No. 001
13 July - 20 July
The Read
This week the RWA market's center of gravity moved from tokenized assets to the money that settles them. One theme ran through nearly every major development: stablecoins are becoming distribution infrastructure, and the fight is over who controls the rails.
On July 16, Visa launched VSP (Visa Stablecoin Platform), an enterprise system that lets banks, fintechs, and crypto firms mint, hold, transfer, and redeem stablecoins through Visa's own network. Its first supported asset is Open USD (OUSD), a consortium stablecoin backed by more than 140 companies including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, and Coinbase. It runs on the same economic model as Paxos's USDG, returning most reserve income to the partners who distribute it. Circle stock fell about 5% on the news.
In Japan, the same model went operational in a different form. On July 20, Nikkei reported that AZ-COM Maruwa, a Tokyo-listed logistics firm that distributes for Amazon Japan, plans to pay roughly 2,300 partners, including independent truck drivers, in the regulated yen stablecoin JPYC, and is weighing a ¥1 billion investment in the issuer. If it goes through, it would be Japan's first large-scale corporate operational use of a stablecoin. In the same week, SBI partnered with Ondo to bring Japanese stocks onchain and settle them in SBI's yen stablecoin JPYSC, so Japan began sketching a picture where both payments and assets sit on top of its own yen stablecoins.
In Korea, the answer to the same question is a bank deposit token rather than a stablecoin. On July 20, the Bank of Korea confirmed that Project Han River's second phase targets live transactions as early as September, testing commercial deployment of bank-issued deposit tokens while won stablecoin legislation stalls.
Underneath all this, the tokenized securities layer kept building. On July 14, the DTCC began limited production trades of tokenized Russell 1000 stocks, ETFs, and US Treasuries, and two days later Ondo launched its first tokenized stocks backed by DTC entitlements. Daily trading volume in tokenized stocks hit an all-time high of $3.57 billion. Whether the instrument is a consortium dollar, a yen stablecoin, a deposit token, or a tokenized equity, the contest is no longer about issuance. It is about which rail gets embedded inside the flows people and institutions already use.
The Anchored Desk
The Insight
USDG, GDN, and Robinhood's Stablecoin Strategy: Challenging the Stablecoin Duopoly
The stablecoin market has long been a two-horse race between Tether and Circle. USDT built its distribution network around global exchanges and international dollar demand, while USDC built its own around Coinbase and US onchain finance. USDG challenges this structure differently. Instead of trying to build a better token, it shares reserve income with platforms so that they have a reason to embed USDG inside their own products.
Robinhood is the first company to put this strategy into practice at scale. In November 2024, Robinhood joined Kraken, Paxos, Anchorage Digital, Galaxy Digital, and others as a founding member of the Global Dollar Network, or GDN. The network was built around USDG, a dollar stablecoin issued by Paxos, and promised to return most of its economics to the companies that contribute to its distribution.
Robinhood is now integrating USDG across Robinhood Chain, Robinhood Earn, and the broader tokenized asset market. This is far more than adding one more stablecoin to a list of supported tokens. USDG is being embedded inside the products through which users trade, lend, and move money.
The scale shows why this attempt matters. Robinhood said in July 2026 that it serves nearly 28 million customers across 38 countries. As of the end of May, it had 27.7 million funded customers and approximately $377 billion in platform assets. USDG had reached a circulating supply of about $3.16 billion by July 16, 2026.
Stablecoins Are Built on Distribution
USDT's position is the result of years of integration across global exchanges, trading pairs, OTC desks, payment channels, and informal dollar markets. It is widely used in regions where access to dollar banking is limited, costly, or unreliable. A network like this cannot be replicated by offering a few platforms slightly better terms.
USDC grew through a different route. Circle supplies the regulated stablecoin, Coinbase distributes it across retail and institutional products, and Base provides a major onchain environment for trading, payments, and DeFi. The relationship between Circle and Coinbase created a strong link connecting issuance, distribution, and blockchain activity.
In Europe, regulation reinforced this position. Circle obtained the authorization needed to issue USDC under MiCA, while several exchanges restricted stablecoins they considered non-compliant for customers in the European Economic Area. Coinbase, for example, announced that it would restrict certain stablecoins while continuing to support MiCA-compliant USDC and EURC. Research published in July 2026 found that USDC gained relative market share on exchanges where MiCA restrictions had a stronger effect. MiCA did not overturn USDT's global position, but it did affect the range of assets that regulated European platforms could offer. That is a distribution issue as much as a regulatory one.
Trading fee exemptions, default trading pairs, deposit rewards, wallet support, and chain integrations all shape which stablecoin a user ends up holding. In many cases, users do not actively choose between stablecoins at all. The platform chooses for them through product design.
This is where GDN is trying to enter. Its direct point of comparison is not USDT's global exchange and payments network but the USDC distribution stack built around Circle, Coinbase, and Base.
The Incentive Structure GDN Designed
Stablecoin reserves generate income because the issuer holds cash, short-term government securities, and other liquid assets against the tokens in circulation. The three issuers diverge on who receives that income.
Tether has never presented a public, network-wide program comparable to GDN that gives USDT distributors a stated share of reserve income. Private commercial arrangements may exist, but reserve income sharing is not the core proposition through which Tether offers USDT to platforms.
Circle does share a significant portion of USDC reserve income with Coinbase and other distributors. These payments are made under negotiated commercial agreements, and Circle's disclosures state that its distribution costs are tied to the amount of USDC held on Coinbase and to partner activity. In the first quarter of 2025, Circle's distribution and transaction costs grew faster than its reserve income — an illustration of how expensive the USDC distribution network had become.
Reserve income sharing itself is not GDN's invention. What sets GDN apart is that it turned an economic share that used to exist only through individual negotiations with a few powerful distributors into a reason for adoption that is open to the entire network.
GDN states that partners can receive virtually all of the returns generated by the assets backing the USDG held on their platforms. Partners can also receive rewards based on minting, custody, and acceptance activity. Actual payments depend on private agreements, network parameters, and governance decisions, so this should not be read as a guarantee that every partner receives all of the relevant reserve income.
Even so, the intent is clear. Paxos chose to trade part of the income it could retain as issuer for deeper distribution. It converted reserve income into an ongoing budget for acquiring partners — and the customers being acquired are not end users but exchanges, brokers, wallets, and payment companies.
This creates a middle option for financial platforms. A company can issue its own stablecoin and take responsibility for licensing, reserves, redemptions, compliance, and banking relationships. It can use an existing stablecoin and settle for whatever economics its issuer is willing to offer. Or it can use USDG, leave the issuance layer to Paxos, and participate in the value created by the balances it brings into the network.
USDG's regulatory structure supports this proposition. In Singapore, it is issued by Paxos Digital Singapore, a Major Payment Institution supervised by the Monetary Authority of Singapore. In Europe, it is issued by Paxos Issuance Europe under the supervision of Finland's FIN-FSA and in compliance with MiCA.
GDN's directory now spans exchanges, payment firms, wallets, infrastructure providers, and DeFi protocols. Its members include Robinhood, Kraken, OKX, Anchorage Digital, Bullish, and Worldpay, among others. The depth of these integrations matters more than the size of the directory, though. Listing USDG as one asset among many creates a very different level of demand from making it the default balance for trading, payments, or lending. Robinhood matters because its integration goes far beyond a listing.
Why Robinhood Chose USDG
Robinhood could have used USDC. It already had deeper liquidity, wider recognition, and mature infrastructure across exchanges and DeFi.
USDC's most important distribution relationship is with Coinbase. Circle pays Coinbase for the USDC balances and activity generated through its platform, and Coinbase operates Base as a large USDC-centered onchain environment. Coinbase is also one of Robinhood's closest competitors in crypto trading and has been expanding into products that overlap with Robinhood's broader financial plans.
Using USDC would have given Robinhood a proven dollar asset, but it would have meant building its onchain financial system on a network closely tied to Coinbase. In a structure where the strongest economic relationship already belonged to Coinbase, Robinhood would have remained just another distributor.
USDG offered different terms. Robinhood participated in GDN from its formation and can share in the economics generated as USDG grows through its products. Paxos handles issuance, reserve management, and redemption, while Robinhood controls how the asset appears inside its customer experience.
This structure gives Robinhood some of the economic benefits of an ecosystem currency without requiring it to become a stablecoin issuer. It gives Paxos access to a customer base and distribution interface that would be difficult to build independently. Each company gets from the other what it could not secure on its own.
None of this means USDG was the better asset for users from the start. USDC remained larger and more liquid. The strategic advantage lay elsewhere: the network around USDG left Robinhood far more room to shape it and capture its upside.
How Robinhood Creates USDG Demand
Robinhood Chain is where this strategy either translates into actual demand or stays a commercial agreement.
The chain launched as an Arbitrum-based Layer 2 designed around tokenized financial assets and onchain financial applications. Robinhood's Stock Tokens are available through Robinhood Wallet in more than 120 countries, subject to local eligibility, and the company has said they can eventually be used in lending pools and as trading collateral. Arcus is one of the decentralized trading venues through which users can access Stock Token markets.
Arcus matters because it standardizes trading activity around USDG. Users can fund their accounts through several routes, but the trading balance is converted into USDG, and Stock Token and perpetual trading are carried out from that balance. A user may come to Arcus to trade equities rather than to buy USDG — but the funding process creates USDG demand either way.
Robinhood Earn covers the other side of the flow. Eligible US users can lend USDG through a self-custody wallet inside the main Robinhood app. Morpho provides the underlying infrastructure, and Steakhouse Financial curates the vault. Borrowers post collateral and pay interest to borrow USDG, and that interest is the source of the yield depositors receive.
As of July 2026, the Steakhouse USDG vault holds approximately $144.91 million in total deposits, with about $56.59 million in available liquidity and a net APY of 1.90%. Earn launched on July 1, which means this capital arrived in roughly three weeks. The low yield should not be read as a sign of failure — quite the opposite. When deposits flow in far faster than borrowing demand, the vault's utilization falls and the yield compresses. A 1.90% APY is evidence of how much capital rushed in over a short period.
Arcus and Earn give USDG roles beyond passive holding. Trading creates balances, Earn gives idle balances somewhere to go, Morpho borrowers create demand for USDG liquidity, and Robinhood Chain provides the settlement layer connecting these activities.
Users do not need to understand GDN, Paxos, or Morpho for this system to work. They only need to use the Robinhood product. The product itself is the distribution channel.
What Has Been Confirmed, and What Remains
The results so far confirm one thing: GDN's incentive structure can move a major platform. Robinhood did not simply list USDG. It joined GDN as a founding member, adopted USDG as the default dollar asset on Robinhood Chain, and built real usage paths into its trading and lending products. The roughly $145 million deposited into the Morpho vault within three weeks of launch is evidence that this relationship is converting into measurable USDG balances.
The harder question is whether this demand can sustain itself.
The first issue is the balance between yield and retention. The current 1.90% net APY signals that supply has outrun borrowing demand. The vault has succeeded at attracting participation, but if this yield persists, the capital most sensitive to better terms elsewhere will be the first to leave. For the vault to hold its deposits while restoring a competitive yield, organic borrowing demand will have to catch up. Going forward, utilization and where the yield stabilizes will matter more than the headline deposit figure.
Arcus faces a similar test. Automatic conversion guarantees that trading activity passes through USDG, but it does not guarantee that users will keep the asset when they leave the platform or have the option to hold something else. Trading volume, repeat usage, and stable USDG balances will matter more than the number of wallets that interact with the product once.
GDN also needs more integrations at Robinhood's level. A long partner list can make the network look broad while most of the actual demand stays concentrated in a few platforms. USDG becomes a meaningful alternative to USDC only when several large distributors place it at the center of trading, payments, lending, or settlement.
Interest rates are another constraint. GDN's proposition is most attractive when short-term government securities generate enough income to reward partners generously. Lower rates shrink that pool. For the model to last, USDG activity will eventually need to depend more on trading, borrowing, and settlement than on the amount of reserve income available for distribution.
There is also a tension inside the model. The more reserve income Paxos returns to partners, the more attractive USDG becomes as a distribution product. But Paxos still needs a sustainable business from issuance, redemption, custody, and infrastructure. Because the specific commercial agreements are private, it is difficult to know how much value Paxos retains as USDG scales.
None of this is a reason to dismiss GDN. These are the conditions under which the strategy will be tested.
Conclusion
USDT and USDC did not reach their dominant positions simply because their issuers produced credible dollar tokens. Both grew on top of their own distribution networks.
Rather than competing with this duopoly on its own terms, GDN and Robinhood took a different approach. Paxos handles the regulated dollar and the issuance layer, and returns much of the economics to the companies that bring USDG into their products. On top of that foundation, Robinhood made USDG the trading balance in Arcus, the lending asset in Robinhood Earn, and the settlement asset within Robinhood Chain.
It is too early to say whether this attempt will establish itself as a lasting distribution network or amount only to an effective launch. The answer will depend on whether borrowing demand catches up with deposits, whether users and borrowers create recurring demand, and whether other GDN members embed USDG into their products as deeply as Robinhood has.
USDG may never become the stablecoin that users ask for by name. It may not need to. If USDG is already built into the products through which users trade, lend, and move money, and people receive and use it without thinking about it, the strategy has worked.
The Brief
Visa Launches Enterprise Stablecoin Platform (July 16)
Visa launched VSP in beta, an environment for banks, fintechs, and crypto firms to mint, hold, transfer, and redeem stablecoins. The first asset is the consortium stablecoin Open USD (OUSD), with USDC and USDG also supported.
Source: Visa
AZ-COM Maruwa to Pay 2,300 Partners in JPYC (July 20)
Tokyo-listed logistics firm Maruwa plans to pay roughly 2,300 subcontractors and truck drivers in the yen stablecoin JPYC, and is weighing a ¥1 billion investment in issuer JPYC Inc. It would be Japan's first large-scale corporate stablecoin payment.
Source: Nikkei Asia
SBI and Ondo Partner to Tokenize Japanese Stocks (July 16)
SBI, one of Japan's largest financial groups, partnered with Ondo Finance to bring Japanese stocks onchain. Issuance runs through Ondo Global Markets, distribution through SBI's network, and settlement in SBI's yen stablecoin JPYSC. Still at the partnership stage.
Source: The Block, Ondo
Bank of Korea's Project Han River Phase 2 Targets September (July 20)
The Bank of Korea confirmed phase 2 of its wholesale-CBDC-based deposit-token pilot will begin live transactions as early as September. The FSC's July 15 designation raised the per-wallet holding limit from ₩1M to ₩10M and added remittance and biometric authentication.
Source: Bank of Korea, FSC
DTCC Begins Live Trades of Tokenized Securities (July 14)
DTCC started limited production trades tokenizing Russell 1000 stocks, ETFs, and US Treasuries already held in its custody. The legal record of ownership stays inside the regulated depository. Full launch is set for October.
Source: DTCC
Ondo Launches First DTC-Entitlement-Backed Tokenized Stocks (July 16)
Ondo debuted tokenized stocks backed by DTC entitlements, starting with CRCLon (Circle) and SPYon (SPDR S&P 500 ETF). Each carries the same CUSIP and ticker as the underlying security.
Source: TheStreet, Ondo
Tokenized Stocks Hit Record Daily Volume ($3.57B)
The tokenized stock sector's market cap reached about $2.3 billion in mid-July, doubling since March, while daily trading volume hit an all-time high of $3.57 billion. Ondo ($955M), Kraken's xStocks ($507M), and Binance's bStocks ($334M) lead.
Source: Token Terminal, The Block
The East West Desk
US
The US theme was infrastructure, on both the money and securities sides.
On the money side, Visa put its network behind a consortium stablecoin. VSP is not about accessing stablecoins, which institutions can already do. It is about plugging them into the treasury, settlement, and card systems banks already run. Backing a 140-member consortium token (OUSD) over the highest-volume incumbent signals that Visa wants a say in how the underlying dollar is governed, not just a connector to whatever trades most.
On the securities side, the DTCC go-live and Ondo's DTC-entitlement model pointed the same way: crypto-native issuers building on the central clearinghouse rather than around it, both keeping the legal record of ownership inside regulated custody. With tokenized-stock daily volume hitting a record in the same window, issuance infrastructure and actual trading grew at once.
Neither is finished. VSP is a beta with unnamed clients, and DTCC's full launch is October. But the posture is clear. The US is wiring stablecoins and tokenized securities into existing regulated plumbing rather than replacing it.
Asia
Asia's two poles were Japan and Korea, and their approaches diverged sharply.
Japan pushed its own yen stablecoins into both payments and assets. Maruwa's plan to pay 2,300 logistics partners in JPYC, fee-free and near-instant, is the clearest test yet of whether a yen stablecoin can work in everyday B2B settlement, in an economy where cash and bank transfers still dominate. In the same week, the SBI-Ondo partnership tokenizes Japanese stocks and settles them in JPYSC. Both the means of payment (Maruwa) and the asset (SBI stocks) began moving on regulated yen stablecoins. That said, SBI-Ondo is still a partnership rather than a live product, and Japanese residents remain excluded from existing offshore tokenized-stock services on regulatory grounds.
Korea took the opposite route. Rather than a private stablecoin, the Bank of Korea is pushing bank-issued deposit tokens through Project Han River, with live transactions targeted for September. With won stablecoin legislation stalled, the central bank is moving first to build the groundwork for programmable money anchored to bank deposits and wholesale CBDC rather than a privately issued token.
Why It Matters
Put the three money experiments side by side and the split is clear. Visa/OUSD is a consortium dollar competing on distribution economics. Japan's JPYC and JPYSC are private yen stablecoins carrying both payments and assets. Korea's deposit token is a bank-and-central-bank-anchored instrument that sidesteps the stablecoin question entirely.
All three answer the same problem, how to make programmable money usable inside existing financial flows, from different regulatory starting points. The US leans on private consortiums and existing card rails, Japan on licensed private issuers, Korea on an anchor kept inside the banking system.
For cross-border RWA, where an instrument can legally settle matters more than the instrument itself. This week showed three credible paths forming at once, and none of them looks like the permissionless, single-token model that dominated earlier stablecoin narratives.
Total Tokenized RWA Value (excl. stablecoins): ~$33.5B
Represented Asset Value: ~$345B
Tokenized Stocks Value: ~$2.3B (30D +73.2%)
Total Stablecoin Value: ~$299B
Total Asset Holders: ~960,000+ (across ~167 platforms)
RWA.xyz separates distributed value, tokens actually issued and freely tradable onchain (~$33.5B), from represented value, which includes assets committed to tokenization but not yet liquid (~$345B).
This week the signal isn't in the totals. It's in the money layer: consortium dollars, yen stablecoins, and deposit tokens all pushing into real payment and settlement flows at the same time.
From Anchored
