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💬 Simon's Market Readout. Tala has quietly brought unsecured credit to stablecoin wallets.

📰 The Big Story. Microsoft, Alphabet and Goldman Sachs have objected to OKXICE trading tokenized versions of their shares.

🗞️ Things You Need to Know. The OCC finalises its GENIUS Act rule, JPM Coin goes live on Ethereum, Coinbase powers stablecoin cards for Marqeta, Visa and Mesh open up crypto spending at 175 million merchants, and Jack Henry brings tokenized deposits to banks.

One of the great unknowns of stablecoins and onchain finance has always been unsecured credit. We've had over-collateralized credit in DeFi for quite some time. For every Bitcoin lent, somebody might have to deposit up to two Bitcoin, or something of that nature. Under-collateralized credit, or deposit-taking-based credit, is what's made the world go round. It's obviously much more affordable not to have to post more collateral than you actually lend. In fact, it's a better economic business case in most cases.

But it was always unsolved and not quite there. Except quietly somebody has solved it, and that company is called Tala. Tala started out as an unsecured credit lender in emerging markets, full stop. It didn't start as an onchain product.

They started by looking at the alternative data signals that make a consumer creditworthy, looking at everything on their mobile phone. How they behave, how they transact, and how they're using mobile money. And they built a solid credit business in this world. They've lent more than $10 billion to date, with a very solid non-performing loan ratio. By itself, this is a phenomenal emerging markets business.

But what they've now done is supercharge that by making that credit available to stablecoin wallets in multiple markets. Tala recently partnered with El Dorado, which has millions of customers across Latin America. They're starting in Bolivia, where customers can open wallets, access pre-qualified credit offers, and receive funds directly in USDT within seconds.

So this is putting the full cycle together. I can store stablecoins, I can earn rewards on them, I could potentially invest in different funds, and now I've also got credit, so I can borrow. I think that's a full-stack ecosystem that's onchain. And all of this runs on Tempo as well, which I was pretty excited to see from all involved.

I got the chance to meet the Tala founder here in Vegas at Money20/20, and I think we'll be hearing a lot more from this company in the future.

Sixteen companies have now objected to OKXICE trading tokenized versions of their shares, up from nine the week before. The new names on OKXICE's latest notice are Microsoft, Alphabet, Goldman Sachs, Qualcomm, Caterpillar, McDonald's and Western Digital.

OKXICE is the joint venture between OKX and NYSE owner ICE. They want to run 24/7 trading in tokens backed one-for-one by real shares, with the same dividend and voting rights, settled in stablecoins.

Their original list of tokenized shares included 62 companies, and 15 of them have objected.

For the uninitiated, the SEC's Innovation Exemption from September 2026 lets venues like OKXICE list tokenized stocks without the company signing up first. Issuers get a 30-day window to object instead.

Andrew Cuomo, OKXICE's co-chair and a former New York governor, called the objections "a very natural response". He said "The model was designed to give companies the right to determine whether they want to opt in or opt out."

SIFMA, Wall Street's trade body, wrote to the SEC asking for affirmative issuer consent, a longer objection period and a universal opt-out for issuers. The letter says "The five-year term of the relief heightens the importance of resolving these questions at the outset."

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has published its final rule implementing the GENIUS Act, the US stablecoin law. It sets the requirements for permitted payment stablecoin issuers and foreign issuers under the OCC, covering reserve assets, redemption, risk management, audits and reporting, custody and applications.

The rule applies to national banks, federal savings associations, federal branches of foreign banks, foreign stablecoin issuers and nonbanks applying to become federal qualified issuers. Anti-money laundering and sanctions rules aren't in it, and the OCC will write those with the Treasury separately.

The rule and the GENIUS Act both take effect on 18 January 2027. The OCC proposed the rule in March 2026, received hundreds of comments, and will say separately when it starts accepting applications from would-be issuers. Comptroller Jonathan Gould said "We are providing a clear, practical framework for payment stablecoin innovation, with strong standards for reserve backing, redemption, and risk management."

(Read more here)

Kinexys by J.P. Morgan has brought JPM Coin (JPMD), their US dollar deposit token, to Ethereum. It has been on Layer 2 Base since it launched in November 2025, and only J.P. Morgan's institutional clients can use it.

(Read more here)

Coinbase and Marqeta are expanding their six-year partnership so Marqeta's business customers can offer stablecoin-backed cards. Coinbase holds the stablecoins and converts between them and fiat, Marqeta issues the cards and processes the payments, and settlement runs onchain on Base.

Businesses can fund their card programmes 24/7, and there's no launch date yet. Marqeta was already the processor for Coinbase's US debit card, which launched in October 2020.

(Read more here)

Visa and Mesh will let people spend crypto and stablecoin balances held in participating wallet apps at more than 175 million Visa merchant locations, in-store and online, without a separate card. Users don't need to sell or move their crypto first, and payments run through a Visa credential set up behind the scenes.

Bam Azizi, CEO and co-founder of Mesh, said "Mesh handles the funding and conversion, so a balance becomes purchasing power at the moment of payment."

(Read more here)

Jack Henry, who sell core banking technology to more than 7,200 clients, will let banks and credit unions offer tokenized deposits through Google Cloud Universal Ledger (GCUL). They say they'll be the first core technology provider to integrate with it, and there's no launch date yet.

GCUL offers 24/7 programmable settlement, with clearing and multilateral netting that don't need pre-funded accounts. Ben Metz, CTO of Jack Henry, said "Tokenized deposits have the potential to reshape how money moves across the financial ecosystem."

(Read more here)

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