The new bill has dropped. Yesterday, Republicans released the latest Clarity Act text, a 616-page merger of the Senate Agriculture and Banking Committee versions, now with added ethics language on how federal officials (e.g. the U.S. President) can profit from digital assets while in office.

That provision has been the single biggest roadblock to bipartisan support. And by the early reactions, adding it hasn't moved the bill much closer to the finish line.

According to Punchbowl News, politicians on both sides are picking apart the freshly written restrictions. To be fair, they do seem light:

  • Officials and their spouses can't issue or sponsor new digital assets for compensation while in office, but existing holdings and businesses can largely be kept through divestiture or a blind trust.

  • The rules only take effect after an implementation period of up to a year.

  • The entire regime expires at noon on January 20, 2029, erasing even liability for earlier violations.

As a reminder: According to Trump's own 2025 financial disclosure, he booked more than $1.4 billion in crypto-related income last year, his single largest source of earnings.

Given that track record, you can see why rubber-stamping ethics provisions this porous doesn't come easily to your political opponent.

Still, yesterday was likely just the starting gun on what everyone hopes is the final stretch. And sometimes perfect really is the enemy of good.

So here's our unsolicited wisdom from across the Atlantic: sometimes it’s worth turning complex decisions into simple questions.

In this case, senators on both sides might ask themselves which is worse: no ethics rules and no consumer protection at all, or thin ethics rules attached to a law that finally brings clarity to the market?

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Housekeeping: Starting next week, the Blockstories editorial team is taking a two-week summer break. We’ll be back in August.

For a bit of infotainment in the meantime, we’ve put together a short aftermovie from our Horizon Summer Series, featuring the best 8 slides from keynotes on stablecoins, tokenization, vaults, and infrastructure. You can watch it here.

In today’s Briefing:

  • Morgan Stanley completes rollout of crypto spot trading

  • Visa introduces stablecoin management platform

HIGH SIGNAL NEWS

TOP STORY

Visa Launches Stablecoin Platform for Financial Institutions

Stablecoin platform: Last week, payments giant Visa introduced its Visa Stablecoin Platform (VSP), designed to help financial institutions and enterprises hold, move, and manage stablecoins through a single Visa-managed environment. The platform will initially support Open USD (OUSD) and launch in beta to a limited group of customers.

  • Why it matters: The launch comes amid a wave of solutions designed to move enterprise payments and treasury operations onchain. Banks such as HSBC and JPMorgan are building infrastructure around tokenized deposits, while fintechs like Stripe and a new breed of orchestration platforms are pursuing the same opportunity through stablecoins. All are seeking to capture recurring enterprise financial activity by moving core money flows onto rails that are always on.

Years in the making: Visa has been building toward this since 2023, when it began allowing issuer and acquirer partners to settle their obligations to the network in USDC. It has since extended stablecoin support to Visa Direct, its real-time payouts network. Adoption is growing quickly: as of April, Visa reported a $7 billion annualized stablecoin settlement run rate, up 50% quarter over quarter.

Bringing it all together: With VSP, Visa is moving from individual stablecoin integrations toward a more unified platform, bundling key capabilities so institutions can more easily embed stablecoins into payment and treasury workflows. A central, new component is its Wallet-as-a-Service layer, which brings stablecoin functionality into back-end operations while adding controls such as dual approvals, audit logs, and transfer allow lists.

Acquirer settlement: Beyond treasury, those wallets open up a second use case, which is acquirer settlement. Through VSP, acquirers, the firms that enable merchants to accept card payments, can take their settlement funds from Visa in stablecoins rather than bank deposits.

  • “The big use case I keep coming back to is the opportunity around acquirer settlement. We’re working hard to enable Visa acquirers to settle in stablecoins like OUSD so acquirers can receive funds faster, merchants can get paid faster, merchants can pay suppliers faster, and ultimately create that entire cycle,” explained Cuy Sheffield, Head of Visa Crypto Labs, on the Tokenized Podcast.

Starting with OUSD: The token at the center of that cycle also gives Visa an economic stake in its success. OUSD was introduced just last month by the Open Standard consortium, whose more than 140 members include Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Google, Coinbase, BlackRock, and Standard Chartered. OUSD distributes the yield on its reserves to participating members, something Circle, the issuer Visa has historically supported, does not.

A flywheel for OUSD: For Visa, those earnings grow with the amount of OUSD in circulation, and settlement is one way to get it circulating. Every payout in the token would put new OUSD into use through ordinary card volume.

  • “Acquirer settlement is a major distribution opportunity. Imagine that every time someone spends at a merchant acquired by an OUSD member, OUSD is minted, paid out to the acquirer, and ultimately reaches the merchant. We’re still at a very early stage. The issuing side is already well developed, but now we need to get the acquiring side going,” added the Head of Visa Crypto Labs.

Outlook: For now, neither OUSD nor VSP is broadly available, with the stablecoin not yet live and the platform in beta without named customers or a launch date. Competitors are moving in parallel, from Mastercard’s $1.8 billion acquisition of BVNK to Stripe’s build-out around Bridge and the Tempo blockchain. In his expert perspective below, Luis Schaubhut of AllUnity breaks down what this means for the competitive landscape.

Luis Schaubhut is Chief of Staff at AllUnity, a Frankfurt-based stablecoin issuer. As of today, the company issues euro, Swiss franc, and Swedish krona stablecoins.

What does the market for stablecoin payments and treasury solutions look like, and who is Visa competing with?

I see three groups converging. Visa and other payment networks start with reach and rule-setting power. They are now moving beyond traditional rails, adding the orchestration needed to connect stablecoins with local payment systems, FX and bank accounts.

Stripe is coming from the opposite direction. Through its core business, Bridge, Privy and Tempo, it already brings together merchant relationships, wallets, licensing, orchestration and blockchain infrastructure, pushing it closer to becoming a payment network in its own right. Circle is pursuing a similar strategy through Arc and the Circle Payments Network.

Then there are global banks such as JPMorgan, which are building blockchain-based flows inside their own ecosystems and can draw on existing infrastructure and long-standing corporate relationships.

Ultimately, the winners will be those that make a stablecoin wallet feel like another bank account inside a company’s treasury system. There is unlikely to be one winner across the market. Different players will succeed depending on which clients, corridors and distribution channels they already control.

Elie Naba is the founder of Meridyan, a startup that enables banks to connect to tokenized settlement networks.

Who’s already adopting stablecoins for treasury management today, and how will adoption likely play out over the next 1–2 years?

Stablecoins are already deeply embedded in the operations of crypto-native companies, from exchanges and DeFi protocols to crypto fintechs, where they support day-to-day treasury, liquidity and payment flows.

Outside the crypto sector, adoption remains narrow and problem-led. Demand is strongest among businesses operating in corridors where access to dollars is restricted or traditional cross-border payments are expensive and unreliable, particularly across Africa and Latin America. Over the next one to two years, I expect adoption to deepen in these markets. Progress in Europe, on the other hand, will be slower because SEPA works well and corporate treasurers still depend on banks for financing and liquidity.

Now zooming in on banks: You don’t see them participating yet. That’s because their main constraint is economic.

Stablecoins can pull deposits and payment revenues away from them, leaving little incentive to promote adoption. Smaller banks may move first, though, because they have less direct access to foreign currencies and often need to park substantial capital with larger correspondent banks. Stablecoins could reduce that dependence and improve their economics.

  1. China’s Central Bank Digital Currency 2.0 and the Future of Digital Finance (CIGI) — This paper provides a deep dive on how China has redesigned the digital yuan from digital cash into an interest-bearing digital deposit. It explains how the new model aims to strengthen commercial banks, compete with stablecoins, and reshape cross-border payments through a hybrid CBDC architecture.

  2. MiCAR versus the GENIUS Act (European Parliament) — In this briefing, the European Parliament compares the European and U.S. regulatory approaches to digital assets and stablecoins. It explains how MiCA and the GENIUS Act differ less in their treatment of stablecoins than in the way they integrate digital assets into existing financial and supervisory frameworks.

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Disclaimer: The information provided in the Institutional Briefing by Blockstories does not constitute investment advice. Accordingly, we assume no liability for any investment decisions made based on the content presented herein.

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