Debanking, Never Again

Converge is The Defiant's weekly briefing on tokenization, stablecoins and real-world assets — written for the institutions building the on-chain financial system.

Good afternoon. "Reputation risk", the lever banks used for years to refuse crypto business, was stripped from 15 federal supervisory documents this week. In parallel, the SEC named crypto rulemaking its top priority. Stablecoin fever picked up again this week, with MoneyGram launching its own digital dollar, competing with Western Union’s, which got integrated into Bybit in Latam. Not to be outdone, payroll company Deel also launched its own stable. Broader crypto markets bled, but it’s a party in stabletown.

Chris, Contributing Editor, and Partner at Storaker Advisory

Vast commodity reserves. Locked in the ground, locked out of markets. AetherStrike tokenizes them on-chain. Every commodity. Every risk profile. Putting the real in real-world assets.

TOP NEWS THIS WEEK

• SEC names digital-asset rulemaking the top priority of its FY26-FY30 Strategic Plan
• Fed, OCC, and FDIC strip 'reputation risk' from 15 supervisory documents
• Deel deploys Stripe's full stablecoin stack to pay 1.5M contractors in DLUSD
• Schwab targets mid-2027 spot crypto for its $5.2T advisor channel
• Anchorage Digital becomes collateral manager for Ethena's institutional lending
• Revolut plans 2027 US bank launch with stablecoin services built in

Follow @ConvergeDefiant for between-issue dispatches.

REGULATION & POLITICS

The Final Dismantling of Gensler-Era Tactics

This headline went under the radar but it’s an important one for the blockchain industry (and anyone who cared about freedom and due process): On Tuesday, the Federal Reserve, OCC and FDIC reissued 15 supervisory documents stripping every reference to "reputation risk" under OCC Bulletin 2026-23. The move closes discretionary supervisory text that, for two-plus years, gave bank examiners a loophole that allowed "lawful but disfavored" business activity to be rejected or turned away. Or what became more commonly known as de-banking.

"Reputation risk" sat across this body of text as a transversal supervisory category, and that’s what made it usable against crypto firms. The most documented application was the FDIC's "pause letters" in 2023; supervisory correspondence instructing banks to halt crypto-asset-related activity pending review. Anchorage Digital CEO Nathan McCauley told the Senate Banking Committee on February 5 that while banks wanted to work with the crypto industry, regulators “pressured banks to shut an entire industry out of the federal banking system.” The nail in the coffin, he said, was the January 2023 joint statement from the Federal Reserve, FDIC and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, warning national banks against serving crypto clients.

Of course, losing banking access is close to existential for a crypto company. Firms need accounts to make payroll, hold customer dollars and run the fiat on- and off-ramps that let users move between dollars and tokens. As examiners pressed banks to cut crypto clients, firms reported steeper costs, drawn-out onboarding or outright rejection, and some moved operations offshore. The pressure also concentrated the industry's dollar plumbing into a handful of willing banks. Two of the largest, Silvergate and Signature, wound down or were seized within days of each other in March 2023, choking the on- and off-ramps that exchanges and market makers relied on. Lack of reliable banking has hung over the industry and slowed how fast US firms could grow since the start of the industry. But that’s finally ending now.

This is the last of a series of actions by the administration:

• Rescinded Biden-era digital-asset guidance.
• Reversed the accounting that had required banks to record customer crypto holdings as on-balance-sheet liabilities, making custody uneconomic under SAB 121.
• Restored bank authority for crypto custody and stablecoin reserves.

This same week, the SEC's draft Strategic Plan for FY26-FY30 puts crypto rulemaking at the top of its five-year operating plan.

Objective 1.1 of Goal 1: "Provide a firm regulatory foundation for digital assets and distributed ledger technologies." The specific items signaled were the Innovation Exemption framework for tokenized stock trading (covered in last week's Converge), custody clarification, standards for tokenized fund share classes, and tokenized issuer disclosure.

In short, we are seeing a dismantling of the Gensler era regulation-by-enforcement and getting clear rules instead. And that will continue driving more institutions and assets onchain. Case in point: Schwab on Tuesday extended their crypto exposure to its $5.2T advisor channel. CEO Rick Wurster told Bloomberg Radio on November 21, 2024 the firm would "get into spot crypto when the regulatory environment changes."

The next checkpoint is CLARITY's Senate floor vote ahead of the July 4 White House signing target. This week, 160 former CIA, DOJ, Treasury, FBI, IRS-CI, Secret Service and military officials signed a Blockchain Association letter urging the Senate to pass CLARITY.

TRADFI & FINTECH

Stripe's On-Us Test

On June 3, Deel launched DLUSD for 1.5 million contractors across 150 countries using all three of Stripe's stablecoin-infrastructure pieces (Bridge, Privy and Tempo).

Deel contractor receives DLUSD (issued Bridge Open Issuance) into a Privy wallet inside the Deel app and spends through the Deel Card or exits via swapping DLUSD into more widely accepted stables like USDC via Bridge or down to fiat; any Argentine exchange handles the off-ramp at standard spreads.

Contractors opt in with a single tap; capital routes through Sentora's infrastructure on Morpho — a public, permissionless lending protocol — with Sentora acting as the risk curator. Yield accrues automatically and passes back to the contractor with no lock-ups. This is the first time DeFi-native earn reaches a global non-crypto workforce at scale: Deel processed $20B in global payroll in 2025 across 40,000 businesses.

The first time digital asset earn infrastructure reaches a global workforce.

Anthony DeMartino, Sentora CEO

Stripe’s 2025 annual letter reported $400B in stablecoin payment volume — roughly 60% B2B, with Bridge volume more than quadrupling, and Patrick Collison called stablecoins "room-temperature superconductors for financial services". The target: spread that has gone to correspondent banks, FX intermediaries, and card networks themselves.

WATCH THIS WEEK

ERC-3643: The Case for Permissioned Tokens for Institutional Adoption

On this week's Converge podcast, Dennis O'Connell of the ERC-3643 Association makes the case for permissioned-token standards — embedding compliance, KYC and transfer restrictions at the token contract level — as the institutional default for tokenized securities. ERC-3643 is the standard backing tokenized RWAs across institutional issuers. The conversation covers why institutions need on-chain compliance primitives, what the standard does and doesn't enforce, and where the issuance market is heading.

OTHER STORIES WORTH YOUR TIME

Citi Projects $5.5T Tokenized Securities Market by 2030

Citi's latest GPS report models a 300-fold expansion in tokenized real-world assets by 2030, released ahead of Proof of Talk in Paris and anchored on the same institutional moves Converge tracked this week (DTCC + Stellar, Nasdaq tokenized equity rules, ICE on-chain settlement).

BlackRock's BUIDL Pushes Avalanche's Tokenized RWA Past $1.16B

A single allocation of BlackRock's $2.85B BUIDL fund drove more than half of Avalanche's distributed real-world asset total past $1.16B. The structural point: BlackRock is using BUIDL share-class deployment across multiple chains as the institutional discovery layer for which networks meet the regulatory and operational bar. Avalanche, Ethereum and Solana are the institutional public-chain shortlist; the BUIDL allocation pattern is now the most reliable read on where institutional tokenized treasury money goes next.

Anchorage Becomes Ethena's Institutional Collateral Manager

Anchorage Digital, the OCC-chartered crypto bank, becomes collateral manager for Ethena's institutional lending book, holding borrower collateral in segregated custody and running real-time margining. The arrangement plugs a federally chartered settlement bank directly into a DeFi credit market, providing the regulated counterparty role institutional lenders need to participate.

Revolut Plans 2027 US Bank With Stablecoins Built In From Day One

Revolut plans a 2027 US bank launch pairing FDIC-insured accounts with stablecoin access on a single platform: the British neobank has 70 million customers and a $75B valuation. The institutional read: Revolut sees the GENIUS-era US market as a stablecoin-native banking opportunity, not a traditional digital-banking expansion. The day-one stablecoin integration mirrors SoFi's national-bank stablecoin issuance pattern from May 27, except Revolut would launch with the integration rather than retrofit.

Even more this week:

Western Union Deploys USDPT on Bybit's Fiat Channels in Latin America: USDPT becomes available to Bybit's LATAM users, the first major crypto exchange to integrate Western Union's stablecoin.

MoneyGram Launches MGUSD Stablecoin on Stellar: The 85-year-old remittance operator is now the first global cash-payments network to issue its own dollar token, with Bridge as the regulated minter.

Visa and Brale Test Privacy-Enabled SBC Stablecoin Settlement on Canton: Visa pilots stablecoin settlement on the privacy-preserving institutional DLT — a parallel rail to its Tempo validator role.

NYDFS and European Banking Authority Sign Cross-Atlantic Stablecoin Supervision MoU: A 22-page memorandum commits both supervisors to automatic quarterly exchange of stablecoin reserve composition, ≥10% holders and per-jurisdiction volumes.

Kalshi Files Perpetual Futures on 12 Altcoins, Three Days After CFTC Cleared Bitcoin: ETH, XRP, SOL, DOGE and nine others — the onshore perps category opens beyond bitcoin within a week of the BTC approval.

Anchorage Pushes Federally Chartered Settlement Into Non-Custodial DeFi: The OCC-chartered crypto bank is positioning its Atlas network as the coordinated multiparty settlement layer for institutional trading on Hyperliquid and Lighter.

Franklin Templeton Wires BENJI Money-Market Fund Into MoonPay Trade: The $1.74T asset manager lets institutions move directly between stablecoins and tokenized-MMF shares onchain.

Solana Ships Native Payments Rail for Subscriptions and Allowances: A single onchain program lets merchants, payroll operators and wallets build recurring billing, capped agent allowances, and pull payments.

House of Doge and Paxos Push Dogecoin Onto Infra Used by PayPal, Venmo and Interactive Brokers: The Dogecoin Foundation's corporate arm plugs DOGE into the same OCC-regulated brokerage stack PayPal and Venmo already use.

That wraps this week's Converge. Tips, corrections, pushback? editorial@thedefiant.io.