Key banking institutions in Japan gave several stablecoin updates.
MUFG, Mizuho, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, and Mitsubishi banks published a joint statement on their stablecoin pilot carried out over the summer.
This tested the joint Yen stablecoin issuance and transfers.
The same group of banks announced initial plans 1 year ago.
Joint Stablecoin Issuance
The core purpose of this pilot was to trial out whether a joint stablecoin issuance model was practical.
Some of the use-cases mentioned referred to using a JPY stablecoin for cross-border settlements.
Additionally, it had a no-cap on stablecoin circulation, separation of roles and trustees between banks (agent vs. principal), and a unified vendor (TISI) for linking ledgers and AML/KYC.
Japan is gradually progressing its 2023 regulation and the FSA stablecoin April update on oversight.
Unlike top stablecoin issuers today, who are private entities managing minting and redemption, banks have more regulatory hurdles to accompany when undertaking these activities.
More recently, a different group of nearly 40 banks in Japan were reported to have partnered on tokenized deposits.
SBI Group and Startale Join Open Standard
Separately, SBI and Startale have officially backed OUSD.
A few months back, both entities revealed the JPYSC stablecoin lending in partnership with Solana.
Now there is an interest from both to explore conversion between JPYSC and OUSD stablecoins.
This means that the bank and tech infrastructure provider are the latest members to support the revenue-sharing stablecoin issuance model from Open Standard.
Open Standard announced 5 founding members including Stripe, Shopify, Visa, Mastercard, and Coinbase. This is now a signal that there is more support from financial institutions.
When it launched OUSD stablecoin had $400M+ in supply, with the latest explorer metrics from Bridge pointing to $825M already.
