Who's who in stablecoins

Issuers that keep their own balance sheet

An issuer is the company that creates the token, holds the money behind it and owes the holder a dollar. Most large issuers take a dollar, buy short US government debt with it and keep the interest, as the business chapter shows.

Tether and Circle are the two giants. They look alike from a distance, since both hold cash and Treasury bills and both let verified clients mint and redeem at one dollar. They differ in where they live and whom they answer to. Circle has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange since 5 June 2025, holds US and EU licences, and publishes monthly attestations by Deloitte. Tether moved its base to El Salvador in January 2025, publishes quarterly attestations by BDO, and holds gold and bitcoin in its reserve buffer. Those two assets are outside the reserve list of the US federal stablecoin law, the GENIUS Act, which is why Tether is building a separate US token, USAT, rather than putting USDT through that regime.

Sky, the protocol formerly called MakerDAO, is a different animal. There is no company that owes you a dollar. USDS is minted against crypto collateral, tokenized Treasuries and a swap into USDC. A Peg Stability Module is a contract that exchanges the protocol's own dollar token one for one with another dollar token, so traders can defend the peg cheaply. It also works as a pipe for shocks. When USDC fell to about 0.87 USD on 11 March 2023, DAI followed it to about 0.88 USD, because the module tied the two together.

Ethena issues USDe, which holds no cash reserve at all. It holds crypto and sells an equal amount of perpetual futures against it, so price moves cancel out. The return comes from funding payments on the futures, and it shrinks when traders stop paying to be long. USDe is not a payment stablecoin under the GENIUS Act, because nobody is legally obliged to redeem it at one dollar, and Germany's supervisor BaFin stopped its public sale there.

Two newer issuers follow the Circle model. Ripple's RLUSD launched in December 2024 through a New York trust company and lives mostly on Ripple's XRP Ledger. World Liberty Financial's USD1 launched in March 2025 and carries a risk no other issuer has: its owners include the family of the sitting US president.

Issuers that rent the rails

Issuer-as-a-service separates the brand from the balance sheet: a regulated trust company mints the token and holds the reserve, and another company puts its name on it and owns the customer. PayPal's PYUSD is the classroom case: PayPal sells it in its app, and Paxos issues it and holds the reserve.

Paxos also issues USDG for the Global Dollar Network, a group of exchanges and fintechs launched in November 2024. The two products split the money differently. PayPal pays its own rewards from its own margin, while USDG shares reserve income with network members in proportion to what they hold. Agora, a younger firm licensed in Bermuda, sells the same service as a white-label product to many brands.

The model has a clear weakness, and it has already played out once. Paxos issued BUSD for Binance. In February 2023 the New York regulator, NYDFS, ordered Paxos to stop minting it over its oversight of the Binance relationship. The reserve was complete. The token died anyway, because the supervisor could act against the partner. PYUSD carries a milder version of partner risk: its supply rose on a rewards campaign and fell when the campaign ended, from about 4.1 bn USD in early 2026 to about 3.0 bn USD in September.

Banks enter from the side

Banks prefer a different instrument. A tokenized deposit is an ordinary bank deposit recorded on a blockchain: it stays a claim on that bank, under bank rules, and usually moves only between the bank's approved clients. A stablecoin is a new liability of a non-bank issuer that anyone can hold. Chapter 1 draws the line in detail.

JPMorgan's JPM Coin, ticker JPMD, is the leading tokenized deposit. It went live on Base, Coinbase's blockchain, in November 2025 for institutional clients and added the Canton network in January 2026. In June 2026 a group of banks owned through The Clearing House, including JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, said it plans a shared tokenized-deposit network for early 2027, and it described the project as something other than a stablecoin.

Société Générale went the other way. Its digital-asset arm, SG-FORGE, issues EURCV and USDCV as e-money tokens under MiCA, the EU crypto law, which makes it a bank that issues a public stablecoin in its own name. The scale is still small: SG-FORGE's own dashboard showed about 166 mn EUR of EURCV on 10 September 2026.

Infrastructure and custody

Minting a fully reserved token is easy to copy. Connecting it to bank accounts in many countries is not. Orchestration is that connecting layer: software and licences that take fiat in one place and deliver stablecoins, or fiat, somewhere else.

The two leading orchestration firms were both bought by payment giants. Stripe paid about 1.1 bn USD for Bridge and closed in February 2025, its largest acquisition. Mastercard agreed to buy BVNK for up to 1.8 bn USD and closed on 3 August 2026. Neither buyer launched a consumer stablecoin of its own. They bought the pipes, which tells you where they think the durable business is.

Custody is the job of holding the private keys and assets safely for someone else. Anchorage Digital became the first federally chartered US digital-asset bank in 2021 and is the custodian for BlackRock's crypto ETFs. BitGo listed on the NYSE in January 2026. Fireblocks sells wallet and key-management software to banks, exchanges and issuers, and says it is not a custodian by default. Ownership links run across layers: Cantor Fitzgerald, which holds Tether's Treasury bills, also owns a stake in Tether.

Distributors and card networks

A distributor is whoever puts the token in front of users: an exchange, a wallet, a fintech app. Distribution is where issuers spend most of their money. Coinbase co-founded USDC with Circle in 2018 and, under a 2023 agreement, receives income on USDC held in its products plus half of the residual income on USDC held elsewhere. Coinbase said in its first-quarter 2026 shareholder letter that more than a quarter of all USDC sits in its products.

Binance issues nothing and still shapes the market. It carried BUSD until the 2023 halt, then pushed FDUSD with zero-fee trading pairs, and from December 2025 promoted USD1. A token's supply can rise quickly when a large exchange makes it the default pair, and shrink when the exchange moves on.

Card networks joined as settlement layers. Settlement is the step where banks pay each other what they owe after card transactions. Visa lets partner banks settle in USDC and reported a 3.5 bn USD annualised run rate at the end of November 2025. Mastercard settles in six stablecoins across eight chains since June 2026 and bought BVNK. The cardholder sees nothing different; the plumbing between banks changes.

How they compete

The roles compete over one pool of money: the interest earned on the reserve. Whoever owns the customer relationship decides how that pool is split. Circle's second-quarter 2026 results show the pattern. Of about 701 mn USD of reserve income, Circle paid about 412 mn USD, close to 59%, to distribution partners, mostly Coinbase. Tether pays almost nothing for distribution because its users come to it through offshore exchanges, which helps explain why Tether reported more than 10 bn USD of net profit for 2025.

That is also why payment companies bought orchestration instead of launching tokens, and why fintechs with large user bases move toward issuing. Revolut launched its own euro stablecoin in August 2026, issued through Bridge. Licences have become a second front. On 12 December 2025 the US bank regulator, the OCC, conditionally approved national trust charters for Circle, Ripple, Paxos, BitGo and Fidelity Digital Assets on one day. Circle's approval became final on 10 July 2026, and World Liberty received a conditional approval in August 2026.

Who disappeared, and why

Stablecoins end in one of two ways. Either the peg breaks and never returns, which costs holders money, or a regulator or owner orders the minting to stop and holders are paid out in an orderly way.

BitUSD, launched on BitShares in 2014, was backed by the network's own token; when that token fell in 2018, BitUSD went into global settlement in November and never recovered. NuBits broke twice, the last time in March 2018. Terra's UST was the large version of the same flaw: its backing was its sister token LUNA, and in May 2022 both fell toward zero, wiping out tens of billions of dollars. The history chapter tells those stories.

In November 2025 the same pattern returned inside DeFi. Stream Finance disclosed a loss of about 93 mn USD in off-chain strategies. Its token xUSD lost most of its value within hours, and Elixir's deUSD fell about 98% because Elixir had lent much of its collateral to Stream. USDX from Stables Labs broke in the same episode.

The orderly endings look different. BUSD stopped minting on 21 February 2023 with a full reserve, and holders could redeem into 2024. Mountain Protocol's USDM, a Treasury-backed token, was bought by Anchorage in May 2025 and wound down in stages until its primary market closed on 22 August 2025. Banks and custodians can also vanish without a depeg: Silvergate and Signature, whose payment networks Circle used, closed in March 2023.

What to watch next

• The OCC's final GENIUS Act rule: the Comptroller said in August 2026 it would come by November. It sets the reserve, redemption and yield rules for every federally supervised issuer on this map.
• Tether's USAT: whether a US-regulated sibling of USDT gains supply will show whether Tether can win onshore without changing USDT.
• The Clearing House bank network: a named product and a launch date in early 2027 would give banks their own settlement token and put pressure on USDC in corporate payments.
• Circle's distribution share: if the share of reserve income paid to partners falls well below 59%, Circle is gaining bargaining power; if it rises, distributors are winning.
• World Liberty's charter: final OCC approval, or its refusal, will test how US supervisors treat an issuer with political owners.