Delphi Digital: Stablecoins, the next frontier in financial infrastructure

Author: Delphi Digital, Compiled by: Shaw Golden Finance

Stablecoin issuers have now become the 19th-largest holders of U.S. Treasuries in the United States, and the assets they hold are completely identical to the underlying assets that support ordinary savings accounts. One of the most important issues in current cryptocurrency legislation is how regulators will allow these institutions to dispose of the Treasury proceeds they obtain.

Yield Gap

There is a significant spread between U.S. Treasury yields and the deposit rates that banks pay to savers. Treasury yields remain in the 3.5%–4% range, while the average yield on standard savings accounts is only 0.39%.

Stablecoin issuers hold the same underlying assets. The GENIUS Act prohibits them from distributing the yield directly to holders, and regulators are expanding the scope of this ban to include all kinds of bypass tactics that may emerge going forward.

If people can hold funds that are instantly liquid, carry no credit risk, and generate interest, their willingness to keep cash in traditional bank accounts will drop sharply.

Critics characterize this as a national security issue. But in practical terms, it poses a threat to the reserve-based funding model that a significant part of the entire credit system depends on.

The Structural Finance Problem Exists

Banks rely on deposits to make loans. If large amounts of dollars flow in solely to be invested in fully reserved stablecoins backed by Treasuries, private credit creation will contract. Funds will shift toward sovereign assets, and the credit transmission mechanism that supports lending to small and medium-sized enterprises and consumer credit will begin to fail as well.

Small and mid-sized banks and credit unions will be hit first. They are far more dependent on deposits than large institutions to support their lending operations. Once these deposits move on-chain, they will not only lose the net interest spread, but also lose the corresponding capacity to make loans.

This is the real core contradiction in stablecoin legislative debate: end users can get access to dollars that are cheaper to obtain and move faster, but the credit system will lose the deposit base it needs to keep lending going.

Everyone Wants to Be a Bank

In the past few months, fintech companies and crypto firms have been competing to secure bank charters—either by applying directly for licenses or by directly acquiring existing banks.

After the global financial crisis, the United States effectively stopped issuing commercial bank charters for nearly the past decade. The number of new bank formations dropped from about 132 per year to only 6. When charter resources run out, the market no longer tries to become a bank; instead, it builds a system around banks. Today, the situation is completely reversed.

For crypto-native firms and stablecoin issuers, a federal charter means being able to connect to the Federal Reserve’s instant payment system, FedNow, and Fedwire, and directly take control of the clearing and settlement layer. For traditional fintech companies, this means escaping reliance on third-party banks and achieving end-to-end vertical integration.

This fusion trend is being pushed in both directions. In December 2025, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) approved a proposed rule that allows state banks it regulates to issue payment stablecoins through subsidiaries. In February 2026, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) also followed suit by releasing proposed rules for national banks. Once these rules are finalized, any depository institution holding the relevant charters will have an official, legal channel to issue stablecoins.

The Endgame of Vertical Integration

Stripe is the most typical example. By acquiring Bridge, Privy, and Metronome, and partnering with Paradigm to build Tempo, it is putting together an entire payments infrastructure—from stablecoin issuance to merchant settlement.

It’s not the only one moving in this direction. Stablecoin technology architecture is highly aligned with the institutional finance system: blockchain settlement replaces real-time gross settlement systems (RTGS), stablecoin issuance replaces commercial bank deposits, on-chain liquidity and FX trading replace correspondent banking, compliance logic replaces the anti-money laundering (AML) infrastructure, and all kinds of payment applications are built on top of all this.

Fintech, banking, and major players across the crypto space are doing everything they can to gain control over more layers of the ecosystem’s narrative power.

Issuer Risk Becomes a New Kind of Credit Risk

Tether and Circle together account for more than 84% of the total stablecoin market capitalization. The brief de-peg event for USDC during the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has demonstrated this concentration risk in an intuitive way. Even though Circle is solvent and has ample reserves, some funds were for a time trapped in the troubled bank and could not be used.

In the traditional banking system, payment risk is distributed across institutions, while credit risk is distributed across the credit assets of thousands of banks. But in a stablecoin system, while settlement risk that originally existed among participants is eliminated, it is concentrated at the issuer level. The system does not achieve zero risk—it simply experiences a vertical shift in where risk occurs, moving from dispersed counterparty exposure to highly concentrated issuer-dependence risk.

White-label stablecoin issuance services are expanding. Firms such as Paxos, Agora, Brale, M0, Bridge, and others all provide issuance-as-a-service. Over the past year, Paxos has grown the market value of its issued assets to nearly 8 times by partnering with partners such as PayPal—where the partners handle channel distribution, while Paxos focuses on infrastructure and compliance. While this model has been proven feasible, it has not shaken the position of the existing leading institutions. The depth of liquidity at this scale in itself has a very strong self-reinforcing effect.

Conclusion

In just a few short years, stablecoins have grown from a niche trading tool into a key payments infrastructure for cross-border remittances in emerging markets. And the next round of shocks will go straight to the core funding model of the banking system itself.

The GENIUS Act has already put in place a regulatory framework, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) is drafting the implementing rules, aiming to have them finalized by July 2026. The remaining key variable is whether the CLARITY Act can pass. Once approved, it will directly determine whether various platforms can offer stablecoin yields in any form.