Tokenizing the Reserve, Banning the CBDC

We missed last week's send, so here's the latest issue. Your regular Friday tokenization update resumes this week.

Chris, The Defiant contributing editor and Partner at Storaker Advisory

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ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

ICE and OKX to Tokenize NYSE Equities
Spark, Uniswap and Sky Build a Stablecoin FX Layer
Circle Standardizes USDC for Machine Payments
Baillie Gifford's Native On-Chain Bond Fund
SoFi's Bank Stablecoin Crosses $150M
Franklin Crypto, Securitize IPO, Ondo, CLARITY, Japan Stablecoins, BoE

STABLECOINS / TOKENIZATION / ASSET MANAGEMENT

Invesco Files to Tokenize Stablecoin Reserves — and It Isn't Alone

Invesco, the $2.45 trillion asset manager, filed with the SEC on Wednesday for the Invesco Stablecoin Reserves Onchain Fund — a money market fund whose shares are issued as tokens on a public blockchain and that holds the reserves backing stablecoins, with Robert Leshner's Superstate as sub-transfer agent. The fund is deliberately plain: a Rule 2a-7 government money fund of cash, sub-93-day Treasuries, and repo, the maturity ceiling cut to GENIUS reserve rules. It touches no crypto.

What makes it notable is Invesco is at least the eighth major manager to build one. Morgan Stanley, State Street, Fidelity, BNY, Goldman, and BlackRock (which runs the reserve behind Circle's USDC) all field near-identical 2a-7 funds. The only real difference is how shares are issued: most record ownership off-chain, while a few issue the shares themselves on-chain. JPMorgan's JLTXX went live on Ethereum in May on its own Kinexys platform; Invesco is the second to that model, but on Superstate's third-party rails.

Superstate is becoming the shared plumbing for tokenized funds. The transfer agent managers rent rather than build. It already runs Invesco's USTB, handed USCC to Bitwise, and powers Coinbase Asset Management's credit fund, with roughly $769 million on-chain. The analog is the ETF era: issuers competed on the wrapper while sharing the machinery underneath, and the durable economics sat in the machinery. Leshner calls his deals "the blueprint for how funds and ETFs will come onchain." Superstate wants to be the rail.

Bottom line: With eight near-identical products, the differentiator is distribution and rails, not holdings. The prize is scale, a stablecoin-reserve pool State Street pegs at $1.9 trillion to $4 trillion by 2030. Invesco's filing matters less as a fund than as confirmation that tokenized reserves are now a standard line on the TradFi roadmap.

Sources: Invesco files tokenized reserve fund · SEC filing (SEC EDGAR) · Franklin Templeton tokenized treasuries top $2.5B

REGULATION / SETTLEMENT / MARKET INFRASTRUCTURE

The US Bans Its CBDC; the Cash Leg Has to Come From Somewhere

Congress passed the first US statutory ban on a Federal Reserve digital dollar through 2030, riding in on the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act by veto-proof margins (Senate 85 to 5, House 358 to 32). Trump then canceled the signing over an unrelated voter-ID demand, but the bill auto-enacts within ten days absent a veto. Read with the GENIUS Act, the posture is settled: private dollar tokens are the sanctioned digital dollar, and the Fed is off the field. The winners are stablecoin issuers — Circle and Tether, ~84% of a $308 billion-plus market — and the banks whose tokenized deposits become the closest substitute for the dollar that won't exist.

But banning a CBDC doesn't remove what it was meant to solve. Tokenized settlement needs a cash leg that moves atomically against the asset, and the cleanest such instrument is central bank money, which the US just ruled out building. Switzerland went the other way: the Swiss National Bank issues a wholesale CBDC on the SIX Digital Exchange under Project Helvetia, where over CHF 750 million of digital bonds have settled, asset and central bank money on one ledger. Where the SNB supplies the settlement asset, the US has handed the job to the private sector — the role Citi's $5.5 trillion forecast hands its "Structural Orchestrators," the firms that own both the asset and the cash-leg rail.

Which is why the private rails now matter more. JPMorgan's Kinexys clears tokenized deposits at over $5 billion a day; the bank deposit network through The Clearing House is the multi-bank version; DTCC is wiring assets onto Canton and Stellar. The same day the ban cleared, Chainlink launched Project Pangea — a 50-plus-bank, 16-country consortium settling cross-border FX as atomic swaps of regulated euro and won stablecoins on a neutral chain, the clearest template yet for doing a central bank's job with private tokens.

Bottom line: Banning a CBDC didn't settle whether tokenized markets need a digital cash leg. They do. It settled who supplies it — Switzerland with central bank money, the US with banks and stablecoin issuers — making the deposit network, Kinexys, Pangea, and DTCC's rails the most important plumbing in American capital markets.

Sources: Congress passes Fed CBDC ban · Trump holds up signing · Project Pangea · SNB wholesale CBDC on SDX (SDX) · Citi $5.5T tokenized market · US banks' tokenized-deposit network

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CONVERGE INTERVIEW / STABLECOINS / PAYMENTS

MoneyGram's Anthony Soohoo: 'A Great Time to Re-Found a Company'

MoneyGram has been building on blockchain for over five years, and this week CEO Anthony Soohoo joined Converge to explain why the pace is accelerating. Eighteen months into what he calls a "refounding" — telling staff to "think like founders" — the company spent that time rebuilding the back end first: "We really focused our transformation on the back end so that... we can then accelerate and run faster on the front end." The result is a full stablecoin stack: its own token, MGUSD — Bridge issues it, M0's contracts manage the flows, Fireblocks handles treasury, Stellar is the chain — plus a Kraken cash-out partnership and a validator seat on the Tempo network.

Why issue its own coin when dozens exist? Soohoo's answer is vertical integration: it "gives us a lot more control... and allows us to reap... more economics that we can then lower the cost for our consumers." His analogy is Apple silicon — "we see MGUSD as our foundational... our own ASIC chip specifically for our use case." Crucially, MGUSD is "not built for traders or institutions"; it is only for MoneyGram's roughly 60 million customers, the base layer for stored value, rewards, and spending still to come.

On the back end the rails are already live: MoneyGram is settling FX at a run rate "close to two billion dollars," turning its cash "inventory" just-in-time instead of pre-funding corridors. The bigger bet is reach. "The tough thing is... how do you get distribution? And guess what? We already have distribution across the world," Soohoo said, pointing to a brand that "stands for trust" across 200 countries. On what comes next — cards, agentic payments — his parting word was "stay tuned."

Watch the full 38-minute conversation, hosted by Chris Storaker: MoneyGram CEO on rolling out MGUSD to its 60 million users.

Sources: Converge interview (YouTube) · MoneyGram launches MGUSD on Stellar

OTHER STORIES WORTH YOUR TIME

ICE and OKX Form a Joint Venture to Tokenize NYSE Equities

Intercontinental Exchange, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, is forming a 50-50 joint venture with crypto exchange OKX to bring NYSE-listed equities on-chain, with former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo as co-chair. Pending approval it will operate as a US broker-dealer and futures commission merchant, routing OKX's 120-million-plus customers into ICE futures and tokenized NYSE equities; the deal follows ICE's March investment that valued OKX at $25 billion. It is the sharpest sign yet that the incumbents are not defending the old rail but building the new one — the operator that owns the NYSE issuing the on-ramp to put its own listings on a public chain. The governance is a question mark: OKX pleaded guilty to US anti-money-laundering violations in 2025 and paid a $500 million settlement, and the broker-dealer registration is not yet granted.

Spark, Uniswap and Sky Build a Shared Stablecoin FX Layer

Spark, Uniswap, and Sky are launching a shared "Stablecoin FX Layer," seeding it with roughly $150 million of Sky's USDS migrating into two Uniswap v4 pools, USDS/USDT and USDS/PYUSD — one of the largest AMM liquidity migrations in DeFi. The thesis is fragmentation: stablecoins settled more than $28 trillion in 2025, but every new issuer bootstraps an isolated pool, so capital is abundant and stranded. The layer uses a Uniswap v4 DualPool hook to redeploy idle liquidity into yield-bearing Sky products until a trade needs it, with USDS as the common quoting asset and PayPal's PYUSD wired in directly. In a week that also brought a yen token, draft sterling rules, and the rolling euro launches, this is the interdealer plumbing a multi-currency stablecoin market needs to clear.

Circle Standardizes USDC for the Machine Payments Protocol

Circle published a formal USDC method specification for the Machine Payments Protocol on Monday, standardizing how AI agents and automated services settle in USDC across EVM chains and Solana. MPP revives the dormant HTTP 402 "Payment Required" code: an agent hits a paywalled endpoint, signs a USDC authorization via EIP-3009, and Circle Gateway verifies and batches it for on-chain settlement — no API key, every payment attributable by wallet and transaction hash. The spec adds the first crosschain payment profile in MPP and extends coverage to USDCx on Stacks. It landed the same day 0x enabled agent payments on its Swap API, and it formalizes USDC as a named method inside an open standard that Tempo Labs and Stripe engineers built and proposed to the IETF.

Baillie Gifford Issues a Bond Fund Where the Chain Is the Record

The Edinburgh manager launched BAGEY on Monday, the first publicly available UK-regulated tokenized bond fund issued natively on Solana and Ethereum, with BNY providing custody and a roughly 7% target yield. The architecture is the point. Most tokenized funds are wrappers — a token representing a claim on a fund whose ownership ledger still lives off-chain with a registrar. BAGEY removes that layer: the token is the legal holding, subscriptions and redemptions clear in USDC against the chain, and Solana itself confirmed the design as "not a wrapper — the blockchain is the register of record." That collapses the transfer-agent intermediary and replaces T+2 with settlement at block speed, inside an FCA-regulated structure.

SoFi's Bank-Issued Stablecoin Crosses $150M

SOFIUSD passed $150 million in circulating supply on Tuesday, the same day Bullish became the first centralized exchange to list it. The token's distinction is its issuer: SoFi Bank, N.A., a nationally chartered U.S. bank, making SOFIUSD the first stablecoin issued by a U.S. national bank. It launched to enterprise clients in December, rolled out to SoFi's roughly 15 million members through the app, and went live on Ethereum before adding Solana. The Bullish listing routes institutional order flow to the token for the first time, while the Solana deployment opens it to on-chain liquidity — a bank-issued dollar moving out of its own walled app and onto open rails.

Even more this week:

Franklin Templeton Stands Up an Active Crypto Arm — The $1.78 trillion manager closed its 250 Digital acquisition and launched Franklin Crypto for institutional allocators, led by former CoinFund partners Chris Perkins and Seth Ginns.

Securitize Goes Public on NYSE July 2 — The tokenization platform behind BlackRock's BUIDL will list under ticker SECZ via a Cantor SPAC merger that closed with more than $400 million in cash and an oversubscribed $225M PIPE.

Ondo Launches 24/7 Minting for Tokenized US Stocks and ETFs — Ondo opened round-the-clock mint-and-redeem for its tokenized equities and ETFs on Ethereum, pushing tokenized stocks toward always-on primary issuance.

Lummis Sets a July Floor Vote for the CLARITY Act — The lead sponsor committed to a July Senate floor date and told Jamie Dimon to "read the bill"; passage still needs seven Democratic crossovers after ethics-language talks collapsed June 9.

Japan's Stablecoin Wave Builds — Ripple's RLUSD went live in Japan via SBI under JFSA approval, alongside SBI's yen JPYSC, with Circle/Nomura targeting 2027 and the three megabanks planning yen tokens — a full non-dollar issuance stack forming at once.

Bank of England Publishes Draft Rules for Systemic Stablecoins — The BoE released a policy statement and draft framework for stablecoins deemed systemically important, sharpening the UK's line as sterling and dollar tokens scale.

Converge is produced by The Defiant. This briefing is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.