The company that has been moving remittances for a hundred and seventy years is making its own stablecoin
The money transfer network that will issue the stablecoin serves about 100 million users. On October 29, 2025 Bitcoin closed at $110,021, a move of −2.5% on the previous day.
Who is issuing it, and why that matters
It will arrive in the first half of 2026, pegged to the dollar, issued by an American bank that specializes in digital assets, and it will run on Solana. Alongside it a network is being built to convert crypto into cash at physical counters. That’s the piece no pure issuer has: 100 million users and a presence in places where not everyone has a bank account.
The chief executive’s line needs no interpretation: they want to own the stablecoin economy. In plain terms, if your margin is about to be eaten by a new instrument, the only move that keeps you in the game is to issue it yourself.
A money transfer network with about 100 million users and a dense physical presence issues its own stablecoin: the value of the move lies mostly in the distribution network that already exists.
The same pattern, in three different companies
Three different moves with the same structure: use stablecoins for cross-border payments, keep earning on the money sitting on deposit, and keep collecting fees, only smaller ones on bigger volumes. At the time, the stablecoin market was worth $312 billion, and payments settled with them had reached $19.4 billion since the start of the year.
What’s worth understanding is that adoption is coming from people with a margin to defend, more than from people who believe in the technology. The intermediaries are the ones building the infrastructure that, in the founding story, was supposed to eliminate them. They’re building it because the alternative is someone else doing it.
What changes for people sending money home
A stablecoin issued by someone who already has the counters changes two things at once: the cost of the transfer collapses, and cash withdrawals stay possible where they’re needed. It’s the combination everyone else lacks. Pure issuers have the coin and no counters, and traditional networks have the counters and no coin.
What remains to be seen is how much of that saving reaches the people sending the money. The technology lowers the cost of moving it. But the fees are set by whoever controls the last mile, and here that’s the same company as before. It could end with the money moving for free and the price staying where it is.
Put bluntly: the intermediaries are building the instrument that the founding story said would remove them, and they are doing it because the alternative is somebody else building it.
The rest of the day, and the price
Bitcoin, in the middle of all this, closed at $110,021 against $112,898, down 2.5 percent. On the day a network with a hundred million users announces it’s entering stablecoins, the best-known coin falls two and a half percent for reasons that have nothing to do with the announcement.
That’s why it pays to keep the two readings apart. The price tells you what speculative money is doing today; announcements like this one tell you where payments will run in two years. The second matters more, and it’s much harder to see.
the words in this piece · 3
- fee
- what you pay to use a protocol. it can go to whoever supplies the service, to whoever holds the token, or to both.
- stablecoin
- a token built to be worth the same as a currency, usually the dollar. what changes is how it manages that: reserves at a bank, collateral onchain, hedges on derivatives.
- wallet
- the program that keeps the keys a transaction is signed with. it doesn’t hold the funds: it holds the permission to move them.