This Week in Stablecoins: FinTech, Big Tech and Regulation

Stablecoins are out there; now they just need to work. The next phase for stablecoins may focus less on issuance and more on interoperability in practice.

Multiple stablecoins, operating under different regulatory regimes, will need mechanisms to transact seamlessly with one another and with traditional bank money. When infrastructure becomes boring, it has usually won. Stablecoins are not there yet. But as the headlines this week reveal, they are getting closer.

Revolut, working with support from U.K. regulators, is exploring its own stablecoin initiative. Payoneer is applying for a bank charter to help scale its cross-border stablecoin payouts. Meta is again experimenting with tokenized money after the high-profile retreat of its earlier blockchain dollar project.

Stripe, meanwhile, is building a stablecoin-native blockchain designed explicitly for real-world commerce rather than crypto utility. At the same time, U.S. regulators including the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are signaling a path toward integrating stablecoins into regulated financial rails. Hong Kong reportedly will issue its first stablecoin license within weeks.

See also: Behind the Stablecoin Buzz, Old-School Infrastructure Still Runs the Show

Big Tech and Payments Players Circling Back

The significance of Revolut being chosen to take part in a Regulatory Sandbox program supported by the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) allowing companies trial stablecoin products in real world settings with proper safeguards is not that another FinTech wants to issue a digital token. It’s that companies built on top of legacy banking rails are now seeking to control their own settlement layers.

Revolut already operates at scale across currencies, cards, and remittances. A proprietary stablecoin would allow it to internalize liquidity flows that currently traverse correspondent banks, card networks and FX intermediaries.

Meta’s reported interest in on-chain money is another signal of the emergence of stablecoin utility. The company once attempted to build a global digital currency and was forced into retreat by regulators wary of private-sector monetary power. Its 2026 re-entry, which would entail a third-party partner, suggests that the regulatory climate has shifted.

And in another sign of that shift, cross-border payment FinTech Payoneer on Tuesday (Feb. 24) said it applied to the OCC to open a digital bank . If approved, PAYO Digital Bank would permit Payoneer to use the framework established by the GENIUS Act to bring stablecoin services to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) around the world. Payoneer’s announcement came one week after the company said it is adding stablecoin capabilities to its platform.

Elsewhere, Hong Kong-based stablecoin payments firm RedotPay is reportedly planning to go public. And PYMNTS unpacked how Stripe is moving beyond payment APIs in a bid to redesign financial rails with its own purpose-built blockchain for stablecoins and payments.

Read more: New SEC Guidance Pushes Stablecoins Closer to Cash Status

Regulation Moves to the Center

None of this acceleration would be possible without a parallel shift among regulators, who are increasingly treating stablecoins less as crypto curiosities and more as bank-adjacent instruments requiring clear oversight.

The PYMNTS Intelligence and Citi report “Chain Reaction: Regulatory Clarity as the Catalyst for Blockchain Adoption” found that blockchain’s next leap will be shaped by regulation; that evolving guidance is beginning to create the foundations for safe, scalable blockchain adoption; and that implementation challenges continue to complicate progress.

Standards bodies, custodians and infrastructure providers will play an outsized role in determining whether the stablecoin ecosystem fragments or coheres.

The OCC, for example, on Wednesday (Feb. 25) issued a proposed rulemaking to implement the GENIUS Act, a major step for the legislation’s enaction. The current proposed rule addresses standards and requirements related to activities, reserve assets, risk management, custody, capital and operational backstop, and other issues related to payment stablecoins.

Elsewhere, new guidance from the SEC allows firms to apply only a 2% “haircut” to certain stablecoins, counting 98% of their value toward regulatory capital. While the move is far from formal rulemaking, it signals for broker-dealers, tokenization platforms and institutional market infrastructure providers that stablecoins may be transitioning into a real-world operational tool.

Hong Kong’s forthcoming licensing regime, announced as part of the 2026 budget, offers another template for how jurisdictions can formalize issuance requirements, reserve management standards, and redemption guarantees. By committing to a defined approval timeline, the city is signaling that stablecoins are part of its broader ambition to position itself as a digital-asset finance hub.

See also: Banks and Stablecoin Wallets Battle for Digital Cash’s Front Door

In other stablecoin news, PYMNTS wrote Tuesday about the “unavoidable paradox” at the center of the coins’ growth story: these tokenized assets promise to modernize money by making dollars “programmable, portable and instantaneous,” but their most compelling benefit may not be technical at all.

“Instead, it may stem from something more prosaic, and potentially more controversial: the ability to move value through channels that ask fewer questions than the traditional banking system,” the report added.

Financial regulation, the report continued, is expensive by design, with banks investing billions each year on anti-money laundering (AML) programs, sanctions screening and regulatory reporting. Customers rarely notice these costs, but they play a role in everything from wire fees to onboarding timelines.

“Stablecoin ecosystems shift where those costs reside,” PYMNTS wrote. “Exchanges and regulated issuers perform know-your-customer when users convert fiat into tokens. But once assets enter the blockchain, transactions between self-custodied wallets occur outside of regulated financial institutions.”