Banks, Cards and Creators Push Stablecoins Into Financial Mainstream

The stablecoin pitch has always been a digital token that maintains a stable value, usually pegged to a fiat currency, while inheriting the speed, programmability and global reach of blockchains.

What that pitch can leave out, however, is everything that makes money usable at scale. That includes compliance, consumer protection, liquidity management, accounting standards and integration with existing payment rails.

But that gap is now closing, and some of the most telling developments this week came from the banking sector itself.

On Wednesday (Jan. 7), Digital Asset and Kinexys by J.P. Morgan announced a collaboration bringing Kinexys by J.P. Morgan’s products to Digital Asset’s Canton Network, a privacy-enabled blockchain network designed for synchronized financial markets. Also Wednesday, Barclays announced it purchased a stake in Ubyx, a U.S. stablecoin settlement company.

Capping it all off, PYMNTS and Citigroup announced the launch of a weekly podcast series aimed at giving corporate leaders practical guidance on stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets. Called “From the Block: Straight Talk on Stablecoins and Digital Assets for Corporate Leaders,” the show will be co-hosted by PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster and Citi Global Head of Digital Assets, Treasury and Trade Solutions Ryan Rugg. The first episode will debut Tuesday (Jan. 13).

Read also: The Stablecoin Wallet Playbook for CFOs and Treasury Teams

Stablecoins Move From Speculative Asset to Settlement Primitive

At the consumer and merchant level, the digital asset shift is even more striking because it is being framed as anything but cryptocurrency.

This week, Stripe expanded its crypto payment capabilities, enabling millions of merchants to accept blockchain-based payments with minimal friction. From a user experience perspective, little changes. Customers still click “pay.” Merchants still receive funds they can spend or convert. But under the hood, the rails are different.

What Stripe’s move underscores is that the future of stablecoins is not about convincing people to care about blockchains. It is about abstracting them away.

In the same vein, the stablecoin company Rain announced Friday (Jan. 9) that it raised $250 million in a Series C funding round to scale its infrastructure for stablecoin payments and add new capabilities and products.

Rain’s platform enables companies to launch compliant stablecoin cards that work everywhere Visa is accepted, offer rewards, convert fiat into stablecoins, power secure wallets and facilitate payouts.

Stablecoins may prove to be the most transformative chapter in digital payments because they merge money movement and reconciliation into a single digital packet, Rain CEO and co-founder Farooq Malik told PYMNTS in an interview posted in September.

It’s “the holy grail of money since the beginning of time,” Malik said.

Total stablecoin transaction volumes topped out at $33 trillion in 2025, Bloomberg reported Thursday (Jan. 8), citing data from Artemis Analytics.

See also: Tokenized Deposits Steal Stablecoin Buzz — and the Business Model

What It Means for the Future of Money

Perhaps the most underappreciated stablecoin story this week came from creator platforms. Rumble announced Wednesday a partnership with stablecoin issuer Tether to enable audiences to tip creators natively in the Tether stablecoin (USDT), Tether Gold (XAUt) and Bitcoin (BTC).

Mark Nelsen, head of product for Visa Commercial Money Solutions, discussed this topic during a November interview with PYMNTS.

“There are 30 million creators, and they’re in all these markets where the local currency isn’t really strong,” he said. “That’s where stablecoins can offer a sweet spot in being able to say, ‘We can pay you immediately.’”

YouTube has also begun letting creators on its platform get paid in PayPal’s stablecoin.

Outside of the creator economy, U.S. states are also getting into the stablecoin issuance arena. On Wednesday, the state of Wyoming officially launched the Frontier Stable Token ($FRNT).

Earlier this year, PYMNTS interviewed two of the executives involved in the project, Rain’s Malik and Morgan Krupetsky, vice president of on-chain finance at Ava Labs.

“This is a different category of token that we haven’t seen before,” Malik said. “And it has a lot of really interesting opportunities for the state to embed itself into how money moves.”

Elsewhere, a subsidiary of World Liberty Financial, the decentralized finance company co-founded by members of the Trump family, has submitted an application to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to establish a national trust bank purpose-built for stablecoin operations.