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Howdy!

Gotta love the weather in New York City. It feels like I’ve experienced both the coldest June and the hottest June in recent memory all in the same month.

Today, we’ve got Fiserv’s stablecoin, the REV rankings, and a new Solana stablecoin app:

Fiserv to launch FIUSD stablecoin

One of the biggest payment processors on earth is dropping its own stablecoin. This morning, the $90 billion payments giant Fiserv announced it will launch a bank-friendly stablecoin called FIUSD.

According to the company, this will be a dollar-backed stablecoin built on Solana, catering specifically to banks, merchants and financial institutions. The company indicated that the launch will happen later this year, though it has not yet given an exact date.

FIUSD will run natively through the same infrastructure that already powers 90 billion transactions annually, including Clover POS systems and banking tools used by 10,000 financial institutions.

Most global commerce still runs on systems designed for a slower age. Funds take days to clear, cross-border transfers are expensive and error-prone, and small businesses often wait until Monday for weekend payments to settle.

The rise of crypto has been promising to change that for over a decade, but banks and enterprises are slow to evolve. Until recently, most have lacked a compliant, scalable way to interact with decentralized assets.

Fiserv's solution is a regulated, programmable digital dollar built using infrastructure from Circle (USDC) and Paxos (PYUSD).

Fiserv also announced an expansion of its partnership with PayPal. The two firms will build interoperability between FIUSD and PYUSD to smooth cross-border payments, merchant settlements and real-time payouts.

Banks and merchants would tap into FIUSD via SDKs baked into Fiserv tools like Experience Digital and Commercial Center. Then, they can track transactions on the Finxact core ledger, with compliance, fraud monitoring and risk controls handled on the backend.

It sounds like end-users will mostly be unaware they're even interacting with crypto. They'll gain all of the speed, transparency and efficiency benefits of Web3 with none of the persisting friction.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out why Fiserv has chosen to do this now.

Just six days ago, the US Senate passed the GENIUS Act — short for Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins — by a wide 68-30 margin.

The bill creates a comprehensive federal framework for payment stablecoins, defining them as a new legal category of regulated payment systems, not as securities or commodities.

Large issuers will fall under federal oversight, while smaller ones may opt-in via aligned state-level rules.

The Act mandates 100% backing with high-quality liquid assets, strict transparency, monthly reserve disclosures and AML compliance under the Bank Secrecy Act.

This is a major turning point in US digital asset policy and clears the way for enterprise-scale stablecoin adoption. That clarity likely removed one of the biggest remaining hurdles for Fiserv, which operates deep in regulated financial infrastructure.

For normal people, these changes could mean that your paycheck starts arriving on Sunday. Your international orders could settle in seconds. A business in Brazil could get paid instantly by a partner in Boise.

Look out, world. Stablecoins aren't just for crypto traders anymore.

— Jeffrey Albus

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Katana is a DeFi chain built for higher sustainable yield and deep liquidity.

It concentrates liquidity into core applications and channels the chain’s revenue back to the users. Creating a better DeFi experience that benefits the active users on the chain.

Earn KAT tokens: Pre-deposit with turtle club 

Solana ekes out another week:

Despite seeing a fifth consecutive week of REV decline, Solana was still the top blockchain by the metric last week. Solana’s $13.8 million in REV edged Tron’s $12.9 million. 

That’s 13 straight weeks atop the leaderboard for Solana. Perhaps this new TRX treasury company will finally push Tron over the line?

— Jack Kubinec

Solana-based stablecoin platform Lulo debuted its mobile app today. The app is pretty pared-down, offering stablecoin deposits and vaults as well as a referral link program in a bid to drive adoption. 

Lulo is one of a few stablecoin-specific apps in Solana land right now. In my view, its killer feature is “protected deposits,” which lets users accept lower yields in exchange for some protection against smart contract risk or DeFi exploits. 

Basically, users can deposit stablecoins into a boosted vault — which has averaged 5.93% APY over the past 30 days — if they’re okay with losing their funds first if, say, Lulo were to get hacked. In the event of a protocol failure or exploit, the boosted funds would be used to cover depositors into the protected vault, which has 3.68% APY on average over the past 30 days.

Stablecoins seem to have real momentum, but users are justified to be a little leery about depositing their savings into DeFi protocols given the space’s history of hacks. Protected vaults address the trust gap by creating something akin to DeFi depositors’ insurance for those willing to take less yield.

Still, a world where people feel safe doing all their financial activities on a stablecoin-based mobile app may still be a way off. Lulo co-founder Jesse Brauner told me last week that he doesn’t foresee too many folks taking their paychecks in stables and doing banking tasks on crypto mobile apps, at least in the short term.

— Jack Kubinec

Crypto’s execution layer is meeting in Brooklyn.

From programmable identity to parallel infra to onchain governance that works — this is where real builders compare notes.

Joseph Lubin. Goutham Buchi. Illia Polosukhin. Alex Blania.
 
June 24-26 | Brooklyn, NY

A message from Adam, founder of star.fun: