Karla Barker 
When Standard Chartered said it would offer institutional clients direct access to minting and redeeming Circle Internet’s USDC this week, it wasn’t simply adding another digital asset service. Rather, it was joining a growing list of global financial institutions building product offerings around stablecoins. These fiat-pegged tokens were once retail investors’ refuge from crypto market volatility but increasingly form part of the plumbing in financial institutions worldwide.
Chainalysis estimates stablecoin settlement volumes could reach a quadrillion dollars per year by 2030. Standard Chartered’s announcement came just days after BNY, the world’s largest custody bank, expanded its support for USDC by letting institutional clients custody, mint, and redeem the stablecoin using its infrastructure instead of building their own. Both Standard Chartered and BNY, which holds roughly $59 trillion in assets under management, are considered global systemically important banks by the Bank for International Settlements’ Basel Committee.
Established networks gain traction
Their decisions reflect a pattern among some lenders toward using established stablecoin networks rather than creating proprietary systems. The moves suggest the conversation inside banking has shifted. The question seems no longer whether stablecoins belong in finance, but how banks fit into the networks forming around them.
“Banks aren’t asking whether they’ll use stablecoins anymore,” said Andrew MacKenzie, founder and CEO of Scotland-based stablecoin issuer Agant. “They’re deciding how they’ll use them.”
The discussion intensified this week after Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire responded to the launch of OpenUSD, a rival stablecoin backed by companies including Coinbase, payment firm Stripe, and asset manager BlackRock. Allaire argued that USDC’s position depends on nearly a decade of building liquidity, banking relationships, and regulatory approvals.
Adrian Cachinero Vasiljevic, a co-founder at Steakhouse Financial which advises institutions on decentralized finance, agrees the ecosystem surrounding a stablecoin matters greatly. “The network is what creates the value,” he said. “The stablecoin itself becomes almost secondary.”
New entrants in Europe
Even so, new stablecoins continue to appear, especially in Europe where there’s less of an established network and concern about the dominance of dollar-pegged tokens. Those tokens account for over 99% of the total stablecoin market cap.
Jan-Oliver Sell, CEO of Qivalis, a group of 37 European financial institutions developing the Euro On-Chain stablecoin, noted that Europe already has regulatory oversight under the Markets in Crypto-Assets framework. What it lacks, he said, is enough euro-denominated liquidity to prevent settlement activity from migrating to dollar-backed stablecoins. The gap between regulatory readiness and market depth remains a challenge for any euro-pegged alternative trying to gain traction.