Visa, Goldman and Samsung Raise the Stakes for Stablecoins

Stablecoins spent years waiting for regulatory legitimacy. Now that legitimacy is creating a more complicated problem: almost everyone wants a piece of the business.

As a result, the biggest stablecoin news this week didn’t come from crypto-native companies. Visa launched a new Visa Stablecoin Platform (VSP) that gives financial institutions, FinTechs and crypto companies a single managed environment for minting, redeeming, holding and transferring stablecoins. Goldman Sachs’ CEO broke with parts of the banking lobby over pending crypto legislation while federal regulators confronted another implementation deadline and Samsung previewed stablecoin functionality inside its consumer wallet.

Individually, none of those developments settles the future of digital dollars. Collectively, they show that stablecoins are no longer primarily a cryptocurrency product. They are becoming a contested layer of financial infrastructure.

The Stablecoin Stack Is Up for Grabs

The week’s developments do not suggest that one company is winning. They suggest that the competitive battleground is shifting away from who issues the token and toward who controls the software, banking relationships, settlement infrastructure and consumer distribution that make digital dollars usable at scale.

That strategic tension is playing out in Washington, where a newly released draft of the text for the proposed Digital Asset Market Clarity Act is revealing a financial sector fault line of banks versus banks, with each institution assessing whether stablecoins threaten its existing economics or open a new line of business.

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, for example, has reportedly expressed support for advancing the Clarity Act, despite objections from banking trade groups concerned about the treatment of stablecoin rewards and the possibility of deposits migrating outside conventional banks. Goldman became a deposit-taking institution after the 2008 financial crisis.

Institutions dependent on low-cost deposits have reason to resist stablecoin products that resemble interest-bearing accounts. PYMNTS covered how on Friday (July 17) the European Central Bank added its voice to banks in the United States in warning that widespread adoption of stablecoins could pull retail deposits out of traditional banks, weakening a critical source of funding for lending.

Firms with large trading, custody, market-making and investment-banking businesses, however, may see more upside in the expansion of tokenized finance. The central question has shifted from whether stablecoins will be legal to what kind of company can profitably operate one.

Still, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Thursday (July 23) that he did not expect the Senate to pass crypto market structure legislation before the August recess, a significant blow to the supposed progress negotiations around the Clarity Act had spurred. At the same time, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is urging governments to bring decentralized finance platforms under anti-money laundering rules when developers, token holders or other identifiable parties retain meaningful control. It warned that many purportedly decentralized platforms are not as decentralized as they claim.

Distribution Remains the Missing Piece and Unproven Prize

Across the consumer end of the market, Samsung used its Wednesday (July 22) Galaxy Unpacked event to demonstrate stablecoin functionality inside Samsung Wallet. The interface reportedly showed USDC capabilities including sending, receiving and funding an account. The potential distribution is substantial because Samsung Wallet is already embedded in the company’s device ecosystem. But the demonstration came without a confirmed launch date or detailed rollout plan, making it a signal of intent rather than a finished consumer product.

The stablecoin industry has become adept at announcing infrastructure. It has been less successful at proving that mainstream consumers need a blockchain-based dollar for everyday domestic purchases. Existing card and bank-payment systems provide fraud protection, dispute resolution, credit and familiar rewards. Stablecoins must either reproduce those benefits or solve a problem conventional payments handle poorly.

A day earlier, on Tuesday, the financial operations platform Ramp announced it had begun offering customers stablecoin accounts and payments through a new business-focused offering.

Still, the PYMNTS Intelligence report “The Wallet Effect: How Credit Unions Can Close the Digital Currency Access Gap,” produced in collaboration with Velera, found that only 7% of credit union members said their institutions support cryptocurrency transactions, while 67% did not know whether that capability existed. Uncertainty was even greater around stablecoins, with 70% of members unsure whether their credit unions supported them.