This Week in Stablecoins: Interoperability vs Competing Interests

Interoperability is what the financial space has touted as a prerequisite for stablecoins to reach commercial scale. But, at the same time, the banks, card networks, stablecoin issuers, blockchain operators and infrastructure providers all building that interoperability are each simultaneously competing to control the layer through which digital money is routed, converted, settled and governed.

The headlines this week offered a clear indication that while the first battle was over whether stablecoins would become legitimate financial infrastructure, the next may be over who controls the infrastructure that makes different forms of digital money interchangeable.

Thirty-nine U.S. state banking associations are backing the BankChain Alliance, a bank-owned network intended to support tokenized deposits, stablecoins and programmable payments. Large, systemically important banks like J.P. Morgan that once treated stablecoins largely as a non-issue are reportedly reconsidering whether they need stablecoins of their own. And the British government wants to give the Bank of England an explicit secondary mandate to encourage innovation in payments and digital money, including stablecoins.

This is familiar territory for payments. The most durable businesses in the industry have rarely succeeded simply because they invented another way to represent money. They succeeded because they sat between institutions and made fragmented systems behave like networks.

Read more: This Week in Stablecoins: Crypto That Never Touches the Customer

Banks Stop Betting on a Single Digital Dollar Answer

The stablecoin debate’s battle lines have traditionally appeared straightforward. Cryptocurrency companies issued stablecoins. Banks defended deposits and experimented with tokenized versions of them. Those lines are blurring as banks move beyond the question of whether stablecoins or tokenized deposits win and prepare for the possibility that both do.

JPMorgan, for example, is reportedly considering a stablecoin alongside its tokenized-deposit infrastructure, while a broader group of banks that includes Bank of America and Wells Fargo is exploring a multi-currency stablecoin initiative. At the same time, JPMorgan, Citi, Wells Fargo and others continue developing tokenized-deposit capabilities.

JPMorgan already operates JPM Coin as a tokenized deposit through its Kinexys infrastructure. But tokenized deposits are institution-specific liabilities. Stablecoins can potentially travel more freely among wallets, applications and blockchain environments.

A multinational treasury department doesn’t necessarily want a stablecoin strategy, tokenized-deposit strategy and conventional-payment strategy. It wants money to arrive where it belongs, in the right currency, at the right time, for the lowest acceptable combination of cost, liquidity and risk.

At the same time, “Waiting for Certainty: Why Most CFOs Are Holding Back on Crypto and Stablecoins,” the March installment of PYMNTS Intelligence’s 2026 Certainty Project, showed that most middle-market companies remain cautious about digital assets. Usage is limited, with 13% of firms using stablecoins and 5% employing other cryptocurrencies.

Read more: SEC Rulemaking Is Giving Corporate Finance a New Crypto Hurdle Rate

Banks Don’t Want to Rent the Future of Money, Either

When several forms of money can accomplish the same commercial objective, choosing between them becomes a routing decision. And routing decisions create powerful intermediaries.

That helps explain why one word in the BankChain Alliance announcement, “owned,” matters more than “blockchain.” Instead of merely connecting to the digital-money ecosystem, participating banks want a stake in the infrastructure underneath it.

Stablecoins therefore pose a more complicated question for banks than deposit displacement. How much of a payment can leave the bank before the bank becomes the regulated balance sheet underneath somebody else’s product?

This is where the industry’s favorite word deserves more scrutiny. Almost everyone wants interoperability. Banks want tokenized deposits interoperable with other financial infrastructure. Stablecoin issuers want their tokens available across chains and platforms. Payment companies want digital and fiat currencies connected. Governments want domestic systems capable of participating in the emerging architecture without surrendering financial stability.

But interoperability does not eliminate competing interests. It reorganizes them. That makes the supposedly neutral interoperability layer one of the most commercially interesting places in the emerging stablecoin stack.

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