Circle and Fireblocks Team to Help Promote Stablecoin Adoption

Stablecoin issuer Circle has launched a collaboration with digital asset platform Fireblocks.

The partnership, announced Tuesday (Sept. 9), is aimed at making it easier and safer for financial institutions to develop digital asset offerings.

The combination of Circle’s stablecoin network and Fireblocks’ custody and payments infrastructure and network will “provide cross-border treasury and tokenized asset settlement,” the companies said in a news release.

“Together, Circle and Fireblocks are working to build the trusted rails that enable stablecoin-based finance at a global scale,” said Michael Shaulov, Fireblocks co-founder and chief executive.

“By combining Circle’s stablecoin expertise with our institutional infrastructure, we’re empowering financial institutions to innovate with confidence. Those who move now will set the standard for tomorrow’s financial ecosystem.”

“The future of money is programmable, and this collaboration with Fireblocks can make that future real for institutions worldwide,” added Jeremy Allaire, Circle’s co-founder, chairman and CEO. “Together, we’re creating a seamless infrastructure that makes it simple to harness the power of stablecoins for payments, treasury operations and settlement.”

The release noted that the rise of stablecoins has set the stage for financial institutions (FIs) to create new value and strengthen client relationships.

However, FIs are also under pressure to quickly introduce stablecoin-based products while also meeting compliance and security requirements and to access “diverse liquidity providers to serve customer settlement and pricing needs,” all while adhering to changing regulatory, operational and technological demands.

“The collaboration between Circle and Fireblocks can provide the infrastructure to meet these challenges head-on, enabling institutions to bring custody, tokenization, and stablecoin payments into production with confidence,” the release added.

In other stablecoin news, PYMNTS wrote Tuesday about the challenges facing payment processors, card networks and FinTech platforms in integrating stablecoins. It’s a costly effort, requiring investments into technical development, compliance approvals, fraud monitoring and customer education. Putting those resources into an issuer that fails to scale can lead to sunk costs and reputational exposure.

“For finance teams, ultimately the lesson may be to not to be mesmerized by transparency reports or reserve audits alone,” PYMNTS wrote. “The viability of a stablecoin can be as much a question of sustainable business modeling as it is of collateral management. Payment firms, likewise, can weigh the cost of integration against the probability that a given coin will ever achieve the scale to justify its presence in the market.”