🏦 U.S. Bank to Trial Stables on Stellar and Exodus to Acquire Baanx & Monavate

Your First Captivating Topic of the Week

🏦 U.S. Bank to Trial Stablecoin Issuance on Stellar

Just a month after announcing their new Digital Assets and Money Movement organization, U.S. Bank is already back in the headlines. Released yesterday, this podcast reveals that the bank is exploring stablecoin issuance on Stellar, in collaboration with PwC and a big theme here is risk management.

This is part of why they chose Stellar as they’ve found the ability to claw back, freeze assets and online transactions, embedding compliance rules, etc. Stablecoins (tokenized cash) are a great way for them to start onboarding clients to their onchain ecosystem before expanding to other tokenized assets. Programmable money alone comes with a variety of use cases across USB’s existing clients, from “vanilla” ones like basic, cheaper payments to more complex ones like corporate clients reallocating money across international subsidiaries and streamlining treasury management. Stellar Development Foundation President José Fernández da Ponte brings up the fact that since transactions are essentially free to execute thanks to the blockchain, more frequent and customized payments are possible at scale such as usage-based payments, for example.

It’ll be interesting how they roll this out and any findings along the way. The super regional bank may have different needs and use cases than a Global Systemically Important Bank (G-SIB), meaning $USB ( ▲ 0.2% ) could incorporate this a bit differently than say JPM or HSBC with their deposit tokens and with more flexibility. The relationship USB has with smaller regional and community banks could also be a focus and be enhanced with their stablecoin, strengthening those relationships and helping them also onboard.

This is not financial advice.

RWA Foundation & WALLY DAO Updates

The RWA Foundation introduced the RWA Pod as “A permissionless way for anyone to support RWAs using crypto with multiple RWA project tokens as yield.”

In partnership with PERQ, the RWA Pod allows you to deposit ETH, USDC, ARB, and S/ Sonic. Participants will receive tokens on multiple blockchain protocols related to RWA projects that the RWA Foundation has qualified and selected as Founding Members.

What’s the update this week? Hear directly from your RWA Pod host, Ray Buckton!

Two of the tokens in the POD rewards are Brickken’s BKN and DRVN’s BSTR. Want to learn more about them? Check out interviews with their founders now available on X and on YouTube, go ahead and check them out 👇!

Your Second Captivating Topic of the Week

🤝 Exodus to Acquire Baanx & Monavate for $175M

Consolidation continues to be a theme this year along with heavy investments into infrastructure and Exodus is now announcing their contribution to that. A crypto wallet provider, $EXOD ( ▼ 7.14% ) was actually one of the pioneering issuers of tokenized stock back in 2021 on Algorand via Securitize (coming soon to Solana via Superstate’s Opening Bell). Now they’re the ones doing the investing and it’s for 100% of W3C Corp which owns Baanx and Monavate. According to the CoinDesk article, this $175M deal is part cash Exodus has on-hand and the rest is financed by Galaxy Digital, with Exodus’ Bitcoin holdings as collateral (great use case of a crypto-backed loan).

The goal here is to own the payments stack for users to go from holding crypto and stables in their wallets to using Visa, Mastercard, or Discover cards tied to them which is something we’ve now seen Coinbase and MetaMask enable (which uses Baanx).

Stablecoins maturing after the GENIUS Act passing has clearly raised interest in the market for companies building infrastructure to support them, from building payments-focused blockchains to whitelabel solutions. Exodus’ focus on the end user is apparent through this acquisition as owning the technology will give them more flexibility in integrations and solutions. It’ll be interesting to see what kinds of financial services aside from card issuance could live natively in the Exodus wallet through this and how it positions them against others.

This is not financial advice.

Security Token Show Ends with 300 Episodes!

Check out the latest and final episode of the Security Token Show as well as the full catalog on Youtube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts & Google Podcasts.

Reports

RWA Tokenization: Key Trends and 2025 Market Outlook

Check out a report we contributed to: RWA Tokenization: Key Trends and 2025 Market Outlook. Led by Brickken, this report brings multiple parties together in diving into tokenization, with STM.co supporting with both data and some of the written sections.

What’s Inside?

✅ A Breakdown of Tokenization and Related Benefits
✅ Key advantages for issuers, investors, and institutions
✅ How the market is evolving and trends shaping adoption in 2025
✅ What’s next? Expert insights on regulation, DeFi integration, institutional involvement, and market growth

STM’s RWA Market Prediction for 2030

STM.co is proud to release a thorough report on our prediction on the tokenized real world asset market growth. This report explores the variety of opportunities within each asset class to capture value on-chain.

Tokenization can be applied to just about any object and asset type. Art, carbon credits, life insurance, and other sub $5 trillion asset classes weren’t even considered in estimates.

In order for STM to derive its 2030 market predictions, the following asset classes were evaluated: currency, M2/M3, real estate, commodities, public equities, private companies and funds, bonds, credit and lending markets.

This is not financial or investment advice.