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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Ripple Wins EU MiCA License As July 1 Deadline Looms
Luxembourg granted it a preliminary crypto asset service provider license
Ripple has acquired a preliminary crypto asset service provider (CASP) license in Luxembourg, making it compliant with the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulations ahead of a July 1 deadline. In a statement on Tuesday, Ripple said that once its CASP is finalized, it would be able to provide regulated cryptoasset services to financial institutions and businesses across the 30-member European Economic Area (EEA). Combined with Ripple’s existing EU Electronic Money Institution (EMI) licence, the CASP license means that European banks, fintechs, and businesses can access Ripple’s full cryptoasset and stablecoin payments infrastructure through a single integration, the company said. The two licenses, when finalized, will make Ripple fully…
