Standard Chartered’s recent announcement that it will offer institutional clients direct access to minting and redeeming Circle’s USDC stablecoin signals a significant shift in how major banks view digital assets. It wasn’t just another service addition. It was a clear sign that stablecoins are moving from a niche retail tool to core financial infrastructure.
Chainalysis estimates stablecoin settlement volumes could hit a quadrillion dollars annually by 2030. That’s a staggering number. And banks are taking notice.
Standard Chartered’s move came just days after BNY, the world’s largest custody bank with $59 trillion in assets under management, expanded its USDC support. BNY now lets institutional clients custody, mint, and redeem the stablecoin using its existing infrastructure, rather than building their own systems from scratch.
Both banks are considered globally systemically important by the Bank for International Settlements’ Basel Committee. Their decisions reflect a broader pattern among lenders: using established stablecoin networks instead of creating proprietary ones.
The conversation has shifted inside banking
Andrew MacKenzie, CEO of Scotland-based stablecoin issuer Agant, summed it up bluntly: “Banks aren’t asking whether they’ll use stablecoins anymore. They’re deciding how they’ll use them.”
That’s a big change from just a few years ago, when stablecoins were mostly associated with crypto traders looking to avoid volatility. Now they’re becoming part of the plumbing for financial institutions worldwide.
The discussion intensified after Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire responded to the launch of OpenUSD, a rival stablecoin backed by Coinbase, Stripe, and BlackRock. Allaire argued USDC’s strength comes from nearly a decade of building liquidity, banking relationships, and regulatory approvals.
Adrian Cachinero Vasiljevic of Steakhouse Financial agrees that the ecosystem matters more than the token itself. “The network is what creates the value,” he said. “The stablecoin itself becomes almost secondary.”
New stablecoins keep appearing, especially in Europe
Despite USDC and Tether’s USDT dominating the market, new stablecoins continue to launch. Europe is a hotspot for this activity, partly because the region has fewer established networks and concerns about dollar-pegged tokens, which account for over 99% of the total stablecoin market cap.
Jan-Oliver Sell, CEO of Qivalis, a group of 37 European financial institutions developing the Euro On-Chain stablecoin, noted that Europe already has regulatory clarity under the MiCA framework. What it lacks, he said, is enough euro-denominated liquidity to keep settlement activity from flowing to dollar-backed alternatives.
This tension between dollar dominance and regional ambitions will likely shape the stablecoin landscape for some time. Banks, it seems, are ready to play their part either way.
