Stablecoin

Electronic trading firm Tradeweb has led a $31 million Series B round in institutional crypto platform Crossover Markets, giving the CROSSx operator a $200 million valuation. The deal includes a strategic partnership to connect Tradeweb's global institutional network to spot crypto liquidity on CROSSx and will fund the expansion of the ECN, which has handled over $50 billion in volume since 2023. Additional venture funding has recently gone to infrastructure firms Talos, Mesh, Rain and VelaFi as investors target trading, payments and settlement services for digital assets.

On March 3, 2026, Visa and Bridge announced plans to extend their stablecoin-backed card program to more than 100 countries by year-end, up from the current 18. Cardholders will be able to spend stablecoins at over 175 million Visa-accepting merchants, while a separate pilot with Lead Bank is testing direct on-chain settlement for issuers.

In a March Truth Social post, President Donald Trump accused banking groups of trying to weaken the GENIUS Act, a stablecoin regulation law passed in July, and of blocking broader U.S. crypto market structure legislation. He argued that banks, despite strong profits, should not influence rules for digital assets and warned that delays could drive crypto firms to move to countries like China with clearer regulations. At the center of the dispute are restrictions on stablecoin yield payments, which have divided banks and crypto industry representatives and slowed progress in the Senate.

SoFi Technologies' share price closed at $18.61 on March 3, 2026, after announcing an expanded partnership that will allow its SoFiUSD stablecoin to be used as a settlement option on Mastercard's global payments network. The company also disclosed that CEO Anthony Noto purchased roughly $1 million of SOFI stock in the open market, coinciding with a premarket rise to $19.23 on March 4. SoFiUSD, issued by SoFi Bank, N.A., is fully cash-reserved and is expected to support around-the-clock settlement for SoFi's card transactions.

On 4 March 2026, White House Digital Asset Advisor Patrick Witt publicly rejected JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon's claim that yield-bearing stablecoins operate like bank deposits, pointing to strict reserve rules under the 2025 GENIUS Act. The clash has complicated negotiations over the CLARITY Act, while Coinbase offers a 3.5% return on USDC that traditional banks struggle to match.

On 4 March 2026, Deloitte issued a reserve attestation for Tether's new U.S. dollar stablecoin USAT, which launched in late January 2026. The report showed $17,604,716 in reserves backing 17,501,391 tokens, with assets held in cash and reverse repos backed by U.S. Treasuries. USAT is structured as a federally compliant alternative to USDT and is positioned to compete with USDC in the U.S. institutional market.

On 02 March, Bitmine Immersion Technologies disclosed that it now holds 4.47 million ETH, valued at about $9.9 billion, representing roughly 3.71% of Ethereum's circulating supply. The firm has staked 68% of its ETH, while on-chain data shows Ethereum's MVRV ratio deeply negative and whales like F2Pool's Chun Wang moving hundreds of millions in stablecoins and ETH across exchanges and DeFi protocols.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told CNBC on Tuesday that issuers of stablecoins paying interest on customer balances should be regulated under the same framework as traditional banks. He argued that yield on stored balances is effectively equivalent to bank deposits and must carry identical safeguards, including capital, liquidity, and insurance protections. Dimon's remarks come amid U.S. legislative debate over digital asset rules and contrast with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong's call for open competition between banks and crypto platforms.

Coinbase's x402 protocol, launched in May 2025, is an open-source web payment standard that lets AI agents and human users pay with stablecoins directly over the internet. By embedding onchain payment requests into HTTP interactions, it enables fast, low-cost micropayments across networks like Base, Solana and Ethereum without traditional processors. Backed by firms including Cloudflare, Circle, Stripe and Amazon Web Services, x402 is already handling hundreds of millions of transactions for use cases ranging from pay-per-inference compute to metered web content.

On Tuesday, major U.S. equity benchmarks recovered from steep intraday declines, with the S&P 500 ending 0.9% lower after an earlier 2.5% plunge as conflict involving Iran and a spike in oil prices unnerved investors. Bitcoin traded around $68,000 after briefly touching $70,000 on Monday, while Brent crude surged above $87 per barrel and rate-cut expectations were pushed further out.