HUGE CRYPTO NEWS! STABLECOIN ADOPTION SURGES & CHINA HONG KONG STABLECOIN TO COMPETE WITH US!

Tony Edward (0:05)

Hey, folks, welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcast, your home for cryptocurrency news and interviews. I'm your host, Tony Edward. On your way in, please hit that subscribe button, as well as the thumbs up button and leave a comment below. If you're listening on a podcast platform such as Spotify or Apple, please be sure to follow and leave a five-star rating. All right, folks, we have major stablecoin adoption news, a lot to cover. And of course, there's an international geopolitical layer to this. So first off, let's talk about OpenUSD. So we talked about this months ago, where OpenUSD is a consortium stablecoin. So today, major financial firms officially launched this new stablecoin. Again, call OpenUSD. The ticker symbol is OUSD. It's backed by Visa, Stripe, Shopify, Coinbase and MasterCard. OUSD is launching across Solana, Base, Ethereum and Tempo, with $1 billion in launch liquidity. Now, there's also another consortium stablecoin out there, which Robinhood is a part of, Galaxy Digital. So you're seeing these conglomerate stablecoins start to form. And this is very interesting because they have the partnerships, they have the network of businesses and consumers. And remember, what can help your stablecoin to do well is distribution, where it is being put to work in different ecosystems, on different platforms. So if you have companies like Visa and Shopify and MasterCard, all backing this stablecoin, it helps it to get off the ground very quickly. So we're going to see a lot of competition here with stablecoins, which is great. And the competition is good for the end consumer. And of course, the Genius Act, which was passed last year, is the stablecoin regulation bill. It is officially law. We know some of the banks are trying to roll back the stablecoin yield aspect, but we're seeing incredible innovation because once again, we have the legislation in place. So the company that's actually launching this stablecoin is called Open Standard, and their CEO is Zach Abrams. And they tried to launch this, I believe, or they initially unveiled it in June of this year, and now it's officially live. So here's a quote from Abrams. We want to be the most useful stablecoin, the same way the US dollar is useful.

Every other stablecoin is building a fund. We're building money. So again, competition heating up here. And we know the world's largest stablecoin is Tether's USDT. And of course, the largest in the United States is Circle's USDC, which is doing a lot, and it's getting a lot of adoption by some of these companies that are part of this consortium. So really big news here. And moving ahead, we got some stablecoin adoption news here. This one's pretty big. So Lloyds Banking Group and Visa complete a seven-day pilot settling $750,000 in USDC. So that's the stablecoin issued by Circle, of course, with funds reaching Visa in under an hour, including over the weekend. So this is just a perfect example, a microcosm of what's to come, right? All these major institutions are going to be using stablecoins.

Some may use tokenized deposits. You're going to have the tokenization of other assets. They're going to have crypto custody, crypto assets available for trading, maybe crypto assets on their balance sheet. They're going to use blockchain to manage their internal operations, right? Putting data on chain. All of that's coming. But of course, payments is the big use case. Being able to move money very fast, 24-7, 365, at a very cheap rate with instant settlement. So it's incredible. Look at the institutions that are participating, folks. Years ago, when I got into the market, 2016, 2017, we couldn't even imagine this, that these guys would even touch this stuff with a 10-foot pole, right? Many of them were saying negative things about stablecoins and crypto. So this is huge adoption news. Now moving ahead, HSBC, one of the largest banks in the world, names its Hong Kong stablecoin HSBC Redcoin, launching initially for peer-to-peer and merchant payments before expanding to corporate and institutional use cases.

Wow.

This is very fascinating. So it's a Hong Kong stablecoin. Now we know who controls Hong Kong, China.

If China was against this, they would, of course, roadblock it and ban it and all that. We've heard over the years there's a lot of tight controls in China. People are not able to do a lot with stablecoins and crypto, even though a lot of people do it on the black market if you want to call it that. But we've seen Hong Kong, which is once again, fully under control of China, has expanded its crypto operations, financing for crypto ETFs, stablecoins, everything that is essentially exists in the United States exists in Hong Kong for crypto. And there's a lot of crypto companies there. So again, there's a geopolitical layer here because the US dollar is the world's reserve currency. We know recently the Trump administration came out and said they want to make a big push to have US dollar-backed stablecoins pushed across the globe. And we know that would help the US dollar to maintain the world reserve currency status. But it will also help our dollar and our economic system to function because stablecoin issuers of the US dollar will have to back their reserves with US treasuries. So they will have to keep buying the debt. And of course, you know China would love to have their digital yuan or something like the red coin be the world reserve currency. They would love that. But this is where we're in this geopolitical competition of currency and it's ongoing. It's been going on for a long time. And China for years now has been pushing its digital yuan to its citizens. And we'll see how this all plays out. Maybe they just keep the digital yuan for China, not necessarily Hong Kong. But we've heard talks about them looking to push the digital yuan into other countries. So lots of things playing out here guys. But again, it's all running on blockchain. As I've said many times, the future economies, capital markets and governments will all run on blockchain rails. We are seeing that infrastructure being built right before our eyes. Now here's some other stablecoin adoption news. Bloomberg brings on-chain stablecoin data to its terminal.