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This week Simon Taylor & Cuy Sheffield are joined by:

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On September 1, 21 institutions including Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Capital One, Fidelity, WisdomTree, Santander, Deutsche Bank, Lloyds, Rabobank and UBS committed to set up a stablecoin company in the second half of 2026, targeting a US dollar coin in the first half of 2027 and a euro token afterwards. The effort began in October 2025 with a smaller bank group. The stated scope covers wholesale, institutional and retail use.

Simon Taylor's opening question was what unifies TD, Deutsche, Lloyds, Rabobank and Standard Bank in a single product, and everyone on the call had a different answer. Ada Vaughan read the announcement as a countermeasure against non-bank issuers taking the stablecoin business, summarised the design brief as "everything but the kitchen sink," and asked whether this was crypto Zelle before conceding that Zelle already has its own coin. Cuy Sheffield saw the pooling logic as sound, since few banks want to issue alone and fragmenting liquidity across 21 coins helps nobody, but said the vision, the use cases and the team to execute are still undefined.

Simon's explanation for the missing use case came from the consortium structure itself. Each member sees the coin through its own business line, so the brief expands until it says everything and specifies nothing.

His contrast was Qivalis, which he said is zeroing in on a couple of use cases, with two primary ones leading, because it clustered mid-sized European banks around a euro stablecoin for very specific purposes. His other examples ran the same way. The Clearing House, in his account, sees tokenized deposit clearing as the benefit if you want 24/7 capability, while Zelle sees a stablecoin as an offshore dollar it can use to extend its network so people can remit out to other markets and send money home. The 21-bank release names no equivalent.

Darko Hajdukovic moved the discussion off membership and onto settlement design. From the tokenized-securities side, a payment token is only useful if it changes the workflow between the asset leg and the cash leg. His three tests are whether the asset moves with the cash, whether settlement exposure falls, and whether separate reconciliations across networks disappear. Fully prefunded atomic settlement is one answer to that, and it is the one most stablecoins default to.

Darko's position was narrower. Not everything has to be prepaid, and not everyone wants everything prepaid.

Simon, with his Tempo hat on, offered a wholesale case where a bank coin has a clear edge. Off-hours cross-margining across multiple venues, at an hour when neither commercial bank deposits nor central bank money is available in both markets, is something Tempo is looking at as "a material use case for some clearing banks." That names a transaction and a counterparty set, which is what the release does not do. Darko added the two operating tests the coin faces regardless of use case. Can it move across chains, banks and borders, and will redemption hold in market stress? A member list answers neither.

Also on September 1, LSEG and Payward, Kraken's parent, agreed to bring the 100 largest LSE-listed companies to Payward's xStocks framework over the coming weeks, across more than 110 countries and, for now, not to UK investors. LSEG plans to list the tokens on LSE 24 in 2027 subject to regulatory approval, and to explore natively LSE-issued equity tokens with the same rights and fungibility as traditional shares.

The quieter detail is that LSE 24 launches on traditional technology, not as a tokenized venue. The design has three parts. An overnight venue running 17:00 to 07:50 London time, Monday to Friday, with a 30-minute processing pause and client testing due by the end of 2026, a third-party wrapper that LSEG has agreed to list on it subject to regulatory approval, and a native token built separately to carry the rights layer, with investors able to toggle between forms. Darko's scorecard for the whole category was sustained liquidity and preserved investor and issuer protections, not who announces first or trades the longest hours. Simon's caution on the global-access piece was that one person's financial inclusion is another person's regulatory arbitrage.

On August 31, ICE agreed to invest in tZERO's latest round and take a licence to its blockchain patent portfolio. tZERO becomes a design partner under an MOU for the NYSE tokenized platform's transfer agent and broker-dealer infrastructure, and is expected to be designated an approved digital transfer agent, alongside Securitize, once regulatory and operational requirements are met. The two firms are in court. tZERO sent Securitize a cease-and-desist in June, and Securitize sued in Delaware a week later seeking a ruling that it does not infringe tZERO's patents. Simon's description of ICE contracting with both was "playing matchmaker." The next day, September 1, the SEC proposed updating transfer agent rules that date from the 1970s. Cuy's read was that competition over the IP for representing stocks onchain, dividends and corporate actions included, is now a live market. Ada's point was about sequencing, and she cited over $4 billion in RWAs now issued onchain on Stellar, per Vaughan, as evidence of the pull.

The transfer agent is the handover between the issuer's legal record and the trading venue. ICE named two candidates for that role. The bank consortium has not yet named who accepts its coin.

Ethena launched Ethena Pay in beta on Avalanche, opening to roughly 400 users, expanding weekly, across 48 authorised countries, with up to 6% on USDe balances and card cashback of 4%, 4.5% and 5% by tier, paid in AVAX. The app pairs a fiat IBAN with a self-custodial account, which is closer to a full neobank than a stablecoin wallet. Ada's Kenya example made the distribution problem concrete. Card and banking penetration are low, M-Pesa handles nearly everything, and the product's success there could hinge on that one integration. Cuy's assessment turned on the same economics.

Ethena Pay has a clearer retail proposition than the bank consortium has disclosed. Ada's caveat was that every company underestimates how hard it is to change consumer behaviour, and that acquiring one card customer is hard and expensive. Her verdict was still favourable: keep CAC low, get good value from the users, 'go for it.' Cuy's phrase for the segment was "vicious competition between these different providers." A bank coin "for everything" enters that lane with the same CAC problem and no yield lever.

2027 now holds the consortium's USD coin in the first half, LSE 24's planned xStocks listing and, on Cuy's count, several other bank consortium products. His expectation, with Visa's own effort focused on getting Open USD (the Open Standard consortium's coin) into circulation and, in his words, "excited to work with them," is that banks will join multiple consortiums and a winning approach will consolidate at the end. Simon's version was that the ones that cluster around a few use cases with traction will deliver value, and the passengers will board afterwards.

In Ep. 85, we covered whether it would take a consortium of banks to dent USDT and USDC. Ep. 99 is that consortium arriving, and the show's verdict is that scale is not the constraint. An exchange that agreed to list a third-party wrapper on a conventional venue has told the market more about its settlement path than 21 banks have. The coin that competes will be the one that names its first transaction, specifies its cash leg and shows repeated institutional usage before the launch announcement fades.

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