America’s fifth-largest bank is exploring the use of stablecoins.
U.S. Bancorp, doing business as U.S. Bank, is experimenting with its own stablecoin on the Stellar (XLM) blockchain, reports Bloomberg.
Mike Villano, U.S. Bank senior vice president and head of digital asset products, says that the ability to freeze assets on the Stellar blockchain is one of the reasons it picked that network.
“Out-of-the-box stablecoins provide faster, cheaper, 24/7 [payments]. But for bank customers, we had to think about other protections around know-your-customers, the ability for online transactions, the ability to claw back transactions.”
Stablecoins are digital assets designed to be pegged to the dollar.
Jose Fernandez da Ponte, president and chief growth officer of the Stellar Development Foundation, says that new US regulations in support of crypto are helping to boost stablecoin adoption.
“One of the very important things is that institutions are considering deploying on-chain. That’s a ton of progress from where the institutional market was a few years back.”
The Stellar network logged $32 billion in payment volume in 2024 and had 9.8 million unique addresses by the end of September, says the foundation’s third-quarter report.
XLM is trading for $0.25 at time of writing, down marginally on the day. With a market cap of $8.17 billion, Stellar is the 24th largest crypto project.
U.S. Bank has $671 billion in assets under management.
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