Meta Returns to Stablecoins - This Time as the Distribution Layer

If you're reading this and still haven't signed up, click the subscribe button below!

Pssst. We also have a podcast… find that here on your favourite podcast player or here on YouTube 🙏 

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.

🎙️ Tokenized Podcast Live — NYC, March 25

Pssst. We're taking the podcast from behind the screen to up close and personal. Join 100+ leaders shaping the future of stablecoins and real-world asset tokenization at our live event during Digital Asset Summit NYC. One expert fireside chat. One live podcast recording. Made possible by Visa, presented by Mesh, powered by MomentumX Global.

Request to RSVP here.

In This Week's Edition:

📣 Simon's Market Readout – Crypto may be in a full-blown winter, but it is unquestionably stablecoin summer. Stripe reports Bridge volume up 4x year over year. And the biggest story? Meta is exploring a stablecoin comeback, not as an issuer this time, but as a distribution surface for 3 billion+ users. The strategic logic has shifted from currency creation to settlement infrastructure for agentic AI commerce.

🚀 Meta's Stablecoin Comeback: What the Company Denies, the Infrastructure Confirms - Meta is engaging stablecoin infrastructure providers about payments integration across WhatsApp and Instagram. Andy Stone says there's no Meta stablecoin, but "enabling payments via preferred methods" leaves the door wide open. The real story is the AI angle: $115–135 billion in 2026 capex, the Manus acquisition, and agentic shopping assistants that need instant, cross-border settlement underneath.

🏛️ Payoneer Seeks OCC Trust Charter for Platform-Native Stablecoin – Payoneer files to establish PAYO Digital Bank, N.A. - a national trust bank designed to issue PAYO-USD as a "balance-at-rest" for its nearly 2 million business customers across 190+ countries. This isn't a branded stablecoin chasing exchange listings. It's operational plumbing. Plus: our exclusive podcast interview with Payoneer's Head of Stablecoins, Rob Morgan.

💸 Stripe Eyes PayPal: The Digital-Dollar Super-Stack Takes Shape - Stripe is in early-stage talks to acquire all or parts of PayPal. If completed, it would combine over $3.6 trillion in total payment volume and assemble the first vertically integrated digital-dollar platform in payments history - issuance (Bridge), settlement (Tempo), consumer distribution (Venmo/PayPal's 400M wallets), and merchant acceptance (Stripe + Braintree), all under one roof.

Simon’s Market Readout 💬 

Crypto may be in the middle of a full-blown winter, but it is unquestionably stablecoin summer. In their annual report this year, Stripe noted that Bridge's volume was up 4x year over year - and that's a meaningful amount. This is on top of their previous announcements about partnering with Klarna, launching stablecoin-linked cards, and a custom stablecoin for Phantom with 20 million users .

This is a meaningful growth industry, and everyone I speak to is hearing it.

But the big story right now is whether or not stablecoins are the natural money for AI. And if Meta has anything to do with it, they could be the inflection point. Yes, Meta has entered the chat. According to a scoop by Coindesk, Meta is thinking about getting back into the stablecoin space with Bridge as a likely partner, and they're issuing an RFP. The same Meta, of course, of Libra - the ill-fated 2019 attempt to build a new currency for billions of users. Cue every central bank panicking about sovereignty.

"That thing is dead," Zuckerberg reportedly said to Stripe's John Collison. And the 2026 version would be meaningfully different. Meta is no longer building its own currency. We now have the Genius Act in law. Companies that are attempting to be Genius Act compliant are all applying for national trust charters - a.k.a., they are banks - and stablecoins enhance the role of the sovereign currency. They don't fight against it. So what Meta is bringing is a distribution channel, not an issuer. That distinction matters enormously.

So why would Meta want stablecoins? They could use them to improve corporate treasury and cross-border flows, accessing the hundreds of countries where correspondent banking is slow or expensive. That alone would be a no-brainer. But consider AI. Meta is spending tens of billions in 2026 capex, mostly on AI. They're building agents that will shop and transact autonomously through agentic commerce. Imagine you're about to buy something on Instagram and it needs to settle instantly, cheaply, and across borders. Stablecoins are the settlement layer for AI-driven payments.

Traditional payment rails can't settle instantly, cheaply, across borders in hundreds of countries. They can't do that at Meta's scale or speed. They become very expensive. They make commerce almost prohibitive in those markets. Stablecoin rails across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp would give 3 billion-plus users access to faster, cheaper value transfer.

Let's see how this plays out in the next couple of years.

Stories You Can't Miss 📰

🚀 Meta's Stablecoin Comeback: What the Company Denies, the Infrastructure Confirms

As discussed above, Meta is back in stablecoins, or at least, circling the opportunity. Reports indicate the company has held exploratory discussions with multiple stablecoin infrastructure providers about integrating dollar-denominated payments into WhatsApp and Instagram. Meta VP Andy Stone responded publicly: "Nothing has changed; there is still no Meta stablecoin." Fair enough. But the company also confirmed it is exploring ways to let users "pay via preferred methods"- and the infrastructure partners Meta is reportedly engaging with, tell a more specific story. (For more info on stablecoin middleware volumes and competitive positioning, see today's Market Readout.)

Key Points:

• Meta has reportedly engaged stablecoin infrastructure providers about payments integration across WhatsApp (~2 billion users) and Instagram (~2 billion users). No issuer partnership or token has been announced.

• Andy Stone's pushback frames the company's position clearly: no proprietary stablecoin, no Diem revival. But "enabling payments via preferred methods" leaves the door wide open for third-party stablecoin rails.

• The middleware layer Meta would need already exists - and is being contested aggressively. Coinbase pursued BVNK for ~$2 billion  (deal collapsed November 2025); Mastercard held advanced talks with Zerohash at ~$2 billion (Zerohash walked away, now raising $250M independently at $1.5 billion ). Circle's integration with Stripe/Bridge remains the only closed deal in this category.

• The AI angle is the real story. Meta has set aside $115-135 billion in 2026 capex, nearly double 2025's $72 billion, overwhelmingly for AI infrastructure. The company acquired Manus for over $2 billion in Dec 2025/Jan 2026 - a Singapore-based autonomous AI agent startup. Zuckerberg is explicitly building "agentic" shopping assistants that interpret intent, compare options across catalogues, and close transactions inside Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp

• EU regulatory exposure adds complexity. WhatsApp is designated under the Digital Markets Act as a core platform service for messaging interoperability. Whether embedded payment features could eventually face similar interoperability requirements remains an open question - one worth monitoring as the European Commission refines DMA enforcement.

The Tokenized Take:

The instinct is to compare this to Diem. Resist it. Meta learned the hard way that issuing your own stablecoin invites every regulator in the world to your doorstep simultaneously. The smarter play - and the one the infrastructure signals suggest - is to become a distribution surface for existing, regulated stablecoins. That shifts Meta from issuer risk to platform risk, a profile the company already manages across advertising, commerce, and messaging.

The important aspect is that the strategic logic has evolved beyond payments. Consider what Meta has today: 3.5 billion+ daily active users across its family of apps, AI agents designed to shop and transact autonomously, and now a stablecoin settlement layer underneath. When an AI agent buys something for you inside Instagram, it needs to settle instantly, cheaply, and across borders. Traditional card rails can't do that at Meta's scale or speed. Stablecoins aren't the product here - they're the plumbing for agentic commerce.

So who supplies the rails? The stablecoin middleware wars covered in today's Market Readout are directly relevant. Stripe/Bridge (closed), Circle's direct merchant play, and the independent paths BVNK and Zerohash chose after walking away from acquisition talks all position differently for a platform with 4 billion combined monthly users. However,  if Stripe acquires PayPal, Meta's stablecoin integration suddenly runs through a platform that also controls a competing consumer wallet (Venmo) and a competing stablecoin (PYUSD). That can create strategic tension Meta did not sign up for.

If Meta moves forward - and Stone's careful non-denial suggests internal work is more advanced than the public position implies - the competitive impact lands on banks, traditional remittance providers and payment networks simultaneously. A WhatsApp-native stablecoin payment in a corridor like US-to-Philippines competes with every cross-border rail that charges more than near-zero and settles slower than near-instant.

That's not a niche disruption. That's the entire correspondent banking model under pressure from a messaging app with 3 billion users. Size that implication accordingly.

🏛️ Payoneer Seeks OCC Trust Charter for Platform-Native Stablecoin

Last week, we covered Bridge's conditional OCC charter approval and Payoneer's decision to embed stablecoin capabilities (i.e., receive, hold, send, and convert)  directly into its existing platform, powered by Bridge. That story was about distribution over issuance, and the Bridge flywheel pulling in platform partners. This week, Payoneer showed it wants more than a seat on someone else's rails.

Payoneer filed with the OCC to establish PAYO Digital Bank, N.A. - a national trust bank built specifically to issue and operate stablecoin infrastructure for its nearly 2 million active business customers across 190+ countries.

And in an exclusive interview on the Tokenized Podcast, Rob Morgan (Head of Stablecoins at Payoneer), laid out the strategic logic behind the filing. What he described isn't another branded stablecoin chasing exchange listings. PAYO-USD is designed to disappear into the background.

Key Points:

• Filing scope: PAYO Digital Bank would send and receive approved stablecoins, issue PAYO-USD as a GENIUS Act-compliant holding currency, manage reserves backing PAYO-USD, offer custodial wallet services, and provide on/off-ramp conversion to local currencies. Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP advised on the application.

• Token design: PAYO-USD is a "balance-at-rest" - a platform-native internal liability that unifies multi-token inflows into a single customer balance. A marketplace seller receiving payments in USDC, USDT and other tokens sees one PAYO-USD balance. Not intended for secondary market trading.

• Architecture: Payoneer handles fiat orchestration, liquidity management, and customer relationships. Bridge (Stripe) handles blockchain custody, on/off ramps, and infrastructure abstraction. The charter gives Payoneer its own federal regulatory standing rather than relying entirely on a partner's supervised status.

• Regulatory path: CEO John Caplan stated the charter directly leverages the GENIUS Act's federal framework - federal preemption over 50 state money transmitter licenses, single federal supervisor.

• Timeline: Select-market launch targeted for mid-2026, with broader rollout through the remainder of the year.

• Volume context: Payoneer processed $80 billion in payment volume for FY2024, with ~$1 billion in revenue guidance.

The Tokenized Take:

The balance-at-rest model is the part worth unpacking. Payoneer isn't trying to create the next branded stablecoin for secondary markets. PAYO-USD solves two problems at once. First, for the customer, it's a UX fix: when your platform accepts multiple token types from multiple counterparties (say, USDC, USDT, etc.), you shouldn't need to manage that complexity - one balance, one number. Second, for Payoneer, it's operational infrastructure: real-time seamless conversion between tokenized assets and fiat, flowing straight into their global banking network. One balance for the customer. Orchestration underneath.

It's closer to how a bank presents a single account balance regardless of which ACH, wire or card payment funded it, except the underlying rails are blockchain-native.

On the podcast, Morgan was direct about this. "We don't plan to compete with other stablecoins." PAYO-USD is operational plumbing. It solves an internal fragmentation problem - how do you present a clean balance to a freelancer in Manila who's been paid in three different stablecoins from three different marketplaces? You unify everything into one platform-native unit of account. That framing is deliberate. Morgan confirmed that the charter complements Bridge rather than duplicating it: Payoneer wants to own the customer-facing balance liability while continuing to rely on specialist infrastructure for blockchain orchestration.

This reinforces the distribution-over-issuance thesis we've been tracking since the Klarna and Cash App pieces. But it also extends it: Payoneer is the first distribution-first platform to seek its own federal charter - not to become an issuer in the Circle/Tether mold, but to own the liability layer sitting on top of someone else's infrastructure.

Payoneer's nearly 2 million business accounts absorb real correspondent banking costs - 2-3.5% FX markups, 1-3 day settlement delays, and capital locked in pre-funded local currency accounts.

The value isn't in minting a token. It's in the distribution layer that would use it without ever thinking about it.

But this raises an interesting question for the OCC charter landscape: when the applicant isn't seeking to be a stablecoin issuer in the traditional sense, but a platform operator using a token as internal accounting infrastructure, does the regulatory evaluation look different? On our podcast, Rob pointed out that Payoneer's existing safeguarding requirements for e-money balances are 'relatively similar to what we see in GENIUS ACT', suggesting continuity rather than disruption. Still, the GENIUS Act defines reserve requirements, audit obligations, and redemption rights with general-purpose stablecoins in mind. If PAYO-USD is primarily a balance-at-rest (not listed on exchanges, not competing for market share), how precisely do those redemption rights apply? Payoneer's filing may push the OCC to clarify where 'platform stablecoin' ends and 'payment stablecoin' begins.

The competitive pressure is building, too. Last week we flagged that Airwallex is positioning stablecoins as "not yet ready at scale" while Wise has started hiring a digital assets product lead but hasn't shipped. 

Payoneer's charter filing raises the bar. It's no longer sufficient to integrate stablecoin rails; the frontier has moved to owning the regulatory wrapper around them.

💸 Stripe Eyes PayPal: The Digital-Dollar Super-Stack Takes Shape

Stripe is in early stage talks to acquire all or parts of PayPal. If completed, it would combine over $3.6 trillion in total payment volume under one roof. And, more critically, assemble the first vertically integrated digital-dollar platform in payments history.

Key Points:

• The stablecoin stack math is staggering. Stripe's Bridge (stablecoin issuance and orchestration, now with conditional OCC trust-charter approval) + Stripe's Tempo L1 ambitions + PayPal's PYUSD (~$4 billion market cap) + PayPal/Venmo's 400 million+ consumer wallets + combined Stripe/Braintree (Paypal’s service) merchant networks. That's issuance, custody, distribution, and settlement - all under one entity.

• Bridge's OCC conditional charter approval (covered in last week's edition) materially raises the strategic logic. A federal trust charter gives Stripe a path to hold reserves directly and issue regulated stablecoins without relying on third-party banking partners - turning Bridge from an orchestration layer into a regulated financial institution.

• Natural synergies are real but so is the execution risk. Migrating Braintree merchants to Stripe's stack, embedding Checkout/Link into Venmo and PayPal wallets, and consolidating settlement rails onto blockchain-native infrastructure all look compelling on paper. In practice, integrating a 400M-account public company with legacy systems is a fundamentally different challenge than acquiring a 60-person startup like Bridge.

• The cautionary precedent is FIS/Worldpay: $43 billion acquisition, $17 billion+ in writedowns, and an eventual divestiture. Large-scale payments M&A has a poor track record when cross-sell expectations collide with cultural and technical debt.

The Tokenized Take:

The story here isn't just corporate M&A theater- it's the potential creation of a closed-loop digital-dollar platform that controls issuance (Bridge), settlement infrastructure (Tempo), regulatory authorization (OCC charter), consumer distribution (Venmo/PayPal's 400M wallets), and merchant acceptance (Stripe + Braintree). No entity in payments has ever held all five layers simultaneously.

For enterprise treasuries, we can see the overall link. A combined Stripe-PayPal with a federal trust charter could offer stablecoin-settled merchant payouts, real-time treasury sweeps, and embedded yield - all on proprietary rails. That's a compelling value proposition, but it also concentrates counterparty risk in ways that should make any CFO pause.

Now the key question is: can Stripe actually integrate a public company with 400 million accounts and, frankly, a decade of cultural and technical debt?

Stripe's M&A track record is strong on small, founder-led companies. Bridge , Metronome, Privy - they absorb teams, ship product, move fast. PayPal is a categorically different animal. It has legacy infrastructure and overlapping merchant processing businesses (Braintree vs Stripe core) that create internal cannibalization risk. And we already know about the FIS/Worldpay story. Buying scale in payments is easy. Integrating it is where deals go to die.

But here's the counter-argument: Stripe isn't buying PayPal for card processing synergies. If the Collisons are thinking about this deal through a stablecoin lens, then the integration logic is different. You don't need to merge Braintree into Stripe's core stack. You need PYUSD's distribution, Venmo's wallet base, and PayPal's merchant acceptance network as endpoints for Bridge's stablecoin rails. The traditional payments businesses can coexist while the stablecoin infrastructure unifies underneath. 

During what would be a multi-year integration, could we expect merchant and platform churn toward Adyen, Checkout.com, and other PSPs? It would be fascinating to see how that unfolds. On the stablecoin infrastructure side, Circle, Coinbase, BVNK, and Paxos could benefit as engineering bandwidth at both companies gets diverted toward integration rather than innovation. Antitrust scrutiny is also near-certain given the combined card-processing scale.

So what to watch in the coming weeks? PayPal board and CEO signals in coming weeks, Bridge charter milestone timelines, any Stripe valuation moves in secondary markets, and whether competitors accelerate their own M&A in response.

This deal is far from done, but the strategic logic tells exactly where the payments industry is heading: toward vertically integrated stablecoin stacks that own the full value chain from issuance to settlement.

📰 Some More News:

🏦 Tokenization, Stablecoins & Finance

• Circle Q4 Earnings Beat Estimates as USDC Circulation Reaches $75.3 Billion, Shares Surge (Read more here)

• Stripe's Bridge Sees Stablecoin Volume Quadruple as Utility Insulates From 'Crypto Winter' (Read more here)

• Coinbase USDC Revenue May Multiply 7x as Payments Grow, Bloomberg Says (Read more here)

• WisdomTree Gets SEC Nod to Enable Instant Settlement for Tokenized Money Market Fund (Read more here)

• Coinbase, Kraken and Binance Push Deeper Into Tokenization as Capital Shifts (Read more here)

• Hong Kong to Link New Digital Bond Platform With Regional Tokenization Hubs (Read more here)

• Framework Ventures to Help Better With $500M DeFi Mortgage Play (Read more here)

• Stripe Co-Founder Predicts 'Torrent' of AI Agent Commerce Powered by Stablecoins (Read more here)

• MoonPay Launches 'Agents,' Giving AI Systems Wallets and Onchain Cash Flow (Read more here)

• Endowments Eye Crypto Allocations Amid Tougher Return Outlook for Traditional Investments (Read more here)

• Safe Integrates Morpho Vault to Earn Yield Using Société Générale's MiCA-Compliant EURCV Stablecoin (Read more here)

🤑 Funding and M&A

• Bitwise Acquires Chorus One, Potentially Paving Way for More Staked ETFs (Read more here)

• RedotPay Plans Blockbuster $1 Billion IPO in New York at Over $4B Valuation (Read more here)

• Tether Takes Stake in Whop as Platform Adopts WDK for Stablecoin Creator Payouts (Read more here)

• Canaan Acquires Cipher Mining's Stake in West Texas Bitcoin Mining Projects in $40M Deal (Read more here)

• Backpack Pledges 20% Equity to Token Stakers Amid IPO Plans (Read more here)

• Tether-Backed Bit2Me Ditches 'Retail' Label to Build Plumbing for Europe's Biggest Banks (Read more here)

💼 Government & Policy

• UK FCA Selects Revolut Among 4 Firms to Test Stablecoins in Regulatory Sandbox (Read more here)

• Fed Moves to Permanently Drop 'Reputational Risk' From Bank Supervision (Read more here)

• Crypto.com Secures Conditional OCC Approval in Bid to Become a Federally Regulated Bank (Read more here)

• ESMA Warns Crypto Perpetual Derivatives Likely Fall Under CFD Rules (Read more here)

• Hong Kong to Issue First Stablecoin Issuer Licenses Next Month (Read more here)

• Blockchain Association Pitches Crypto Tax Plan to Congress (Read more here)

• South Korea Moves to Require Crypto and Stock Influencers to Disclose Holdings (Read more here)

• Coinbase CEO Pushes Back on UK Stablecoin Caps as Token Profits Surge (Read more here)

• Arizona Senate Advances Bill to Create Digital Assets Reserve Fund (Read more here)

• Chainlink's Taylor Lindman Joins SEC as Chief Counsel for Crypto Task Force (Read more here)

• TRM Labs and Finray Technologies Partner for Unified Crypto and Fiat Transaction Monitoring (Read more here)

Thanks so much for reading the Tokenized Newsletter!

Please share this edition or share it with your colleagues if you enjoyed it!

Disclaimers