Market Watch
Things to Watch This Week (July 20 - July 24)
· Earnings Season Begins Amid Geopolitical Tensions
Market sentiment remained cautious this week as renewed geopolitical tensions in the Middle East and higher oil prices kept investors on edge. Markets are now focused on major technology earnings and further signals from the Federal Reserve, with solid earnings expectations supporting risk assets despite ongoing geopolitical uncertainty.
Random Musing This Week
Will Stablecoins Become the New Money?
Stablecoins were originally created to provide crypto investors with a stable means of moving funds between volatile digital assets. Today, however, they are beginning to serve a much broader purpose. As payments, securities and other financial assets move onchain, stablecoins could become the money used to settle these transactions. In the future, consumers may use them to shop, companies may use them to pay suppliers, and financial institutions may use them to settle tokenized stocks, bonds and funds. Stablecoins may therefore evolve from a crypto-market instrument into a new digital form of money.
Stablecoins are still rarely used for everyday purchases, but their circulation and transaction activity are growing rapidly. Visa estimates that stablecoin supply increased from approximately $186 billion at the end of 2024 to $274 billion at the end of 2025. Adjusted transaction volume exceeded $10 trillion over the same period, while the number of monthly active users reached approximately 47 million. Stablecoin-linked card payments also grew by 319% in 2025, although their volume remained equivalent to only 0.04% of Visa’s total payment volume. These figures show that adoption is expanding quickly but remains at a very early stage compared with the conventional financial system.
For now, this emerging form of money is overwhelmingly denominated in US dollars. USDT and USDC dominate stablecoin circulation, liquidity and onchain settlement, while euro-, yen- and pound-denominated alternatives remain comparatively small. The result is that the dollar is extending its existing international role into digital markets. Even when users are located outside the United States, they frequently use dollar stablecoins for crypto trading, cross-border transfers, savings and access to decentralized finance. Stablecoins may therefore strengthen, rather than challenge, the dollar’s position as the world’s principal settlement currency.
This raises an important question for other major economies. If tokenized stocks, bonds and funds are ultimately settled mainly in USDT or USDC, countries could become increasingly dependent on dollar-based infrastructure even when the underlying economic activity is domestic. Europe, Japan and the United Kingdom are therefore developing their own digital-money and tokenized-market infrastructure. Their objective is not necessarily to displace dollar stablecoins globally. Instead, they want European assets to remain denominated and settled in euros, Japanese assets in yen and British assets in pounds. Europe’s digital-euro project similarly reflects concerns about dependence on a small number of non-European payment providers, although the digital euro would be central-bank money rather than a privately issued stablecoin.
The future of stablecoins could consequently develop in several ways. Under the first scenario, dollar stablecoins become the default money of the global onchain economy, much as the dollar dominates international trade and finance today. Under the second, a regional system emerges in which tokenized assets are generally settled using the corresponding local currency: euro stablecoins for European securities, yen stablecoins for Japanese assets and pound stablecoins for British markets.
A third and more selective outcome is also possible. Stablecoins may not be viable for every national currency. Their usefulness depends on deep capital markets, reliable reserves, regulatory clarity, convertibility and sufficient international demand. As a result, stablecoins may become concentrated in a small group of major freely convertible currencies, such as the US dollar, euro, Japanese yen, British pound and Swiss franc. Smaller economies may continue using their domestic bank money for local payments while relying on dollar or other major-currency stablecoins for international settlement.
Stablecoins are therefore unlikely to create entirely new currencies. They are more likely to create a new digital form of existing currencies. The central question is whether this technology will eventually be adopted by nearly every country or remain concentrated among a few major currencies and primarily used for cross-border payments and financial-market settlement. Whichever outcome prevails, the rise of stablecoins could reshape not only how money moves, but also which currencies remain influential as the global financial system moves onchain.
Recap of Top Stories (July 13 - July 17)
Top Story of the Week
UK Convenes a 54-Firm Taskforce to Bring Wholesale Financial Markets Onchain
[Tokenization] [Institutional] [Capital Markets] [Europe]
On July 13, HM Treasury and the City of London Corporation convened a 54-firm taskforce to move UK wholesale financial markets onchain, led by former FCA chair Chris Woolard. Members include BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, HSBC, UBS, Barclays, Citi, and State Street, alongside Coinbase, Circle, Ripple, DTCC, and Euroclear.
Organized into nine action groups, the taskforce will spend the next year building a live, end-to-end tokenized repo transaction — a core piece of short-term funding markets — by spring 2027, before extending to tokenized collateral, funds, and a planned digital gilt. The government projects tokenization could add up to £33 billion in annual output by 2035.
The initiative moves the UK from isolated pilots to coordinated market design, pairing with the FCA and Bank of England rulebooks finalized earlier this summer — positioning London to compete with the EU and Asia as tokenization scales.
Also, In Focus
Visa Launches a Stablecoin Platform for Banks and Fintechs
[Stablecoin] [Payments] [Infrastructure]
On July 16, Visa introduced the Visa Stablecoin Platform, an enterprise offering that lets banks, fintechs, and payment providers issue and manage stablecoins and move onchain without building their own infrastructure, alongside Visa’s existing network.
The platform reduces the operational friction that has slowed institutional stablecoin adoption, extending Visa’s role from card rails into stablecoin issuance and settlement. It follows Visa’s participation in the Open USD consortium two weeks earlier — the payments giant positioning itself as core stablecoin infrastructure.
Citadel Securities Invests $400 Million in Crypto.com at a $20 Billion Valuation
[Market Structure] [Institutional] [TradFi]
On July 16, market maker Citadel Securities, founded by Ken Griffin, invested $400 million in Crypto.com at a $20 billion valuation — the Singapore-based exchange’s first institutional funding round in its decade-long history. The capital will fund expansion into tokenized securities and derivatives.
It is Citadel’s second major crypto-exchange stake, after $200 million into Kraken last November, adding to a run of Wall Street firms taking positions in digital-asset infrastructure — ICE in OKX, Nasdaq in Gemini — as the two markets converge.
Ondo Finance and SBI Partner to Bring Japanese Equities Onchain
[Tokenization] [Asia] [Capital Markets]
On July 16, Ondo Finance — the largest tokenizer of equities globally — and SBI Group, one of Japan’s biggest financial conglomerates, announced a partnership to tokenize Japanese equities onchain, with settlement and collateral handled through SBI’s newly launched JPYSC yen stablecoin.
Ondo will issue the tokenized assets and SBI will distribute them across its ecosystem, giving investors onchain access to Japanese equities — connecting one of the world’s deepest capital markets to the global tokenized economy.
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