Welcome to another edition of the Money Code newsletter (fka The Weekly Stable), the essential source of stablecoin news coverage for global fintech professionals, brought to you by This Week in Fintech and Stablecon.
This week we cover:
Augustus raises $180 million to build the Global Dollar Bank
Money Code Ep 41: Stablecoins Need Local Liquidity w/ Jack Chong (Checker)
Product launches, partnerships and funding news from Alpaca, Crypto.com, Digital Asset, Keyrock, Ualá, BNY, Galaxy, Morpho, Ramp, Telegram and more.
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🏆 Top Stories
Augustus Raises $180M to Build the Global Dollar Bank
Augustus raised a $180 million Series B at a $1 billion valuation to establish a U.S. clearing bank for international fintechs and banks. Its proposed U.S. bank has preliminary OCC approval, and Augustus plans to combine dollar accounts, conventional payment networks, and stablecoin settlement on its proprietary Marble core.
Why it matters:
Banking modernisation has focused on replacing pieces of infrastructure inside institutions built over decades. De novo charters give companies a chance to design the regulated institution and its technology together.
Build the bank and the stack together. Legacy cores, regulatory obligations, and risk cultures make major changes expensive for incumbent banks. Augustus can design compliance, onboarding, accounts, and settlement around one modern core, although the speed and cost benefits still need to be proven in production.
The charter window has reopened. The OCC received as many applications last year as it did during the previous four years combined and has granted ten conditional approvals this year. Augustus sits inside a broader increase in de novo banking activity.
Dollar demand provides the commercial pull. International fintechs and banks want better access to dollar accounts, treasury services, and round-the-clock settlement. AI agents could add a future demand driver: software initiating transactions will need programmable money and banking infrastructure that operates outside human business hours.
Banking infrastructure faces new competition. Sponsor banks provide account access and compliance services to fintechs, while correspondent banks provide dollar clearing to international institutions. Successful execution would let Augustus combine those services in one regulated stack and compete for the customers that now depend on incumbent providers.
The approval is still preliminary and conditional. Augustus still has to complete its pre-opening requirements and prove that a modern bank stack can meet bank-grade standards at scale.
📺 Money Code Podcast
Ep 41: Stablecoins Need Local Liquidity w/ Jack Chong
Stablecoin payments can look instant onchain while the money still gets stuck in local liquidity, banking hours, and settlement windows. If your product depends on cross-border flows, the bottleneck may sit outside the blockchain.
Jack Chong sees this through Checker, which has processed more than $3B for regulated financial institutions using stablecoins across FX, payments, treasury, and credit. He walks through the operator layer behind the promise: convert/trade, send/receive, and the local liquidity that makes both work.
We decode
USD is local: why dollars in Nigeria, London, Hong Kong, and New York behave differently in production money movement
Correspondent banking 2.0: how emerging-market fintechs use stablecoins to get closer to the payment rail
The stablecoin peg problem: why USDT and USDC are not always one-to-one at institutional size, and what issuers have to balance when liquidity meets redemption friction
Give it a listen and share your feedback by sending me a DM or replying to this email.
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Read on for a round up of this week's news:
📊 Market Trends
💸 Fundraises and M&A
Crypto brokerage firm Alpaca raises $135 million for tokenized stock infrastructure (read more)
Augustus raises $180 million Series B at $1 billion valuation to build the 'Global Dollar Bank' (read more)
Citadel Securities invests $400 million in Crypto.com at $20 billion valuation (read more)
Canton developer Digital Asset raises additional $10 million at same $2 billion equity valuation (read more)
Keyrock acquires BlockFills trading assets to expand institutional crypto business (read more)
Tether invests $20 million in Argentine neobank Ualá as it expands Latin America push (read more)
🚀 Product Announcements & Partnerships
Arcus rolls out 24/7 tokenized US stocks and perpetual markets on Robinhood Chain (read more)
BNY to enable 24/7 settlement for U.S. Treasuries by 2027 (read more)
Galaxy targets institutional stablecoin yield with new DeFi vaults (read more)
Japan logistics provider for Amazon to use JPYC stablecoin in operations (read more)
Morpho launches fixed-rate lending protocol Midnight on Base to expand onchain credit markets (read more)
Ramp integrates Stripe to enable corporate stablecoin payments (read more)
Telegram plans 'largest rollout of a non-custodial crypto wallet in human history' (read more)
⚖️ Regulatory Developments
Abu Dhabi's ADGM recognizes Tether’s XAU₮ as accepted spot commodity (read more)
Bank of Korea prepares for live CBDC transactions with 9 banks in September (read more)
BIS warns USD stablecoins can evade capital controls, challenging traditional market regulations (read more)
Brazil’s securities regulator sets up task force with 60-day deadline for tokenization proposal (read more)
Key Democratic lawmakers say crypto Clarity Act 'falls short' on ethics, other issues (read more)
SEC's Peirce warns some DeFi vaults and onchain lending may fall under securities laws (read more)
UK parliamentary group launches probe into crypto sector's banking challenges (read more)
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