC only if that sender is federally regulated, so every hop outside the perimeter triggers re-verification.”
The Corridors Already Have a Dollar
While the consortium drafts its charter, the independents are shipping. Circle switched on Arc’s public mainnet on September 16, a layer-1 network where fees are paid in USDC.
Validators include BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, Standard Chartered, and DTCC, among others. Open USD is due later this year, with more than 140 partners lined up to share its reserve income. And Tether’s USDT, at roughly $183 billion, is larger than every other stablecoin combined as of mid-September.
That is the market the banks are entering. Their advantage is obvious. A familiar name behind the token and a regulator to call when something goes wrong count for a lot.
But trust is only useful where the token is accepted, and that is where the independents still hold the ground.
Barbier of Triple-A says independent stablecoins have independence and a network advantage.
“They can move across banks, wallets, payment providers, and blockchains, rather than being tied to a single institution’s ecosystem.”
He added that a bank-issued stablecoin may work very well within that bank’s own network. The limitation appears when the payment needs to leave it.
“Cross-border businesses need money that can move between different institutions, platforms, and markets. So the real competition is not about who can issue a token. It is about whose money can travel furthest with the least friction.”
Witt locates that friction in a specific place: the countries where dollars are hard to get.
“A bank consortium coin will be excellent for institutional settlement in New York, but it won’t be the dollar a P2P desk in Lagos or a supplier in Buenos Aires actually quotes and holds; that’s USDT, built corridor by corridor over a decade with almost none of its $184.6 billion in circulation requiring U.S. approval.”
None of which means the banks lose. Liu of StraitsX drew the line.
“Banks that treat stablecoins purely as competition risk disintermediation. Those that integrate them into payments and treasury can capture the next generation of payment flows.”
The consortium coin arrives in the first half of 2027, if the timeline holds. By then, the corridors it needs will have had another year to settle on someone else’s dollar. Arc is live. Open USD is months away. The banks are drawing up the rulebook for a game already in its second half.
The post Why Banks Suddenly Want Stablecoins, and Why It May Matter for You appeared first on BeInCrypto.
