Stablecoin settlement infrastructure for regulated institutions

For most of their first decade, stablecoins were something regulated institutions watched rather than used. That has changed. The US and EU now have stablecoin law in force, bank regulators have moved digital-asset activity into normal supervision, and banks themselves have begun issuing regulated tokens. What has grown up around that shift is a landscape of settlement infrastructure: the networks, issuance platforms, and orchestration layers through which a bank, payment provider, exchange, platform, or enterprise can actually move value in bank-backed stablecoins.

This page surveys that landscape as it stands, by the numbers and by name.

The market, in numbers

Total stablecoin circulation has held around $300 billion since October 2025, after more than doubling in two years. Tether’s USDT stood at roughly $184 billion in July 2026 and Circle’s USDC at around $73 billion. The market is consolidated but no longer static at the edges: Global Dollar (USDG), a Paxos-issued token backed by a consortium including Robinhood, passed $3.2 billion in circulation in mid-2026.

Usage is the more telling figure. Visa’s Onchain Analytics counted $10.2 trillion in adjusted stablecoin transaction volume over the twelve months to April 2025, against more than $51 trillion unadjusted; the adjusted figure strips out activity that does not look like genuine payments. Forecasts diverge, as forecasts do, but the direction is shared: Citi’s 2025 base case puts stablecoins at $1.9 trillion by 2030, and Standard Chartered projected $2 trillion by end-2028.

Regulation opened the door

Two legal regimes did most of the work of making stablecoins usable by regulated institutions.

In the US, the GENIUS Act was signed into law on 18 July 2025. It requires 100% reserve backing in dollars or short-term Treasuries, monthly public disclosure of reserve composition, and subjects issuers to the Bank Secrecy Act’s anti-money-laundering and sanctions requirements. Alongside it, the banking agencies cleared their own path: the OCC confirmed in May 2025 that national banks may buy and sell custodied digital assets at customers’ direction, and the Federal Reserve withdrew its advance-notification requirements in April 2025, moving bank digital-asset activity into the normal supervisory process.

In the EU, MiCA’s stablecoin titles have applied since 30 June 2024. E-money tokens must be issued by authorised entities, and ESMA directed trading platforms to restrict services in non-compliant tokens by early 2025. The practical effect is a whitelist: in Europe, the stablecoins an institution can touch are the ones issued under MiCA authorisation.

The result, on both sides of the Atlantic, is that a regulated institution can now hold, transact in, and in some cases issue stablecoins inside a defined perimeter. The question has shifted from whether to how, and through what infrastructure.

The landscape

Issuer networks: Circle Payments Network

Circle, issuer of USDC, launched the Circle Payments Network (CPN) in 2025: an invitation to financial institutions to settle cross-border payments in USDC and EURC, with participants vetted for licensing, financial crime compliance, risk management, and security. Banks including Santander, Deutsche Bank, Société Générale, and Standard Chartered advised on its design. The mainnet went live in May 2025 with corridors into Brazil, Mexico, and Hong Kong, and by February 2026 Circle reported 55 financial institutions enrolled, 74 in eligibility review, and annualized volume of $5.7 billion. Circle’s own regulatory footing deepened over the same period: a New York Stock Exchange listing in June 2025 and final OCC approval for a national trust bank charter in July 2026. In July 2026 Standard Chartered became the first global systemically important bank to offer clients integrated USDC minting and redemption.

CPN is the most developed issuer-led settlement network. It is also, by construction, a network for settling in Circle’s coins.

Regulated issuance platforms: Paxos

Paxos is the regulated issuer behind other institutions’ tokens: PayPal USD and Pax Dollar are issued by Paxos Trust Company under New York Department of Financial Services supervision, and Paxos has issued and redeemed over $120 billion in dollar-backed stablecoins since 2018. Its Global Dollar (USDG) launched in the EU in July 2025 under Finnish supervision in compliance with MiCA, with Paxos’s Singapore entity regulated by the MAS; the Global Dollar Network’s partners include Anchorage Digital, Kraken, Mastercard, Robinhood, and Worldpay. For an institution that wants its own branded token without building issuance, custody, and reserve management, this is the model.

Payment-company orchestration: Bridge and Stripe

Stripe completed its acquisition of Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure company, in February 2025, in a deal reported at $1.1 billion, then the largest digital-asset acquisition to date. By May 2025 Stripe had launched Stablecoin Financial Accounts in 101 countries, letting businesses hold dollar-stablecoin balances, receive funds over both fiat rails (ACH, SEPA) and token rails, and send stablecoins globally. Bridge also partnered with Visa on stablecoin-linked card issuing. This is orchestration embedded in a payments giant: powerful distribution, anchored to Stripe’s merchant ecosystem.

Banks issuing their own

The most consequential shift may be banks deciding the token layer is theirs to own. Société Générale-FORGE, an ACPR-licensed e-money institution, issues both a euro stablecoin (EURCV) and, since June 2025, a dollar one (USDCV), with BNY as reserve custodian. J.P. Morgan piloted a dollar deposit token on a public network from June 2025 and made it generally available to institutional clients that November, the first USD deposit token a bank has issued on a public ledger. And in June 2026 a consortium formed around Open USD, a shared-governance stablecoin whose founding partners include Stripe, Coinbase, Mastercard, Visa, and BlackRock alongside more than 140 businesses, structured to return reserve income to participants rather than to a single issuer.

Tokenised deposits and stablecoins are different instruments with different claims on the issuer, but they compete for the same settlement flows. Both are now live at regulated institutions.

The fragmentation problem

Read the list above again as a buyer rather than an observer, and the difficulty is plain. Each piece of this infrastructure is aligned to someone: CPN to Circle’s coins, the Global Dollar Network to Paxos issuance, Bridge to Stripe’s ecosystem, EURCV and JPM’s deposit token to their issuing banks, Open USD to its consortium. Corridors differ, supported currencies differ, membership criteria differ. An institution that integrates one network has, in effect, picked a winner in a market that is still being decided, and the June 2026 arrival of Open USD as a direct challenge to the incumbent issuer model shows how quickly the ground can move.

This is the same structural problem that correspondent banking created in fiat, reproduced at higher speed: value that can only move where your chosen network reaches, and liquidity that fragments across venues that do not interoperate.

Where Frame fits

Frame is the settlement layer for global finance: one integration to orchestrate payments at scale across fiat rails, stablecoins, and tokenised deposits, with compliance enforced on every transaction and settlement in minutes instead of days.

The design choice that distinguishes Frame in this landscape is neutrality. Frame does not issue a coin, so it has no coin to favour: it routes each transaction across whichever rail suits the corridor, the counterparty, and the policy that governs the payment, whether that rail is a fiat network, a regulated stablecoin, or a tokenised deposit. Compliance is not a check that happens before or after the transfer; Frame’s Rules Engine evaluates every transaction inside settlement, and a transfer that cannot satisfy its conditions does not settle. Each settled transaction produces verifiable evidence that its checks were met, without exposing the underlying business data.

For a bank, a payment provider, an exchange, a platform, or an enterprise treasury, that changes the shape of the decision this page describes. Choosing infrastructure stops being a bet on which issuer, network, or consortium wins, and becomes a routing policy that can change as the market does.