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:
Circle becomes the first US public company to issue its own protocol token
Stablecon and Artemis publish the Q2 2026 State of Stables report
Ep 32: Irina Chuchkina on Wallet in Telegram's local growth playbook
Product launches, partnerships and funding news from Augustus, Digital Asset, Ripple, Amazon, Anchorage Digital, BlackRock, DTCC, HSBC, JPMorgan, Tether and more.
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🏆 Top Stories
Circle Becomes the First Public Company to Issue Its Own Protocol Token
Circle raised $222 million in an ARC token presale priced at a $3 billion fully diluted valuation through a private securities placement. a16z led with participation from major financial institutions and investors such as BlackRock, Apollo, ICE (NYSE parent), Standard Chartered Ventures, Janus Henderson, Marshall Wace, Bullish, ARK Invest, Haun Ventures, General Catalyst, IDG Capital, and SBI.
The issuance landed alongside Circle's Q1 earnings (revenue $694 million, net income $55 million, USDC onchain volume $21.5 trillion) and the launch of Circle's Agent Stack.
Why it matters:
This is the first L1 token issued by a US public company, legitimized by anchor positions from some of the world’s largest financial institutions. As CLARITY advances, it shows a new form of economic ownership moving from crypto-native balance sheets to institutions that would not have touched tokens a few years ago.
The Howey defense is written into the whitepaper. Circle frames ARC's economic benefits as flowing from network participation, attempting to defeat the "expectation of profit from others' efforts" test. SDNY is split. The path to public ARC trading runs through CLARITY Act passage; no existing safe harbor covers it.
Value Accrual? ARC turns stablecoin activity into token demand. ARC links usage to rewards, burn, and platform access. Arc keeps fees predictable for users by pricing them in stablecoins, but the protocol converts those fees into ARC before routing them to validators and stakers, with a portion burned. The broader value path is deeper than gas: stakers may receive lower transaction costs, reduced fees across Circle/Arc services like crosschain transfers, mint/redemption, payments infrastructure, and developer tooling, plus governance over fees, inflation, and burn logic.
A cap table aligned. ICE (NYSE parent), BlackRock, Apollo, Janus Henderson, Standard Chartered, and SBI now have direct stake in the CLARITY bill's "mature blockchain" certification path and the CFTC secondary-trading rules that follow.
Coinbase economics hold; the chain layer is the new battleground. Coinbase still earns about half of USDC's reserve interest under their revenue-share agreement, regardless of which chain captures the volume. Arc adds competition with Base for builder mindshare, but the distribution partnership keeps paying. The chains compete on the surface but Arc’s positioning is much more institutional.
A Message from our Partners
📺 Money Code Podcast
Ep 32: Going Global Means Going Local w/ Irina Chuchkina (Wallet in Telegram)
Crypto rails can cross borders. Distribution still happens market by market. The playbook for getting a crypto product into hundreds of millions of hands looks more like Uber's city-launch model than anything on-chain.
Irina Chuchkina grew GrabPay across eight countries for 200 million users in Southeast Asia. Now she's scaling the only wallet built into Telegram's billion-user messenger, where a single game collaboration pulled in a million new users.
We decode
"Distribution is an outcome": why Irina says utility has to come first, and what that means for the growth playbook in crypto versus traditional fintech
Two wallets, one app: how running custodial and self-custodial simultaneously works as a regulatory coverage strategy across dozens of countries
The stablecoin fragmentation bet: why she thinks value shifts from the next issuer to the rails that make hundreds of national stablecoins interoperable
Give it a listen and share your feedback by sending me a DM or replying to this email.
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📈 State of Stables
Q2 2026 State of Stables Is Live
Stablecon and Artemis just released the Q2 2026 State of Stables report.
Supply has flattened at $310 billion since October, but capital is rotating toward yield-bearing tokens and regulated issuers. Ripple's RLUSD, USDG, and Hashnote's USYC each crossed $1 billion for the first time. Roughly 140 stablecoins now have over $10 million in circulation, with commodity-backed and asset-backed categories accelerating.
The key theme this quarter was agentic finance.
Weekly machine-native stablecoin payments grew from 100,000 transactions in early January to nearly 600,000 by mid-March. Stripe shipped the Machine Payments Protocol, Coinbase moved x402 to the Linux Foundation, and Visa and Mastercard launched agentic commerce programs.
Check out the market map that organizes the agentic finance stack into seven control points.
Also in the issue:
The Mastercard-BVNK Deal of the Quarter teardown.
BVNK founders profile.
Policy Corner on agentic commerce.
Read on for a round up of this week's news:
📊 Market Trends
💸 Fundraises and M&A
Augustus raises $40 million led by Valar Ventures and wins rare OCC national bank charter (read more)
Canton Network developer Digital Asset eyes $300 million raise at $2 billion valuation, led by a16z crypto (read more)
Circle raises $222 million from BlackRock, Apollo and others in Arc token presale at $3 billion valuation (read more)
Ripple raises $200 million from Neuberger Berman to expand Ripple Prime platform (read more)
Sky Ecosystem and Plasma co-lead $13.5 million raise for yield platform Osero (read more)
🚀 Product Announcements & Partnerships
Amazon rolls out AI agent stablecoin payments platform with Coinbase and Stripe (read more)
Anchorage Digital and Grupo Salinas partner on US-Mexico cross-border settlement using federally chartered USD stablecoin rails (read more)
BlackRock files for two new tokenized money-market funds, a stablecoin reserve vehicle with Securitize and an Ethereum onchain share class of its $6 billion treasury liquidity fund (read more)
Boundary, backed by Galaxy Digital, to launch 'verifiable' institutional stablecoin USBD (read more)
Circle introduces Agent Stack, financial infrastructure for the agentic economy (read more)
DTCC taps Chainlink for blockchain-based tokenized collateral platform ahead of Q4 launch (read more)
Exodus introduces XO Cash, a Solana-based stablecoin (read more)
HSBC targets retail and wealth with new Hong Kong stablecoin (read more)
Japan Blockchain Foundation to issue trust-type yen stablecoin EJPY on Japan Open Chain and Ethereum for B2B settlements (read more)
JPMorgan to launch second tokenized money market fund on Ethereum (read more)
Jupiter Lend onboards Bitwise to curate Ethena market (read more)
Spritz taps Modern Treasury to unify fiat and stablecoin rails behind consumer crypto spending (read more)
Tether launches developer grants program to fund local-first AI and payments infrastructure (read more)
⚖️ Regulatory Developments
Banque de France governor Beau clashes with ECB's Lagarde over private digital euro plans (read more)
BoE governor Bailey warns of looming 'wrestle' with U.S. over stablecoin rules, flags run risk for UK (read more)
ECB's Lagarde flags euro-denominated stablecoins as financial stability risk, diverging from Bundesbank stance (read more)
Kraken parent goes for OCC charter in bid to become federal crypto bank (read more)
Senate Banking Committee unveils CLARITY Act text, holds markup hearing with 100+ amendments filed (read more)
💼 Stablecoin Jobs
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