Visa Launches Platform for Stablecoins; Predicts They Will Power Agentic Micro-Commerce

Visa has launched the Visa Stablecoin Platform, an enterprise initiative that will bring stablecoin services to more than 200 million Visa-affiliated merchants. The platform, which is currently available to select beta users, initially supports Circle’s USDC and Paxos’ USDG stablecoins. In the future it will also work with the planned Open USD stablecoin from the Open Standard consortia, of which Visa is a leading founding member.

Separately, in conjunction with analytics firm Artemis, Visa has released a report which predicts that stablecoins will power micro-commerce in the emerging agentic economy. Micro commerce relates to low-value transactions that take place autonomously between AI agents and software applications without any direct human instigation.

US and UK Governments Establish Shared Regulatory Principles for Stablecoins and Tokenised Assets

The US and UK Governments have issued a joint statement establishing shared regulatory principles for stablecoins and tokenized assets, aiming to align frameworks for cross-border access while retaining individual legal requirements.

According to the Transatlantic Taskforce for Markets of the Future, the guidelines advocate for 1:1 backing of stablecoins with high-quality liquid assets, timely redemption rights, and enhanced protection for holders’ claims on reserves.

The alignment also extends to testing cross-border use cases for tokenised assets and developing common approaches to tokenised securities settlement and collateral usage.

BridgePort Pilots Digital Asset Master Agreement to Streamline Off-Exchange Settlement Onboarding

Institutional digital-asset firms may be able to trade without placing assets directly on an exchange, but establishing the legal relationships behind that model can remain a lengthy process. BridgePort is seeking to reduce that friction with a common contractual framework for off-exchange settlement arrangements involving trading firms, custodians and execution venues.

The company is piloting the Digital Asset Master Agreement (DAMA), a reusable legal template intended to replace some of the bespoke negotiations required whenever counterparties establish a new off-exchange settlement relationship. BridgePort is forming a working group of trading firms, custodians and exchanges to test the framework across live arrangements.

Off-exchange settlement allows a trading firm to retain assets with a custodian while trading across multiple venues. The structure can reduce assets held directly at exchanges and make collateral available across a wider range of trading relationships. Its practical benefits, however, depend on agreements defining how collateral, credit, settlement and default will be handled between the three parties.

Those agreements can take months to negotiate because each relationship may involve different custody structures, regulatory obligations and operational processes. DAMA is designed to provide a common set of definitions and contractual provisions while preserving the ability to configure the terms for individual counterparties.

The framework can, for example, specify whether collateral is held in trust or pledged under a security interest. Participants can also determine whether DAMA operates independently or refers to an existing International Swaps and Derivatives Association agreement.

“The infrastructure for off-exchange settlement is largely in place,” said Nirup Ramalingam, CEO of BridgePort. “The next phase of this market depends on standardizing the legal foundation beneath it, as has happened in every institutional market before. A shared standard lowers the barrier to entry and gives the market room to scale. DAMA will give the industry that foundation.”

The agreement covers four areas that can create legal and operational uncertainty in off-exchange settlement relationships.

Its custody provisions define how collateral is safeguarded and segregated, including whether assets are held in trust or pledged. Settlement terms address how credit is extended against that collateral, how balances are reconciled and how the settlement cycle operates.

The operational provisions establish how parties respond to erroneous transfers, failed settlements and outages affecting the balance information exchanged between custodians and venues. Default and termination clauses cover events such as venue insolvency or failure, together with close-out procedures, termination rights and the return of collateral.

Standardising these provisions could reduce the amount of legal work required for each new connection. The wider effect will depend on whether custodians, venues and trading firms are prepared to adopt the framework rather than continue using their own agreements.

“The long-term value of standardization extends well beyond faster onboarding,” said Steve Bartfield, chief product officer at BridgePort. He added that commonly adopted frameworks could allow market participants, law firms and industry bodies to develop legal analysis, operational expertise and market practices that can be reused across the sector.

DAMA takes inspiration from the role that master agreements play in established financial markets, but it is intended specifically for the tri-party relationships underpinning digital-asset off-exchange settlement. The pilot will test whether a shared foundation can accommodate different regulatory, commercial and custody models without recreating the agreement for every relationship.

BridgePort provides middleware for coordinating credit allocation and post-trade activity between trading firms, exchanges and custodians. DAMA extends that coordination proposition into the legal layer, addressing an onboarding constraint that technology integrations alone cannot resolve.

Muriel Siebert Selects tZERO for Tokenised Securities

Muriel Siebert & Co. has selected tZERO to provide the digital securities infrastructure for its new asset tokenisation business. Siebert, which manages some $20 billion in assets, is deploying tZERO’s technology stack to support its expansion into DLT-based investments. The platform will handle the entire lifecycle of Siebert’s digital assets, covering investor onboarding, compliance, custody, and secondary market trading.

The first investment product to be supported on Siebert’s tZERO’s platform will be GLDY, a gold-backed, yield-bearing tokenised security developed by Streamex. Siebert will provide private placement services utiising Rule 506(c) of Regulation D under the Securities Act to offer tokenised securities to accredited investors through its traditional brokerage channels.

Circle Set to Diversify Services via Trust Bank

Circle, the issuer of the world’s largest regulated stablecoin – USDC – has received approval from the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to establish First National Digital Currency Bank, N.A., a national trust bank. The bank will operate under the name Circle National Trust.

Via its trust bank, Circle will be able to offer digital asset custody services to itself, its affiliates, and to a limited number of institutional customers. Those customers could include banks and other financial institutions, such as regulated derivatives organisations. It also can manage its USDC Reserve fund directly, reducing costs and bringing the operation under federal regulatory oversight to further enhance the safety, transparency, and trust of USDC.

Strategically, the trust capability allows Circle to diversify from mainly issuing stablecoins to becoming a fuller service infrastructure provider to institutions issuing tokenised assets. Such a broadening of its services could be important as Circle is likely to face increased competition for stablecoin issuance once the Open Standard’s Open USD launches later this year.

Robinhood Chain Launches with Dedicated Public Trading Pool

The Public Mainnet of Robinhood Chain has officially launched, creating a new institutional-grade Layer 2 blockchain built on the Arbitrum platform. The new chain connects directly to Robinhood’s base of onchain users and features tools for lending and borrowing. Focused on real-world assets, it offers application developers fast transaction speeds and was built with technology partners Alchemy, BitGo, and Chainlink.

The chain’s ecosystem supports a number of day-one partners to provide initial liquidity. Uniswap, a leading decentralised crypto exchange, is deploying a dedicated Automated Market Maker (AMM) to serve as the chain’s main public trading pool. Additionally, the Pleiades AMM will offer a private trading venue, helping to integrate advanced decentralised financial tools into everyday professional workflows.

Robinhood announced its mainnet alongside a slew of other offerings, including tokenised stock trading available in 120+ countries (but currently not the US, Canada or the UK) and agentic AI-driven crypto trading.

Bloomberg Taps Kaiko to Add Broadridge’s Onchain Data to its Terminal

Bloomberg has added Broadridge’s Distributed Ledger Repo (DLR) platform data to its Terminal, marking the first time the service has included live data from a blockchain-native fixed income market. Distributed through Kaiko’s regulated data infrastructure, Bloomberg now publishes daily repo par value, turnover, and trade count alongside traditional fixed income data.

This development is a significant milestone for institutional investor workflows. The DLR platform currently processes $7.5 trillion in monthly volume (a 457% year-over-year increase) and handles $362 billion in daily settlements.

Kaiko provided the technology bridge from data held on Broadridge’s DLT to Bloomberg’s formatting, entitlement, and compliance standards.

Chainlink’s DLT-Based Project Pangea Tackles T+0 FX Settlement

Oracle provider Chainlink’s Project Pangea has assembled 50+ banks across 16 countries to bring DLT-powered real-time atomic settlement to the $9.6 trillion per day foreign exchange market.

The project’s bank partners include members of three European and Korean consortia, while the technology base comprises Chainlink’s CCIP (Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol), Swift’s ISO 20022 messaging service and DLT-based settlement technology from FairSquareLab, a Korean digital asset infrastructure developer.

FairSquareLab’s onchain settlement technology uses stablecoin transfers and smart contracts running on Ethereum, Polygon, and a proprietary L1 network. Banks access Pangea via existing Swift connections while Chainlink supports digital asset transfers and FX market data.

State Street Launches GENIUS Act Stablecoin Fund

State Street Investment Management has launched the State Street Stablecoin Reserves Money Market Fund, a regulated money market fund designed to support stablecoin issuers. The fund, which complies with the recently introduced GENIUS Act, offers a regulated reserve option for stablecoin issuers. State Street Bank and Anchorage Digital are the first investors in the fund.

Already the largest real-world application of DLT, USD-denominated stablecoins account for trillions of dollars in annual transactions. Since they are typically backed by short-term U.S. Treasury debt, the U.S. government views them as strategic to the country’s economy and as a result, issuers are required to maintain secure, liquid, and regulated funding pools.

Since money market funds currently represent the single largest tokenised asset category, the addition of funds designed to back stablecoins represents increased convergence of the traditional and digital asset securities spaces.

EIB Issues Commercial Paper on Clearstream’s D7 DLT; Looks to Hybrid Platform

The European Investment Bank (EIB) has issued the first DLT-native, Euro-denominated commercial paper on Clearstream’s D7 DLT platform. The EUR 77.5 million issuance was made in compliance with Europe’s Central Securities Depositories Regulation (CSDR) and involved Citi as sole dealer and issuing/paying agent, as well as BIL, DekaBank, DZ BANK, Eurex Clearing, Union Investment and Volksbank Mittlerer Schwarzwald as primary investors.

Subsequently, DekaBank and Eurex Clearing were able to demonstrate collateral mobility for the DLT-based tokenised securities through Clearstream’s triparty collateral management solution and the European Collateral Management System to support financing with the Bundesbank.

Launched in 2025 following substantial trials with the European Central Bank, D7 DLT is a private, permissioned distributed ledger platform designed by Clearstream in collaboration with Google Cloud.

Following the EIB issuance, Clearstream has announced plans to create a hybrid infrastructure to support both traditional and digital securities. Market participants will be able to hold and combine traditional securities, DLT-based tokenised securities and cash in a single portfolio.

The hybrid offering will launch in stages during 2026 and 2027. Subject to regulatory approval, it will cover the entire securities lifecycle, from issuance, distribution, settlement and custody, through to asset servicing, liquidity and financing.