A consortium supported by a who’s who of the payments, banking, and crypto industries has launched a new stablecoin, Open USD. The reserve-backed stablecoin is the brainchild of Zach Abrams, founding CEO of Open Standard and co-founder of stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge, which was bought by payment processing firm Stripe in 2024. “Existing stablecoins have great strengths, but to use them at scale, businesses need something that’s open, low-cost, high-throughput, broadly accessible, and aligned to their interests,” Abrams said in a statement. Open Standard’s founding users include Visa, Mastercard, American Express, PayPal, Western Union, Blackrock, Standard Chartered, Google, IBM, Coinbase, OKX, Solana, Ripple, and Aave among more than 140 companies.…
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Saylor’s Strategy Announces It May Sell $1.25B Bitcoin
The shock of the leading bitcoin treasury’s last stock sale helped crash the bitcoin market
Almost a month after Michael Saylor’s Strategy helped push bitcoin down about 20% in a week by selling just 32 bitcoins for $2.5 million, the company announced it may sell far more aggressively. In an 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Strategy on June 29 announced its Digital Credit Capital Framework, allowing it to sell as much as $1.25 billion worth of bitcoin to build its cash reserve, pay dividends, and fund stock buybacks. Despite that, Strategy plans to maintain its long-term strategy of aggressively building its bitcoin treasury, currently at 847,363 BTC. While the sale of 32 bitcoins represented just 0.004% of its holdings, the shock…
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Federal Credit Unions to Test Stablecoins, Digital Assets
Stablecore program seeks to prepare credit unions for digital asset adoption
Digital asset infrastructure provider Stablecore has joined forces with two U.S. federal credit union organizations to launch a program intended to help the small lenders evaluate stablecoin, tokenized deposit and digital asset products as adoption grows. Together with Circuit, a research and development Credit Union Service Organization (CUSO) and Curql, a fintech investment organization with more than 160 credit union members, Stablecore’s initiative will allow participating credit unions to test and offer stablecoin and digital asset services. These include stablecoins, tokenized deposits, Bitcoin, on and offramps, and staking, among other things. The program will provide education to both staff and members of credit unions, in order to prepare them for…
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Binance May Be Forced Out of EU as License Fails
Greek authorities have rejected its application for the MiCA license needed by July 1
If you’re an EU-based crypto trader and you use Binance, you may need to look for a new exchange shortly. In a blog post on Wednesday, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange said that it had withdrawn its application for a Greek license to operate in the EU. Those Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) licenses become mandatory for exchanges to continue to do business after July 1. “Binance is not leaving Europe,” Gillian Lynch, the company’s head of Europe and the United Kingdom, told Reuters. “We may just have a different pathway to being authorised. If it is not Greece, I’m looking at other alternatives.” It has said it intends to pursue…
