Market Overview & Growth Highlights

Total stablecoin market cap reached $302.873b, with a week-over-week decrease of $2.063b. In terms of market structure, USDT continues to maintain its dominant position at 60.93%; USDC ranks second with a market cap of $73.315b, accounting for 24.21%.

Blockchain Network Distribution

Top 3 Networks by Stablecoin Market Cap:

1. Ethereum: $165.126bb

2. Tron: $78.885b

3. BSC: $13.259b

Top 3 Networks by Weekly Growth:

1. crvUSD (crvUSD):+69.83%

2. M by M0 (M) :+17.51%

3. Circle USYC (USYC)：+12.02%

Data from DefiLlama

Welcome to Cobo Stable Weekly, Issue 32

The stablecoin landscape is starting to split in visible ways.

Most major players are pivoting toward B2B infrastructure, with institutional depth becoming the new point of certainty. Ripple is pushing aggressively into enterprise M&A, Tether is extending down to the settlement layer through its acquisition of Parfin, and both Yellow Card and Spark have stepped back from retail. The center of gravity is moving quickly toward institutions.

Amid this shift, a small group of crypto-native teams is leaning the other way. Aave and Coinbase are betting on consumer-facing on-chain savings with higher yields and lower risk, expanding the edges of what “on-chain savings” can mean. It’s the riskiest frontier—and often where the longest-term value emerges.

When the same functions—saving, payments, investing—can run at lower cost and with higher returns, the pressure lands not only on banks but also on FinTechs built on net-interest margins and distribution scale. The cost structure of decentralization may be rewriting some of finance’s underlying assumptions.

🎯 Coinbase and the Crypto Super‑App Moment

This week, users found new “Stocks” and “Predictions” fields inside the public code of the Coinbase app, hinting at upcoming support for tokenized equities and prediction markets. If shipped—possibly soon—Coinbase users would gain a broader surface area in a single interface: participate in prediction markets, hold tokenized securities, or hedge positions using on-chain products. Paired with last week’s launch of a regulated, above-bank-yield GBP savings account in the U.K., the direction is clear: Coinbase is tightening the loop between trading, payments, savings, and investing, shaping the Base app into an early prototype of a crypto-native super app.

This follows the company’s broader shift over the past year—from exchange to financial hub. Coinbase introduced the Base app in Los Angeles in July, originally a simple self-custody wallet tied to its Layer-2 network. It now bundles trading, payments, on-chain identity, social features, and even AI agents. The consumer interface is being rebuilt as a multi-layered operating system for personal finance. By funneling exchange users into the Base ecosystem, Coinbase converts one-off trades into ongoing on-chain activity. The GBP savings account acts as an entry point for yield-seeking, risk-averse users; once they enter Base, Coinbase can cross-sell higher-margin products—prediction markets, tokenized securities, on-chain payments—and turn occasional traders into daily participants. It mirrors the logic of every durable platform: once funds and activity stay on the platform, each new feature amplifies the rest. The endgame is an ecosystem with its own economic gravity—a place where capital, identity, and activity coexist.

Becoming a super app means merging payments, savings, investing, and social features into one interface, much like Alipay and wechat. But a crypto-native super app is structurally different. Web2 finance sits on top of the banking system; the crypto version runs its own. That changes both control and economics. Traditional fintech depends on being an intermediary and earns through transaction fees, FX spreads, or net-interest margins. Coinbase’s Base-centric model internalizes the rails: it controls the settlement layer (Base), the liquidity layer (USDC reserves with Circle), and the front-end interface. Each layer generates revenue—Base’s sequencing fees and yield on stablecoin reserves. The former reached $68 million in Q1 2025, nearly doubling quarter-over-quarter, and could become one of Coinbase’s most durable cash-flow engines as more on-chain behavior moves onto Base.

This repositioning places Coinbase in direct competition not only with Robinhood, which is moving from equities into crypto, but also with hybrid fintechs like SoFi, Revolut, and a wave of stablecoin-driven challengers trying to define the next consumer wallet. The coming generational wealth transfer—and the question of where that capital ultimately lands—is one of the most interesting dynamics today. Coinbase’s bet, and the trend it represents, will depend not just on feature breadth but on migration depth: whether tens of millions of users still parked in centralized accounts can actually move on-chain and build their financial lives there—accounts, portfolios, and daily activity included.

🎯Aave’s Bet on the Retail Frontier

The dominant narrative now is institutional depth—Ripple’s enterprise-heavy acquisition strategy, Tether extending down to the settlement layer through Parfin, and retail exits from players like Yellow Card and Spark all reinforce the same consolidation arc. Yet a few crypto-native teams continue to push in the opposite direction. Perhaps it’s cultural wiring, but crypto-native companies remain more willing to test DeFi’s usability directly with consumers.

Aave Labs is one of them. Its newly released DeFi savings app targets everyday users with 5%–9% yields, hiding blockchain complexity behind a neobank-style interface. Fixed rates, up to $1 million in coverage, zero fees, and instant settlement package DeFi’s structural cost advantages in a Web2-like banking experience. If it works, open finance could cross a long-standing trust barrier and enter mainstream savings for the first time. Coinbase represents the adjacent path: leveraging compliance and brand trust to migrate trading users into its Base App super-wallet, merging bank-like yield and custody and then steering users into higher-margin verticals—tokenized securities, prediction markets, on-chain payments—searching for a new equilibrium between safety and returns.

Crypto-native companies are acting as the sector’s most aggressive explorers, trying to reopen the consumer market. Compared with B2B, consumer-facing stablecoin products must solve harder front-end problems: UX, FDIC-/FSCS-like trust guarantees, and the education overhead that comes with abstract systems. The revenue structure is thinner and more dispersed, dependent on scale and user stickiness. But those same hurdles create long-term strategic value. A durable consumer account base can become the next financial entry point.

Across both DeFi players like Aave and regulated giants like Coinbase, the trajectory converges toward open, low-cost, bank-like functionality. The services will look increasingly similar—fixed yield, insurance, instant transfer, zero-fee UX, diversified asset management—but delivered with far lower cost structures than banks and better liquidity profiles than fintech platforms. When identical financial functions can be delivered with lower cost and higher efficiency, the disruption stretches beyond traditional banking and into fintech’s scale-driven model. In that sense, Aave’s success or failure matters for more than the product itself; it is a test of whether the crypto-native bank can become a credible substitute for banks and fintech alike.

Market Adoption

🌱Taurus, which provides digital-asset infrastructure to nearly 40 banks including State Street and Deutsche Bank, has integrated Kaiko’s standardized market and liquidity data sourced from hundreds of centralized and decentralized venues. Kaiko’s feeds will be available natively within the Taurus platform, improving institutional valuation, transparency, and compliance while lowering operational overhead. Both firms have expanded rapidly through multiple funding rounds as they deepen their roles in institutional-grade custody, data, and trading infrastructure. Embedding high-quality market data directly into bank-adopted systems strengthens risk management and pricing standards and accelerates the convergence of traditional finance and digital-asset markets.

🌱World App has begun piloting virtual bank accounts in the U.S., giving users standalone account numbers that can receive payroll and other bank deposits without requiring employers to interact with crypto or cover gas fees. Incoming funds are automatically converted to USDC, enabling fee-free top-ups, cross-border transfers, and instant spending, positioning the feature as a simplified fiat on-ramp. The pilot launches in the U.S. first, with additional countries to follow, and builds on Sam Altman’s World project, which uses World ID to create a verifiable global digital identity layer. By linking mainstream income flows directly to stablecoins, the initiative embeds on-chain dollars into everyday finance and accelerates the shift from crypto-native use cases to global payments and identity-driven financial infrastructure.

🌱Opera’s MiniPay wallet, integrated into the browser and used by more than 10 million people, now supports local payments in Brazil and Argentina, enabling USDT QR-code spending with instant conversion to local currency. The rollout connects MiniPay to Brazil’s PIX and Argentina’s Mercado Pago, with infrastructure provider Noah handling real-time FX so merchants receive only fiat and never touch crypto. MiniPay is also expanding on- and off-ramps through partners like El Dorado, AlfredPay, and Paytrie, with plans to extend the feature across more Latin American markets and Canada. By leveraging browser-level distribution and a large user base, MiniPay brings stablecoins into mainstream payment networks, delivering one of the first scalable models for everyday on-chain dollar usage.

🌱Alibaba.com will begin using JPMorgan’s JPMD blockchain infrastructure to process tokenized USD- and EUR-denominated deposits, enabling faster cross-border payments with lower correspondent-bank and FX costs. Unlike stablecoins issued by non-banks, tokenized deposits are created directly by banks and sit on their balance sheets, offering clearer regulatory treatment and operational reliability. Alibaba is initially focusing on bank-issued tokenized deposits to ensure compliance but may explore stablecoins later. The move signals a major step toward shifting global e-commerce payments and trade settlement onto blockchain-based rails.

New Launches

👀Circle has introduced xReserve, an on-chain reserve and attestation system that allows blockchains to issue USDC-backed stablecoins that remain fully interchangeable 1:1 with native USDC, removing reliance on third-party bridges. Working alongside Circle’s CCTP and Circle Gateway, xReserve unifies cross-chain liquidity through a mint-burn flow that enables seamless value transfer across networks. Canton and Stacks will be the first to integrate xReserve and issue USDC-backed assets tailored to their ecosystems. By standardizing liquidity between “bridged USDC” and native USDC under one framework, xReserve reshapes the stablecoin cross-chain model, reduces trust and security overhead, and pushes multi-chain environments toward native interoperability.

👀Revolut has adopted Polygon as its core blockchain rail to support zero-fee cross-border remittances, USDC/USDT transfers, in-app crypto card payments, and POL staking. The first phase is already live inside the Revolut app, enabling users to move value in and out through Polygon, with total processed volume reaching $690 million. Mastercard and DeCard have also integrated Polygon—bringing Crypto Credential to self-custody wallets and adding merchant stablecoin payment support—showing that major payment networks are accelerating blockchain adoption. Polygon is emerging as a central hub for global payments and stablecoin infrastructure, marking the shift from experimentation to large-scale practical deployment.

👀Mastercard has adopted Polygon for its Crypto Credential system, enabling users to send and receive crypto with verifiable usernames rather than raw wallet addresses. The system uses Mercuryo’s APIs and Polygon’s on-chain identity layer to bind unique usernames to self-custody wallets, issuing credential tokens that signal support for verified transfers and reduce address-entry errors. Designed for low-cost, high-throughput transactions, the setup lowers the usability barrier for crypto wallets and brings the experience closer to mainstream payment apps. By adding an identity and trust layer to on-chain transfers, the approach improves usability and supports more regulation-friendly identity frameworks, paving the way for broader adoption of self-custody wallets in everyday payments.

👀Vitalik Buterin has unveiled Kohaku, an open-source privacy framework led by the Ethereum Foundation that provides modular tools for wallets to deliver on-chain privacy and security without relying on centralized intermediaries. Kohaku integrates systems like Railgun and Privacy Pools to enable compliant anonymity and “proof of innocence,” with future support planned for mixnets and ZK-enabled browsers to extend privacy from the application layer to the network layer. The Foundation has significantly expanded its privacy investment, creating a 47-person Privacy Cluster and reorganizing its research teams into Privacy Stewards to make privacy a default property of Ethereum. Kohaku signals Ethereum’s shift into the execution phase of its privacy roadmap, enabling mainstream wallets to offer built-in privacy and moving on-chain privacy from experimentation to practical infrastructure.

👀R25 has launched a yield-bearing RWA-backed stablecoin protocol on Polygon, introducing rcUSD+, a dollar-pegged asset that distributes interest generated from money-market funds and structured notes. The team says rcUSD+ is supported by multi-layer credit enhancement and will be composable across Polygon lending, collateral, and liquidity protocols to boost DeFi capital efficiency. As the RWA market expands and institutions push yield-bearing stablecoins into broader use, analysts note that these products are narrowing the return gap between crypto and traditional finance. The arrival of yield-enabled RWA stablecoins in major on-chain ecosystems positions them as foundational liquidity for institutional DeFi.

Capital Deployment

💰Tether has invested in Latin American crypto infrastructure provider Parfin to expand USDT’s role in institutional settlement and tokenization across the region, with financial terms undisclosed. The move aims to help banks and enterprises migrate more activity on-chain, improving cross-border payments and asset tokenization where local financial infrastructure is limited. Parfin offers custody, tokenization, and on-chain settlement tools used in trade finance, credit, and institutional payments, creating deeper USDT integration at the enterprise layer. The investment marks Tether’s shift from retail-led growth toward building institutional settlement networks in emerging markets, signaling a new phase where stablecoin competition centers on infrastructure penetration rather than sheer user scale.

💰Kalshi has raised $1 billion, lifting its valuation to $11 billion, doubling within a month and highlighting surging investor appetite for prediction markets. Operating under CFTC oversight with fiat on-ramps and clear legal pathways, Kalshi caters to institutions and retail users seeking regulatory certainty. Its valuation now approaches the $12–15 billion range targeted by crypto-native competitor Polymarket, setting up a contest between regulated centralized infrastructure and decentralized on-chain markets. The momentum signals prediction markets moving from a niche category to the edges of mainstream finance, with both compliant and on-chain models reshaping regulation, information trading, and retail participation.

💰 Obex has raised $37 million in a round led by Framework Ventures, LayerZero, and the Sky ecosystem to build a Y Combinator–style incubator for yield-bearing, RWA-collateralized stablecoins. Sky (formerly MakerDAO) has authorized up to $2.5 billion in USDS to support Obex projects with compliant risk management, underwriting systems, and technical infrastructure to avoid the depeg risks common in synthetic stablecoins. Obex will incubate teams working with high-quality collateral such as compute credit (GPU capacity), energy assets, and credit from major fintech companies, offering a 12-week acceleration program. As the stablecoin market moves toward trillion-dollar scale, RWA-backed and yield-enabled models are becoming the next competitive frontier, with institutions prioritizing stronger risk controls and infrastructure—pushing the next generation of stablecoins closer to regulatory-friendly, institution-grade standards.

💰Tether is in talks to lead a $1 billion investment in German robotics startup Neura Robotics, valuing the company at an expected $8–10 billion, a sharp jump from its €120 million raise earlier this year. Neura aims to mass-produce 5 million humanoid robots by 2030 and already holds €1 billion in orders across industrial and household applications. The global race in humanoid robotics is intensifying, with Tesla, Nvidia, SoftBank, and multiple startups accelerating AI-robotics integration. Stablecoin capital moving into core physical-AI infrastructure signals a new phase where crypto liquidity may help speed commercial deployment of humanoid robots.

💰Self has raised a $9 million seed round from Greenfield Capital, a SoftBank-affiliated fund, and several industry founders to scale its zero-knowledge identity platform. The protocol uses ZK proofs and verifiable credentials for privacy-preserving identity verification and is already integrated with Google, Aave, and Velodrome, supporting biometric passports, national IDs, and Aadhaar. Self also introduced a points program that rewards users for completing verifications and interacting on partner platforms, with more applications coming. The momentum signals faster adoption of privacy-preserving on-chain identity, enabling compliant airdrops and real-user verification across mainstream Web3 products.

Regulatory Compliance

🏛Basel is moving to rewrite its crypto capital rules after admitting the 1250% risk weight no longer fits real-world uses like stablecoins, custody, settlement, and node operations. The U.S. and U.K. have already declined to implement the current framework, accelerating a global reset. The U.S. OCC’s decision to let banks hold crypto for network-fee payments reflects a shift from viewing digital assets as speculative risk to treating them by function. With stablecoin supply near $300 billion, institutional needs are pressuring Basel to differentiate capital treatment by use-case. Updated rules could finally give banks a compliant path to hold on-chain native assets at scale. The change would move blockchain adoption in banking from experimentation to infrastructure.

🏛Canada’s Parliament has narrowly passed Prime Minister Mark Carney’s first budget, which includes a new stablecoin regulatory framework placing licensing and supervision under the Bank of Canada. Issuers will be required to maintain 1:1 high-quality reserves, offer instant redemption, and meet strict standards for risk management, cybersecurity, and disclosures, while being prohibited from offering any yield to users. Coinbase Canada’s CEO called the direction sound but urged a transition path for CAD-denominated stablecoins and flexibility for revenue-sharing to keep Canada competitive globally. The move brings Canada in line with U.S. and EU regulatory regimes, opening a compliant path for non-USD stablecoins and strengthening the country’s position in the emerging digital-currency landscape.

🏛The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has clarified in Interpretive Letter 1186 that national banks may hold crypto assets on their balance sheets when needed to pay blockchain gas fees. The policy applies to situations where banks must cover network costs for clients as part of agency or custody services and falls under permissible activities defined by the GENIUS Act. The shift reflects the OCC’s more open digital-asset posture under Comptroller Jonathan Gould, reversing the caution of earlier years. The clarification removes a key compliance hurdle for banks seeking to settle transactions on-chain, paving the way for smoother integration of stablecoins and blockchain rails into traditional financial infrastructure.

🏛The White House is reviewing a rule that would let the IRS access digital-asset transaction data from U.S. taxpayers on foreign platforms, aligning the U.S. with the global Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF). CARF requires service providers to report specified crypto transactions to improve tax compliance and curb capital flight to offshore exchanges, a move the administration says will reduce competitive disadvantages for domestic platforms. The proposal excludes DeFi and focuses on centralized platforms’ cross-border data. The shift brings crypto’s international flows squarely into the U.S. tax regime, strengthens global coordination, and accelerates alignment with emerging CARF standards.

🏛Hong Kong’s central bank has launched the Project Ensemble pilot, moving from sandbox tests to real-value settlement for tokenized deposits and digital assets. Running through 2026, the program will focus first on tokenized money-market fund transactions and interbank liquidity management before evolving into 24/7 tokenized central-bank money settlement. Regional hubs like Singapore are advancing similar tokenized-deposit and on-chain settlement systems, accelerating cross-border interoperability efforts. The pilot brings tokenized deposits into Hong Kong’s live financial infrastructure, laying groundwork for large-scale on-chain settlement and strengthening the city’s position in Asia’s fintech race.

Big Picture

🔮The Senate Banking Committee has advanced the nomination of FDIC acting chair Travis Hill in a 13–11 vote, sending his confirmation to the full Senate. If approved, Hill is expected to continue easing restrictions on banks engaging with crypto, positioning him as another crypto-friendly regulator under a Trump administration. Hill has pushed back against prior FDIC actions tied to “de-banking” concerns and sought to roll back guidance that discouraged banks from working with crypto firms, though Democrats criticized him for not fully addressing internal culture and oversight issues. The FDIC’s stance shapes whether banks can safely and compliantly offer digital-asset services; Hill’s confirmation could recalibrate risk expectations and reopen the door to deeper bank–crypto integration.

🔮Jefferies reports that Tether has rapidly expanded its gold holdings to at least 116 tons, making it one of the world’s largest non-central-bank holders. Roughly 12 tons back XAUt, while about 104 tons support USDT reserves, with Tether adding 26 tons in Q3 alone, equal to nearly 2% of global demand. The bank argues that gold’s 50% rally this year cannot be explained by traditional drivers, and that Tether’s emergence as a major new buyer is tightening supply and lifting sentiment. With USDT still growing and gold kept at roughly 7% of reserves, Tether may keep accumulating; Jefferies estimates 2025 profits at $15 billion, enough to add almost 60 tons annually if half were allocated to gold. Tether’s scale now makes it a meaningful force in global gold demand, signaling that stablecoin issuers are becoming active players in commodity markets and reshaping both reserve composition and international bullion flows.