Barclays Invests in Stablecoin Clearing Infrastructure

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Introduction

Welcome to the Tokenized newsletter, brought to you by the creators of the Tokenized Podcast Simon Taylor of Fintech Brainfood, Pet Berisha of Sporting Crypto, 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 💬 

The two stories this week show you the extreme difference between credibility and the lack thereof.

The first story: Ubyx receiving a strategic investment from Barclays. This is fascinating for a number of reasons, first of which is, it's something that banks understand quite well.

What does Ubyx do? They clear between different stablecoins, different networks, different wallets. Fundamentally, that is solving a many-to-many problem. There's a many-to-many problem in stablecoins. If I finally send you something, it might not get there. What network are you using? Why? These are questions you don't want to be asking.

Guess what? We've solved this in banking. ACH. SWIFT. Despite its youthful appearance, stablecoin clearing is an old problem wearing new clothes.

That's a very credible story. And what I like about this is it gives banks something they all need. Their corporates are asking: "I need to be able to off-ramp stablecoins with you. How do I do that?" In steps Ubyx. They say: doesn't matter what network you're on, doesn't matter what stablecoin you've got - we'll deliver you fiat. You give us a stablecoin. Fantastic. Big problem solved.

Now, what about the second company?

Kontigo. If you've been following the news, this YC-backed startup has been very vocal about "coming for Jamie Dimon." He must be quaking in his boots. Their banking services are provided by, quote, "the freaking blockchain."

Bold move, calling out the greatest of all time in Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan. A number of old heads like me were tilting our heads a little bit and wondering: why would you say something like this?

Lo and behold, they were hacked. And subsequently, they've said they intend to make all users whole. But you can't unsee the timing - calling out the giants and then getting hacked. And with Venezuela in the mix, that context matters: JPMorgan froze Kontigo's accounts because that is a country under sanctions from the US Government. That's toxic to a bank.

The lesson here is clear: Saying "services provided by the freaking blockchain" doesn't mean your services are safe, more reliable or more consistent.

As much as these founders may have the most positive motivations possible, you've got to compare and contrast these two stories. There's probably a sweet spot somewhere in the middle. You don't have to just sell to banks. You can genuinely be looking to do things for the last mile and the most underserved consumers in underserved markets. But to do that, you have to do so with credibility - and understand the intentions and motivations of all parties in the ecosystem.

Financial services can't yet be provided by "the freaking blockchain" if your wallet can easily be hacked.

Stories You Can't Miss 📰

💸 Walmart's OnePay Adds Crypto. But This Isn't Just a Payments Story

Walmart-backed OnePay now offers Bitcoin and Ethereum trading, positioning crypto in front of Walmart's 150 million weekly US shoppers. The headlines screamed "Walmart accepts Bitcoin." The reality is more nuanced.

Key Points:

• No Bitcoin at the register. You can buy and sell crypto inside the OnePay app. When you sell, the proceeds land in your OnePay Cash balance. At checkout, Walmart's POS sees dollars, not crypto. The blockchain never touches the transaction.

• OnePay is building America's WeChat. In 2025 alone, the app launched high-yield savings, credit cards (via Synchrony), BNPL (via Klarna), $35/month unlimited wireless and P2P payments. Crypto trading (powered by Zero Hash) is the latest module in a rapidly expanding financial services stack.

• Already #5 on the App Store for finance…ahead of Chase, ahead of Robinhood. Yet OnePay's penetration of Walmart's weekly shoppers remains low. The gap between current users and addressable market is enormous.

• Zero Hash is the infrastructure winner. The same platform powering OnePay is behind E-Trade's crypto rollout for Morgan Stanley. Interactive Brokers led Zero Hash's $104 million round at a $1 billion valuation, with Morgan Stanley, Apollo, and SoFi also participating. By late October, Mastercard was reportedly in late-stage talks to acquire Zero Hash for $1.5–$2 billion.

The Tokenized Take:

We've watched "merchants accept crypto" fail repeatedly - 2014, 2016, 2021. Each time, the pitch was the same: Bitcoin as a payment rail. Each time, the friction killed it. Volatility. Conversion delays. Tax headaches.

OnePay isn't making that mistake.

They're not trying to turn crypto into a payment method. They're using crypto as an engagement feature to capture the banking relationship. The crypto button gets a younger Walmart shopper to download the app. The high-yield savings account keeps them there. The credit card deepens the relationship. The BNPL captures transaction data. Before long, OnePay is their primary financial account.

This is the super-app playbook that's worked in Asia for a decade, now adapted for American retail. And Walmart has something no fintech can replicate: 150 million people already walking through their doors every week.

The strategic question for banks isn't whether Walmart will displace them overnight. It's what "distribution" actually means in 2026. Chase has more than 80 million digital customers and spends billions on acquisition. Walmart has foot traffic that dwarfs every bank branch network combined. And they're converting it into financial services relationships one product at a time. If OnePay captures even 10% of weekly shoppers as active financial users within 18 months, they'd rival Chime's entire customer base - built on foot traffic alone.

Zero Hash, meanwhile, is becoming the picks-and-shovels play for traditional finance entering crypto. OnePay. E-Trade. A cap table that reads like a directory of institutional finance. When Morgan Stanley and Apollo invest in your infrastructure company, and Mastercard wants to buy you outright, you're not a startup anymore. You're a utility.

The real story here isn't that Walmart "accepts Bitcoin." It's that America's largest retailer is using crypto as a wedge to build one of America's largest neobanks. And they're doing it on infrastructure that institutions already back with their own capital.

🚀 Jupiter Launches JupUSD: DeFi Protocols Now Import Institutional Collateral

Jupiter, Solana's dominant DEX aggregator with $2.7 billion in TVL, has rolled out JupUSD - a native stablecoin built on Ethena's whitelabel infrastructure and backed primarily by institutional-grade Treasury assets including BUIDL.

Key Points:

• Institutional-grade reserve structure: JupUSD reserves are backed by USDtb - Ethena's stablecoin backed by high-quality short-duration Treasury assets, including BlackRock's USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL)

• Federally regulated issuance: USDtb is issued by Anchorage Digital Bank N.A., the first federally chartered crypto bank in the U.S., positioning it as a GENIUS Act-aligned stablecoin with bank-grade regulatory oversight

• Broad ecosystem integration: JupUSD is designed to work across Jupiter's perpetual futures, lending vaults, DCA tools, prediction markets, and spot trading as integrations roll out

• Yield optimization roadmap: JupUSD will later incorporate USDe, Ethena's delta-neutral synthetic dollar (~$6.3 billion in circulation), to generate yield for holders

• Ethena's B2B expansion: This marks a milestone for Ethena's whitelabel service, which is also powering native stablecoins for MegaETH and Sui

The Tokenized Take:

This isn't just another stablecoin launch. DeFi protocols are now pulling institutional finance into their collateral stacks rather than building around it.

The reserve architecture runs through multiple layers of institutional infrastructure: high-quality Treasury assets (including BlackRock's BUIDL fund), Ethena's USDtb wrapper (designed with GENIUS Act alignment in mind), and Anchorage Digital's custody (federally chartered bank security). That's a DeFi-native protocol accessing institutional-grade reserves - except Jupiter gets to brand it as their own dollar.

What makes this interesting is the infrastructure competition playing out beneath the surface. Jupiter and Hyperliquid are both perpetual futures platforms with billions in volume - and they chose different stablecoin stacks. Hyperliquid went with Stripe's Open Issuance for USDH, joining Phantom's CASH and MetaMask's mUSD on Bridge infrastructure. Jupiter went with Ethena, backed by Treasury assets including BUIDL and custody through Anchorage Digital. Two major perps platforms, two competing rails. This isn't random - it's protocols picking sides in the stablecoin infrastructure war.

Ethena is positioning itself as the default issuance layer for protocols that don't want to build reserve management from scratch. They're running a "Stablecoin-as-a-Service" operation at $6+ billion scale with USDe alone, licensing infrastructure to high-distribution platforms including MegaETH and Sui. The pattern is clear: chains and protocols with existing user bases want to deploy branded dollars immediately and focus on their core product - not spend two years building compliance and custody infrastructure.

For Jupiter specifically, JupUSD solves a fragmentation problem. Their ecosystem includes perpetual futures, lending, DCA tools, prediction markets, and the largest DEX aggregator on Solana. Previously, users juggled USDC, USDT and other stablecoins across these products. JupUSD becomes the unified collateral layer - one dollar asset composable across everything Jupiter builds. That's ecosystem lock-in through liquidity infrastructure, not feature differentiation.

Stablecoin issuance is commoditizing. When collateral, custody and compliance frameworks converge on the same institutional providers, differentiation shifts entirely to distribution and ecosystem integration. Jupiter - Solana's dominant DEX aggregator with ~$2.7 billion TVL - has both.

The next 12 months will be telling. If JupUSD captures meaningful volume, expect every major DeFi protocol with sufficient distribution to evaluate launching their own branded dollar through whitelabel providers. The infrastructure race is no longer about building stablecoins. It's about who controls the issuance platforms that let everyone else launch them.

🏛️ China's Seven Financial Associations Declare RWA Tokenization Illegal

Beijing extends its crypto crackdown to tokenized real-world assets, placing RWA in the same regulatory bucket as crypto trading and mining

Key Points:

• Seven major associations issued a joint warning: The National Internet Finance Association of China, China Banking Association, China Securities Association, China Asset Management Association, China Futures Association, China Association of Listed Companies, and China Payment and Clearing Association jointly declared RWA tokenization an illegal financial activity with no legal basis under Chinese law

• RWA now categorized with crypto, stablecoins, and mining: The notice explicitly listed RWA alongside cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and crypto mining as "primary forms of illegal virtual currency activity". This places tokenized securities in the same risk category as speculative crypto trading

• Three specific legal violations outlined: Authorities identified RWA activities as constituting unauthorized issuance of securities, illegal futures business operations, and illegal fundraising - covering virtually every angle of tokenized asset issuance and trading

• Liability extends to domestic staff of offshore projects: The notice also warns that domestic staff working for overseas RWA or crypto service providers (as well as onshore institutions providing support services) will be held legally accountable, even if the project is domiciled offshore

• Timing follows Hong Kong stablecoin shutdown: This announcement comes months after Beijing halted Ant Group and JD.com's stablecoin initiatives in Hong Kong in October 2025, signaling coordinated action against all forms of tokenized finance connected to mainland China

The Tokenized Take:

This extends a pattern we've been tracking all year. Beijing isn't making isolated decisions about stablecoins or RWA - they're systematically closing every door that leads to private sector tokenization.

When we covered Beijing halting Hong Kong's stablecoin ambitions back in October, the core question was: "Who has the ultimate right of coinage — the central bank or private companies?"

That question has now been answered across the entire tokenized asset spectrum. And the answer is very clear: the state, and only the state.

The fraud justification doesn't hold up. Yes, the notice mentioned that "criminals use RWA for fraud, Ponzi schemes and other illegal activities." But you don't coordinate seven major financial associations to issue a joint statement about retail scams. You do that when you're establishing regulatory doctrine.

The real concern is monetary sovereignty. Ant Group's Alipay already processes ~$20 trillion in annual transaction volume, more than many national banking systems. Allowing private companies to issue stablecoins or tokenized securities would create parallel monetary systems with better user experience, faster settlement, and global reach. That directly competes with the PBoC's e-CNY digital currency initiative, which has struggled with adoption precisely because users prefer WeChat Pay and Alipay. The contrast is clear: the same week Beijing declared private tokenization illegal, the PBoC announced interest-bearing digital yuan wallets launching this month, which triggered $188 million in investor flows into digital yuan-linked stocks. The state isn't blocking digital finance. It's monopolizing it.

For global institutions, this clarifies the operating environment. Any tokenized product - whether stablecoins, deposit tokens, or RWA securities - that touches mainland Chinese users now carries explicit regulatory prohibition. Offshore Hong Kong structures won't provide protection. The separation between Hong Kong's financial innovation and mainland oversight has eroded significantly for digital assets.

The competitive effects are straightforward. Capital and innovation will flow toward jurisdictions that enable programmability, composability and private sector participation. Singapore looks like the leading hub for institutional RWA pilots and regulatory sandboxes. Tokyo is advancing its own yen stablecoin infrastructure. The Gulf states are positioning aggressively for tokenization activity.

For enterprise decision-makers with APAC exposure, the calculation is straightforward. Build for Singapore, Tokyo, and the Gulf. Route around Beijing. And recognize that China's 1.4 billion consumers will be notably absent from the tokenization infrastructure being built everywhere else.

📰 Some More News:

🏦 Tokenization, Stablecoins & Finance

• Grayscale Declares First Ethereum Staking Payout for US-Listed ETF - Read more here

• Morgan Stanley Files for Bitcoin, ETH and Solana ETFs (Read more here)

• Tether-backed Rumble launches crypto wallet, letting fans tip creators in bitcoin and USDT (Read more here)

• US Bankers Warn Stablecoin Yield Workarounds Threaten Local Lending (Read more here)

• JPMorgan's Kinexys Expands Digital Payments Push With Canton Network Partnership (Read more here)

• Lloyds completes blockchain-based tokenised deposit transaction (Read more here)

• The Crypto CFO Playbook for Blockchain Treasury Management (Read more here)

• Stablecoin Titan Tether Wants Gold to Be Used for Everyday Payments – Here's How (Read more here)

• Like sats for Bitcoin, Tether creates tiny gold unit as onchain demand grows (Read more here)

• Binance Futures Launches Silver Perpetual Contracts . (Read more here)

• Polymarket and Parcl Launch Real Estate Prediction Markets (Read more here)

• IBM's crypto partner Dfns integrates Concordium for Web3 compliance (Read more here)

🤑 Funding and M&A

• Barclays buys into stablecoin-settlement company Ubyx (Read more here)

•  Ripple again rules out IPO, saying balance sheet gives it room to stay private (Read more here)

• Babylon Labs raises $15 million from a16z crypto to develop Bitcoin collateral infrastructure (Read more here)

💼 Government & Policy

• StoneX Secures MiCA Authorisation - StoneX Digital obtains Crypto-Asset Service Provider licence under EU's MiCA framework from Central Bank of Ireland. (Read more here)

• XRP currently dominates Japan's cash inflows, and a new 20% tax rate is about to lock that advantage in (Read more here)

• Senate Crypto Bill Faces Make-or-Break Vote Next Week But Key Divisions Threaten Collapse (Read more here)

• UAE's dirham stablecoin race widens as RAKBank nets in-principle approval (Read more here)

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