Multiple stablecoins, operating under different regulatory regimes, will need mechanisms to transact seamlessly with one another and with traditional bank money. Stablecoins are out there; now they just need to work. But as the headlines this week reveal, they are getting closer. The next phase for stablecoins may focus less on issuance and more on interoperability in practice.
Revolut, working with support from U.K. regulators, is exploring its own stablecoin initiative. Payoneer is applying for a bank charter to help scale its cross-border stablecoin payouts. Meta is again experimenting with tokenized money after the high-profile retreat of its earlier blockchain dollar project. Stripe, meanwhile, is building a stablecoin-native blockchain designed explicitly for real-world commerce rather than crypto utility.
At the same time, U.S. regulators including the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are signaling a path toward integrating stablecoins into regulated financial rails. Hong Kong reportedly will issue its first stablecoin license within weeks. Revolut already operates at scale across currencies, cards, and remittances. A proprietary stablecoin would allow it to internalize liquidity flows that currently traverse correspondent banks, card networks and FX intermediaries.
And in another sign of that shift, cross-border payment FinTech Payoneer on Tuesday (Feb. 24) said it applied to the OCC to open a digital bank. If approved, PAYO Digital Bank would permit Payoneer to use the framework established by the GENIUS Act to bring stablecoin services to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) around the world. Payoneer’s announcement came one week after the company said it is adding stablecoin capabilities to its platform. Elsewhere, Hong Kong-based stablecoin payments firm RedotPay is reportedly planning to go public.
PYMNTS unpacked how Stripe is moving beyond payment APIs in a bid to redesign financial rails with its own purpose-built blockchain for stablecoins and payments. None of this acceleration would be possible without a parallel shift among regulators, who are increasingly treating stablecoins less as crypto curiosities and more as bank-adjacent instruments requiring clear oversight.
The OCC, for example, on Wednesday (Feb. 25) issued a proposed rulemaking to implement the GENIUS Act, a major step for the legislation’s enaction. The current proposed rule addresses standards and requirements related to activities, reserve assets, risk management, custody, capital and operational backstop, and other issues related to payment stablecoins. The SEC allows firms to apply only a 2% “haircut” to certain stablecoins, counting 98% of their value toward regulatory capital. While the move is far from formal rulemaking, it signals for broker-dealers, tokenization platforms and institutional market infrastructure providers that stablecoins may be transitioning into a real-world operational tool.
Hong Kong’s forthcoming licensing regime, announced as part of the 2026 budget, offers another template for how jurisdictions can formalize issuance requirements, reserve management standards, and redemption guarantees. By committing to a defined approval timeline, the city is signaling that stablecoins are part of its broader ambition to position itself as a digital-asset finance hub. In other stablecoin news, PYMNTS wrote Tuesday about the “unavoidable paradox” at the center of the coins’ growth story: these tokenized assets promise to modernize money by making dollars “programmable, portable and instantaneous,” but their most compelling benefit may not be technical at all. The report added.
Financial regulation, the report continued, is expensive by design, with banks investing billions each year on anti-money laundering (AML) programs, sanctions screening and regulatory reporting. Customers rarely notice these costs, but they play a role in everything from wire fees to onboarding timelines. Stablecoin ecosystems shift where those costs reside.
Exchanges and regulated issuers perform know-your-customer when users convert fiat into tokens. But once assets enter the blockchain, transactions between self-custodied wallets occur outside of regulated financial institutions.
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