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Welcome to the Tokenized newsletter, brought to you by the creators of the Tokenized Podcast. Written by Simon Taylor of Fintech Brainfood and Shwetabh Sameer of Molten Ventures.

We are the newsletter for institutions that need help preparing for a Tokenized future.

We run through the headlines every week, what it means for you and a market readout. Always with an institutional, business-focused perspective. 

Join us every week as we meet your Tokenization needs.

💬Simon's Market Readout – Ramp chose stablecoins and Stripe over years of building local payment rails. Simon explains why the winning product hides the rail, and why bank tokenized deposits still do not solve the cross-bank user experience.

📰 Stories You Can’t Miss - CLARITY’s ethics deal moves forward without securing the Democratic votes it needs; Marqeta and zerohash put stablecoin spending in front of an incumbent card base; and Augustus raises $180 million to build the dollar-access bank international fintechs still rent from others.

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This week, Ramp announced stablecoin financial accounts. When we spoke to Andrew Chapello on the Tokenized podcast, he said this came directly from customer demand — Airbnb and Spotify were fed up waiting days or weeks to pay vendors in certain markets. They wanted instant movement through Ramp.

Building traditional international payment rails would take Ramp years. Stablecoins were cheap and instantly available. A no-brainer.

Some critics say Ramp doesn't understand international payments. I disagree — I think they understood the complexity perfectly and simply chose not to wrestle with it. Instead, they partnered with Stripe (under the hood) to launch Ramp financial accounts. Faster time to market, lower cost than any turnkey alternative.

This is the beginning of a new normal, where companies face a choice: the multi-year, multi-partner fiat build-out, or a stablecoin abstraction layer.

Now, stablecoins aren't a panacea. Tech companies adopt them because they can handle modern wallets and treasury integration — their CFOs are comfortable with that. But Ramp's real trick is making stablecoins look like any other dollar in the CFO's existing dashboard.

Here's the framing for banks and G-SIBs: tokenized deposits give you instant 24/7 movement, but only inside your walled garden. Citi can't move JPMorgan money. That's what Swift Ledger is trying to solve — orchestrating across bank tokenized deposit systems. But it's not ready. Not for years. And even when it is — which interface do I use? Citi's or HSBC's? Who reconciles what?

With Ramp, none of that matters. It's abstracted away. Product simplicity wins. Not marginally better FX rates or wholesale efficiency. The best customer experience wins. That's what Ramp is enabling.

On May 28, we said ethics was the hinge on CLARITY. Eight weeks later, that is where the White House moved. But CLARITY still does not have the Democratic votes it needs. Seven Democrats involved in the negotiations say the latest draft needs more work. Two of them, Alsobrooks and Gallego, supplied the committee bill’s only Democratic votes, and others, including Cortez Masto and Warner, still want stronger illicit-finance safeguards. That matters because ethics is no longer the only condition standing between the bill and a floor vote. The ethics provision itself responds to a live conflict - Trump disclosed about $1.2 billion in crypto-related revenue for 2025.

Key Points

The Tokenized Take

For fintechs, this is now a timing story as much as a political one. CLARITY has moved closer, but the market-structure rules institutions are planning around still depend on a handful of Democratic votes. Ethics has moved. Illicit finance and other safeguards have not been settled. A deal before recess keeps the rulemaking clock on or ahead of the Q1 2027 base case we set in May. The 18–24-month clock starts when the President signs.

The enforcement design matters more than the size of the penalty. Exchanges can face $250,000 per violation, per day, but DOJ alone decides whether a case is brought. History gives Democrats a reason to be sceptical. The STOCK Act has subjected members of Congress to federal insider-trading rules since 2012. Campaign Legal Center reported in September 2025 that no member of Congress had ever been prosecuted for insider trading under it. CLARITY would concentrate civil enforcement further by giving DOJ exclusive authority under this section.

The ethics compromise is temporary; the market-structure law would not be. CLARITY’s rules on classification, registration and developer protection would outlast administrations. The ethics restrictions expire on January 20, 2029, with the presidential term they were written to constrain. Lawmakers are being asked to accept a temporary guardrail in exchange for permanent market rules.

The calendar now matters. If lawmakers can close these gaps before the August recess, our Q1 2027 rulemaking baseline still holds. If they cannot, Cynthia Lummis (the Senate Banking Digital Assets Subcommittee chair and one of the Republican negotiators driving the bill), called this “likely our last chance” to get digital-asset legislation on the books before 2030.

Stablecoin cards are moving from specialist infrastructure into the product catalogue of incumbent issuing platforms. Marqeta's zerohash partnership now has to prove whether Marqeta’s existing customers want one.

Key Points

The Tokenized Take

Marqeta has customer access. The stablecoin cross-sell remains unproven.

Marqeta already sits inside card programs run by some of the largest fintechs, including Block, Affirm, Klarna and Ramp, giving it a sales channel a new issuer has to build from scratch. Block, its largest customer at 45% of 2025 net revenue, built its own USDC rail on Cash App in May. The announcement names no customer asking for the new capability.

An installed base creates access to buyers. It does not create demand. That makes the first launch more revealing than the partnership itself. If a scaled existing customer adds stablecoins to a card program it already runs on Marqeta, the cross-sell thesis works. A greenfield customer would tell us something different.

Network settlement is where stablecoins can change the economics.

Visa's own framework separates stablecoin card funding from stablecoin settlement. In the traditional model, the user's stablecoins are converted before the issuer settles with Visa. Principal Members can instead settle directly with Visa in stablecoins.

Rain already uses the second model. Because it controls more of the issuing stack and holds direct network membership, Rain can borrow USDC against card receivables and settle directly with Visa each day. Visa says that reduces excess borrowing and shortens the time capital sits against future settlement obligations.

Marqeta and zerohash have not disclosed which model their programs will use. If stablecoins are converted to fiat before network settlement, the partnership changes what funds the card without changing Marqeta's existing treasury model. Under its Sutton Bank agreement, Sutton still issues the card and settles the payment, while Marqeta receives the interchange and pays Sutton a fee based on transaction value.

Europe is the exception. TransactPay gives Marqeta direct Visa and Mastercard membership in the UK and EEA, but customers billed outside the US generated only 14% of 2025 net revenue. Marqeta has more issuing control in a smaller part of its business.

And the clearest consumer demand case is appearing elsewhere. Visa points to markets such as Argentina and Nigeria, where dollar access and local currency volatility make holding stablecoins before spending them useful in its own right.

Marqeta needs new volume to monetise better than the existing mix.

Management now guides to 12% to 14% net revenue growth for 2026, after revenue grew approximately 23% in 2025. On the Q1 call, Mike Milotich said roughly five of Marqeta's top ten customers were still growing above 50%. As larger customers with better pricing take more share of TPV, they put pressure on Marqeta's take rate.

That makes the commercial design of the stablecoin product as important as the extra volume. If stablecoins bring additional program-management revenue, treasury services or deeper customer retention, Marqeta gets more from relationships it already has. If stablecoin support becomes another feature inside a discounted processing contract, TPV can grow without doing much for revenue per dollar processed.

For zerohash, Marqeta adds card spending to a growing list of financial products it powers behind the scenes, alongside E*TRADE crypto trading and Gusto's USDC payouts.

If Marqeta names a scaled customer and moves network settlement onchain, the partnership becomes a direct answer to Rain. If neither happens, it shows stablecoin card functionality is becoming easier to add before the demand and economics are proven.

For most international fintechs, the stablecoin stack still ends at a bank. Augustus has raised $180 million to try to own that regulated layer, including the account, balance sheet and clearing relationship used to access dollars.

Key Points

The Tokenized Take

The scarce part of the stablecoin stack is still direct dollar access. An international fintech can move stablecoins in seconds, yet it still needs a regulated bank to hold dollars, access domestic payment systems, screen transactions and complete the fiat leg. Augustus wants those functions to sit inside one banking relationship rather than several sponsor banks and middleware providers.

The charter gives Augustus more of that stack to own. Bridge's February approval brought custody, stablecoin issuance, orchestration and reserve management inside a national trust bank. Augustus has preliminary approval for an insured national bank with deposit-taking, lending and foreign correspondent banking. It also plans a stablecoin subsidiary and is developing tokenized deposits. The difference is the extra banking powers around the digital asset product set.

Fed membership moves Augustus closer to the clearing layer. As a national bank, Augustus must join the Federal Reserve System, although direct access to Fed payment services still requires approval. If granted, Augustus could settle dollar payments without routing them through another bank's Fed account.

Operating hours alone will not differentiate Augustus. Citi said in February that about 300 banks already use its 24/7 Clearing service. Augustus will not displace an incumbent by keeping the lights on over a weekend.

Augustus’s opening is further down the correspondent-banking market, where the economics become harder for incumbents to justify. For lower-volume international fintechs and financial institutions, fixed onboarding, KYC, sanctions and monitoring costs can eat into the economics of a direct correspondent relationship. They then access dollars through additional intermediaries, each adding cost and another operational dependency.

Augustus is betting that software changes the cost per account. Variant, investors in Augustus, say underwriting, transaction monitoring, compliance and clearing are designed to run through AI systems with human supervision. Marble, Augustus's proprietary core, is built to operate across Swift, ACH, SEPA and stablecoins. Those systems matter if they let Augustus serve more correspondent relationships without recreating the incumbent cost base.

But the customers that make the economics attractive can also make the compliance problem harder. Institutions that struggle to obtain direct dollar access may require more sanctions screening, transaction monitoring and manual investigation. Augustus therefore has to show that automation lowers the cost of control without lowering the standard. The bank still has to pass the OCC's preopening examination before it can launch.

The OCC has put a date on the thesis. Augustus has until May 2027 to capitalize the bank and November 2027 to open. Its $180 million raise comfortably exceeds the $52.5 million minimum on paper, leaving execution rather than fundraising as the story to watch.

If Augustus gets direct Fed access and proves its control model inside that window, stablecoins will have created an opening for a new clearing-bank franchise. If it cannot, the constraint will look less like payment technology and more like the compliance economics that made correspondent banking concentrated in the first place.

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