September 2, 2026
Bonus Content: The Banks Are Back. 21 Firms Just Agreed to Issue a Dollar Stablecoin.
Editor’s Note: See the following from our friend Josh Baylin. Josh is one of the greatest tech investors in America. For years, he helped manage $200 million at SAC Capital (the elite fund run by Steve Cohen, who owns the NY Mets). He purchased two $60,000 Nvidia supercomputers to run his own quant fund. And he even broke tech stories at Bloomberg for many years. But what he’s sharing next could be the most significant call of his career…
What Sam Altman is building next is positioned to operate at a scale that dwarfs ChatGPT, address a market estimated at over $1 million per American, and create a concentrated tailwind for a small group of stocks as the story reaches a wider audience.
Click here to learn about the stocks tied to Sam Altman’s next venture.
At operational sites across America, this project is already running under strict confidentiality protocols — and most of the investment community hasn’t connected the dots yet.
That’s because Sam Altman’s next venture is quietly live at those sites right now.
It’s a new application of AI that sits well outside what most people associate with the technology.
Early data suggests it processes certain research tasks at a pace that outstrips conventional scientific workflows by several orders of magnitude.
It carries backing from Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk — who has called the underlying technology among the most structurally disruptive forces in modern industry.
And it is positioned to reprice one of the world’s largest, most entrenched sectors — with meaningful downstream consequences for millions of people.
To see this analysis before it becomes mainstream financial coverage…
Click here to see what’s developing — and the key stocks to consider as this accelerates.
Regards,
Josh Baylin
Analyst, Stansberry Research
P.S. The framework I’m sharing today reflects the same early-stage positioning approach that, in prior cycles, produced returns on the order of $1,000 into $3 million — and $5.8 million — for those who identified the inflection point early. Click here to see why getting positioned ahead of Sam Altman’s next move may be among the more consequential decisions available to investors right now.
The Banks Are Back. 21 Firms Just Agreed to Issue a Dollar Stablecoin.
The story of the last decade in digital payments has been simple: the banks watched, crypto moved, and Tether and Circle carved out a market that is roughly $320 billion without a single major bank at the helm. That story has a new chapter as of September 1, 2026.
Twenty-one financial institutions announced Tuesday that they plan to establish a company in the second half of 2026 to support stablecoin issuance, focusing first on a U.S. dollar stablecoin for payments and digital asset settlement, with a euro token a priority for expansion. The consortium spans five regions: North America, Europe, East Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. It grew out of a digital-money issuance study that began in October 2025 with 10 banks before expanding to 21 participants.
The North American contingent includes Bank of America, Capital One, Citi, Fidelity Investments, Goldman Sachs, PNC Financial Services, Scotiabank, TD Bank Group, Wells Fargo, and WisdomTree. MUFG Bank is the sole East Asian participant, joined by Sirius International Holding from the Middle East and Standard Bank from Africa. European representation includes UBS, Santander, BBVA, Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank, Lloyds Banking Group, Crédit Agricole, and Rabobank.
Why This Is Not Just Another Fintech Press Release
Twenty-one direct competitors co-owning a single issuance vehicle is not a pilot program. It is an industry deciding, collectively, that it cannot afford to lose the payments layer to entities outside its control. The calculation is straightforward: Tether leads the stablecoin market at roughly $183 billion, representing about 59% of total market share. Circle’s USDC accounted for about 70% of adjusted stablecoin transaction volume in the first half of 2026, widening its lead over USDT, according to Visa’s onchain dashboard data. The rails are being laid, and someone else is laying them.
The bank consortium is planning a 1:1 reserve-backed token available on public blockchains, intended to serve wholesale, institutional, and retail users across cross-border payments and digital asset settlement. The consortium has chosen the stablecoin structure, a bearer instrument, not a deposit token, specifically to compete for liquidity that exists outside the traditional banking system. That distinction matters. Tokenized deposits stay on a bank’s balance sheet. Stablecoins travel freely across blockchains. The latter is where volume lives.
The Regulatory Opening They Are Using
The GENIUS Act created the legal framework these banks are using. OCC rulemaking on prudential requirements for stablecoin issuers was proposed in March 2026 and is still pending finalization. The Act’s effective date is the earlier of January 18, 2027 (18 months after enactment) or 120 days after the primary federal stablecoin regulators issue final regulations. The timing is not accidental. The statute’s schedule places the federal framework into effect around the period when the bank consortium is preparing its first-half 2027 go-to-market target, giving the venture time to incorporate final reserve, capital, redemption, custody, and compliance requirements into the product.
Who This Pressures
Circle (CRCL) and Coinbase (COIN) are the most obvious names to watch. If banks start issuing their own stablecoins, Tether and Circle may finally have real competition. Circle’s edge has been institutional trust and regulatory clarity. The consortium is built on both, at far greater scale. Visa and Mastercard, which have invested heavily in stablecoin settlement infrastructure, now face a network owned by the very banks whose cards they process.
Notably, JPMorgan Chase appears on neither this list nor the competing Open USD consortium. The largest U.S. bank has evaluated whether it could launch its own stablecoin, Reuters reported Tuesday. A bank of JPMorgan’s size setting its own course, rather than joining either coalition, is itself a signal that this market is large enough to support multiple architectures.
What Could Go Wrong
The announcement is a commitment to form a company, not a working product. The group has not disclosed the company’s name, token name, blockchain networks, reserve custodian, governance structure, or final redemption terms. Twenty-one institutions, each with its own legal team, compliance culture, and shareholder base, will need to agree on all of it. The history of bank consortia is littered with initiatives that were ambitious on the press release and slow in execution.
Still, the long-term logic is hard to argue with. A bank-issued, GENIUS Act-compliant, reserve-backed dollar token with distribution across five continents is a different product than anything the stablecoin market has seen. If the consortium delivers by mid-2027, the question is not whether institutional payment volumes shift toward it. It is how quickly, and which of today’s stablecoin leaders absorbs the displacement best.
