Vietnam and India are advancing AI, cybersecurity, and digital payments partnerships, but key projects and cross-border payment services remain in development.
The post Vietnam and India Push AI, Cybersecurity, and Cross-Border Payments at Tech Forum appeared first on TechRepublic.
Vietnam and India are advancing AI, cybersecurity, and digital payments partnerships, but key projects and cross-border payment services remain in development.
The post Vietnam and India Push AI, Cybersecurity, and Cross-Border Payments at Tech Forum appeared first on TechRepublic.
A six-step method that starts at the contract, not the dashboard.
Pick a large stablecoin. Open three data sites. You will get three different circulating supply numbers.
None of them is lying. They are answering three different questions.
And the gap is not cosmetic. In June 2026, one widely used aggregator reported roughly $371 million more USDS than the Ethereum mainnet contract did. No hack. No stealth mint. Escrowed supply counted twice.
If you hold a stablecoin, lend against one, or carry one on a balance sheet, you need a figure you can defend in a risk meeting. Here is the six-step method.
Three structural reasons, and not one of them involves anybody being dishonest.
Same dollar. Three honest answers.
Circulating supply is not a fact you look up. It is a definition you choose, then measure.
Step 1. Read the contract before you read the dashboard
Every real audit starts with one call: totalSupply() on the issuing contract, at a named block.
Not a screenshot. A block height.
Yearn’s risk team did exactly that to USDS on 9 September 2026 at block 25939320. Mainnet totalSupply() came back at 6,645,559,216, down 15% from their previous reading.
They also pulled the protocol’s own internal debt figure, so the token number could be checked against the issuer’s books rather than against another website. The full working is public.
That is the standard worth copying. Two independent reads, same block, both published.
Step 2. Subtract the supply that is not actually circulating
Raw total supply overstates circulation almost every time. Four buckets come out:
The bridge bucket is where most errors live. In that same September reassessment, native-escrow USDS fell from about $448M to $102M, escrowed sUSDS from about $812M to $343M, and LayerZero-locked USDS from roughly $48.7M to $6.67M. Miss those and a cross-chain total quietly counts real money twice.
Step 3. Do not count the yield-bearing wrapper twice
This one catches careful people.
sUSDS is not extra supply. It is a claim on USDS that has been supplied to the Sky Savings Rate module. One dollar of USDS wrapped into sUSDS is still one dollar of stablecoin liability, not two.
Scale is why this matters. Roughly half of USDS supply sits in sUSDS, and the Ethereum sUSDS pool showed $4.85B on 26 October 2026. That is a lot of float to misclassify.
A yield-bearing wrapper is a claim on supply. It is never new supply.
Step 4. Check what backs the supply, not just how big it is
Supply tells you the size of the liability. It tells you nothing about whether that liability is covered.
So pull the collateral figure next, from the same issuer, on the same day.
On 27 October 2026, Sky Ecosystem published $14.15B in Total Collateral against $11.48B in stablecoin supply.
That is roughly $1.23 of collateral behind every dollar of supply, which is the entire point of an overcollateralized design.
Two surfaces let you check it yourself instead of taking it on trust:
Credit agencies have started running the same exercise. Moody’s assigned Sky Protocol a B3 issuer rating with a stable outlook on 7 October 2026, the first rating it has given any stablecoin protocol, after S&P Global affirmed B- on 1 October.
Both flagged reserve depth as the constraint. That is what an outside read of the collateral side looks like, and it is worth more than a logo on a trust page.
Step 5. Ask whether that supply can actually leave at a dollar
A supply number is only as good as the exit. Three questions:
Sky Protocol runs Peg Stability Modules, smart contracts that convert supported stablecoins into USDS and back at 1:1 directly with the protocol rather than against another trader, under governance-set caps. Moving between USDS and sUSDS carries no lockup in either direction.
Redemption depth is the part of a supply audit most people skip, and the part every stress event tests.
Step 6. Date the number, or bin it
Stablecoin supply moves daily. A figure without a timestamp is a rumour with decimal places.
Write the audit line in four fields: source, metric, value, block or date.
This is about to stop being a matter of taste. On 21 October 2026 the OCC finalised its GENIUS Act rule.
From 18 January 2027, permitted issuers must publish the monthly composition of their reserves on their own websites by noon on the last day of each month, and file weekly confidential reserve reports.
As Forbes noted, an accurate weekly reserve figure demands daily reconciliation between tokens outstanding onchain and reserves held at the custodian.
Monthly PDFs are becoming weekly reconciliation. Protocols that already publish live will barely feel it.
Six lines, dated 26 to 27 October 2026, each checkable in under ten minutes:
A defensible number, with the working shown.
Here is the part most supply write-ups leave out.
Supply that pays nothing is a static liability. Supply that pays has to be funded, and that funding has to come from somewhere real.
The Sky Savings Rate is a variable rate set by Sky Governance and accessed by holding sUSDS.
It is funded from revenue Sky Protocol accrues as the Sky Agent Network, independent allocators including Spark, Grove, Osero, Keel and Obex, draws USDS liquidity under governance-set risk parameters and deploys it.
So when you audit the supply, audit the engine behind it:
Galaxy appears to have run some version of that test. On 23 September 2026 it added $100 million of sUSDS to its corporate treasury and approved sUSDS as eligible collateral across its institutional trading business.
Audit the supply. Then audit whatever pays it.
Run this before you quote any stablecoin supply figure:
Six steps. One figure you can put in front of a risk committee.
The stablecoin market sat near $308B in August 2026, below its May peak of $322.4B. That is a lot of dollars measured by methods most holders have never read.
Which leaves the question I actually want argued in the comments.
Does circulating supply mean tokens that exist, tokens that can move, or tokens someone can redeem at par today?
Pick one. Then run the six steps on whatever stablecoin you hold and post the number with its date underneath. I will check mine against yours.
How to Audit a Stablecoin’s Real Circulating Supply was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Stablecoins accounted for 60% of crypto purchase value processed through Mercuryo’s on-ramp in H1 2026, up from 43% six months earlier. Meanwhile, accepted stablecoin off-ramp transactions grew 446% year on year, based on the company’s on-ramp report and off-ramp data.
These figures come from one provider, not the entire market. Still, they highlight something worth discussing: how money moves between bank accounts and crypto platforms.
If I were managing those flows for a business, I’d start with two questions. Which currencies are we moving, and where are our bank accounts? The answers help determine which payment routes make sense.
A company with European partners, a Swiss bank account and international USD settlements might use several payment routes, even through the same crypto platform.
SEPA — for EUR transfers across Europe. It connects participating banks across the Single Euro Payments Area and supports euro transfers between eligible accounts.
SWIFT — for international bank transfers. A global financial messaging network used for cross-border payments in USD and other currencies. Costs and timing depend on the banks involved.
SIC — for Swiss franc transfers. Switzerland’s interbank clearing system handles CHF payments between participating financial institutions.
ZEN.COM — for local PLN payments. Unlike SIC, ZEN.COM is a payment provider rather than a clearing system. Its local PLN transfers use ELIXIR, with availability depending on the provider’s integration and customer eligibility.
Other routes, including ACH in the US and PIX in Brazil, become relevant when businesses need to serve customers in different markets.
1. A Polish Fintech Needs Both EUR and PLN
Imagine a fintech in Warsaw receiving euros from European partners while paying local expenses in Polish zloty. It needs both currencies and a way to move funds into and out of crypto.
WhiteBIT On/Off-Ramp could be worth considering. It lists EUR transfers through SEPA and PLN through ZEN.COM within one crypto ecosystem.The fee for EUR deposits and withdrawals is a flat €5, while limits depend on KYB level and agreed conditions.
The service also lists USD via SWIFT and CHF via SIC, alongside TRY, GEL and AUD among its supported currencies. Routes for those additional currencies require separate confirmation.
For this fintech, having several fiat options in one place could simplify treasury operations. I’d first confirm which PLN transactions are available to its legal entity and whether the limits suit its volumes.
2. What If Your Wallet Serves Customers Across Different Markets?
Now imagine a wallet provider that wants customers to buy and sell crypto directly inside its app. Some users pay in EUR, others prefer cards or local payment systems. The company needs an integrated payment experience across its supported markets.
Kraken Ramp, also marketed as Payward Ramp, takes this approach. Its institutional offering lists 24+ payment methods, including SEPA, ACH, PIX, debit cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay. The service offers API and SDK integration, with payment processing, compliance and crypto conversion handled through Kraken’s infrastructure.
The attraction is the combination of local payment methods and embedded crypto access. However, supported methods differ by market, and the company would need to confirm which currencies, countries and transaction directions are available to its customers.
For this type of wallet, the integration experience matters alongside currency coverage. A payment method listed on a product page is useful, but the full customer journey — from funding to completed conversion — needs to work in the intended markets.
3. And What About Thousands of USD Payouts?
Imagine a US fintech where customers convert digital assets into dollars and withdraw funds to their bank accounts. With thousands of payouts, settlement speed and integration become important.
zerohash On & Off Ramp supports fiat-to-crypto and crypto-to-fiat conversions through ACH, RTP, SEPA and payment service providers. It also supports 100+ digital assets, with availability depending on the market and integration.
For this business, I’d check which USD payout methods are available, how returned payments are handled and whether prefunding is required. These details can make a big difference when customer withdrawals are part of everyday operations.
I wouldn’t rank these payment routes from best to worst. A longer currency list doesn’t necessarily mean a better setup, especially when availability depends on jurisdiction, account type and banking partners.
I’d start by checking three things: which currencies and payment methods are actually available, whether the money belongs to the business or its customers, and how much each completed transfer costs.
Processing times matter too. Domestic real-time payments may suit frequent customer withdrawals, while international transfers can work well for corporate treasury operations. Fees, conversion spreads and reconciliation requirements should all be part of the calculation.
Finance can map currencies and volumes, operations can verify settlement schedules, and compliance can confirm eligibility. Sometimes one provider will cover most needs, while other businesses may benefit from combining several services.
I’d rather check those details upfront than discover halfway through a transfer that the selected route doesn’t work as expected.
Disclaimer: This is not financial or investment advice. Do your own research before making any decisions. Use at your own risk.
Three Companies, Three Fiat Problems, Three Different Ramps was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Danelfin and Tickeron both sell “AI” to people picking stocks, but they are not the same kind of product. Danelfin gives every stock a score from 1 to 10 and leaves the trading to you. Tickeron sells signals and trading bots, some of them running on its own brokerage accounts. I read both sites end to end on Oct 26, 2026, including the parts most reviews skip: Danelfin’s own audit site and the small print under Tickeron’s 191% headline.
I also work on milo, so I’ll say where milo fits and where it doesn’t. It isn’t a third option that beats both. It answers a different question.
Pick Danelfin if you want a daily 1 to 10 rating on about 5,600 US and European stocks and you’ll place the trades yourself. Pick Tickeron if you want ready-made signals or bots that trade on 5 to 60 minute timeframes. Both lead with backtests. Danelfin publishes an audit that shows its live record so far is flat. Tickeron’s headline numbers don’t come with dates.
Danelfin calls itself “AI-Powered Stock Picking.” Every trading day it gives each stock an AI Score from 1 to 10, which it describes as the probability of beating the market over the next three months. A 10 means the model likes it most, a 1 means least. You also get sub-scores for technical, fundamental, sentiment and low risk.
Per Danelfin’s how-it-works page, the model looks at more than 600 technical, 150 fundamental and 150 sentiment indicators a day, which it turns into 10,000+ features per stock. It uses hundreds of decision trees and trains on the latest 252 market days for US stocks. Coverage is all US stocks, the main European markets and US-listed ETFs. The audit site puts the count at roughly 5,600 stocks scored daily.
Danelfin pitches this as explainable AI, “no black boxes,” because it shows which features pushed a score up or down. That’s useful. It still won’t tell you why a 9 should beat an 8 in your account.
One thing to get straight early: Danelfin doesn’t trade for you. The audit site says it plainly, “you execute the trades on your own brokerage account.” The paid plans can sync a US broker portfolio so you see scores on what you own, but that’s a read, not an order.
From danelfin.com/pricing on Oct 26, 2026:
The per-month prices are the yearly plan divided by 12. The page says yearly saves $84, $240 and $540 a year, which works out to about $29, $79 and $179 a month if you pay monthly. There’s a 30-day money-back guarantee.
The homepage says stocks with a Score of 10 beat the market by +21.05% on average after three months (annualized alpha) since 2017, and stocks scored 1 lagged by 33.28%. It also says its Best Stocks strategy returned +456% from Mar 29, 2017 to Sep 3, 2026, against +228% for the S&P 500.
The how-it-works page is honest about what those are: “This Danelfin Best Stocks strategy performance is based on backtested results. Backtested performance is not an indicator of actual future results.” The +21.05% figure covers Jan 3, 2017 to Apr 1, 2025.
Credit where it’s due, Danelfin runs a public audit site and the audit is tougher on Danelfin than the homepage is. Here’s what it says:
Six-month alpha tells the same story: +4.8%, then -1.4%, then -2.6%. So the big homepage number leans mostly on 2017 to 2019. That doesn’t make the score useless as a screen. It does mean nobody, Danelfin included, can show it beats the market now.
Tickeron’s homepage reads “AI Trading Agents, Tools and News.” Where Danelfin is one score, Tickeron is a shelf of products: Daily Buy/Sell Signals, AI Robots, Real-Time Patterns, Trend Prediction, Pattern Search and a screener, plus crypto signal agents. Its models, which it calls Financial Learning Models (FLMs), run on 5-minute, 15-minute and 60-minute charts. That’s short-term trading, not “hold for three months.”
The bot trading page talks about “1,000+ back-tested algorithms, verified forward testing” and lists 25 bots selected from 351. The homepage the same day said 30 selected out of 298. The bot count moves, which makes sense if bots get added and retired. Some are “Double Agent” bots that hedge with inverse ETFs, for example pairing $NVDA with NVDS or $MSFT with QID.
This is the part people mix up. Tickeron’s AI agents page says Brokerage Agents are “designed for those who intend to use them for trading on real-money accounts,” and invites you to “review trades and copy from our brokerage accounts.” So Tickeron runs the bot on its own account and you mirror the trades. Virtual agents and signal agents don’t trade real money at all.
Can a bot place orders straight into your own broker account? Tickeron’s FAQ, dated Nov 22, 2023, said robot brokerage integration was “under development” with plans for Binance, Alpaca, Kraken, Ameritrade and IBKR. I couldn’t find a current page confirming it shipped, so ask them before you pay for that.
There’s no public pricing page. Both tickeron.com/pricing and /pricing/ returned 404 when I checked. The only prices I found were in a Sep 21, 2026 sale post: Daily Buy/Sell Signals at $60 a year instead of $240, and AI Robots at 50% off without a dollar figure. Expect to see prices after signing up.
The bot page headline is “191% Annualized Return During the Reported Period,” with 419 closed trades, a 71% win rate, a 2.92 profit factor, $456 average profit per trade and a 13:1 profit-to-drawdown ratio. It adds “Past performance does not guarantee future results.”
What the block doesn’t say is which bot that is, what dates “the reported period” covers, whether it was live money, paper or a backtest, and what a benchmark did over the same window. 419 trades is a decent count, but annualized returns from a short window can look huge. Until you know the dates, 191% is a hard number to judge.
milo doesn’t score stocks and doesn’t run stock bots. On the stock side it reads filings. The andmilo.com/stocks page pulls Form 4 insider buys and sales and 8-K filings from SEC EDGAR for 50 of the most-followed US stocks, refreshed daily. As of Oct 25, 2026, 23:23 UTC, it showed at least 278 insider sales worth at least $3.3B over 90 days, against at least 7 buys worth at least $54M.
Here’s a real one. On Sep 29, 2026, Oracle director Stephen Rusckowski bought 25,000 shares of $ORCL at a weighted average of $139.352, about $3.48M, filed Oct 1. I opened the Form 4 to check: code P, open-market fills between $138.96 and $139.74, held through his living trust, and the 10b5–1 plan box isn’t checked. That’s a clean buy with his own money.
Now a messy one. The same feed lists a $24M $PEP “buy.” The footnotes show it was a swap between Pohlad family trusts, not someone betting on PepsiCo. A score wouldn’t catch that and neither does a raw count. You have to read the filing, which is how to read SEC Form 4 is about.
Where milo is weaker than these two, plainly:
Where it’s different: every data point links back to a public SEC filing you can open yourself, and on the crypto side milo agents trade from your own wallet with public PnL and a plain-English diary of each move.
If you want the wider field, the best AI stock pickers roundup compares more tools, and can ChatGPT pick stocks covers the public AI paper-trading tests.
The same five questions work for Danelfin, Tickeron, milo or whatever comes next:
If a vendor can’t answer those, treat its performance number as marketing. If you want to test ideas without risking money, paper trade them first. That’s the only way milo handles stocks anyway.
Is Danelfin better than Tickeron?
They do different jobs. Danelfin is a 3-month stock rating you act on yourself. Tickeron is short-term signals and bots. Danelfin is more open about its record, since it publishes an audit with live results.
Is Danelfin’s AI Score accurate?
By its own audit, Score 10 stocks beat the market in 2017 to 2019 and were roughly flat after that. Live since Jul 7, 2025, stocks scored 8 to 10 averaged -0.5% 3-month alpha.
How much does Danelfin cost?
There’s a free plan. Paid plans were $22, $59 and $134 a month billed yearly on Oct 26, 2026, with higher monthly-billing prices.
How much does Tickeron cost?
Tickeron doesn’t publish a pricing page. A Sep 2026 sale listed Daily Buy/Sell Signals at $60 a year, down from $240.
Do Tickeron bots trade real money?
Brokerage Agents trade on Tickeron’s own real-money accounts and you can copy the trades. Virtual and signal agents don’t trade real money.
Is Tickeron’s 191% return real?
It’s Tickeron’s claim for “the reported period.” The page doesn’t name the bot or the dates, so you can’t check it from that page.
Does Danelfin place trades for me?
No. You place trades in your own brokerage account. Paid plans can sync a US broker portfolio to show scores.
Is milo an alternative to Danelfin or Tickeron?
Not a direct one. milo tracks SEC filings and insider trades for US stocks with paper trading only, and runs AI trading agents for crypto.
Try milo to see insider buys and 8-Ks for the stocks you follow, and paper trade the ideas before any money is involved.
For education only. Not investment advice. milo stock features are paper trading and research only. Competitor details checked on their own sites on Oct 26, 2026 and may change. Sources: danelfin.com (home, how-it-works, pricing), audit.danelfin.com, tickeron.com (home, bot-trading, ai-agents, FAQ, Sep 21, 2026 sale post), andmilo.com/stocks, SEC EDGAR Form 4 accession 0001341439–26–000099.
Originally published at https://blog.pumpparade.com on October 26, 2026.
I read Danelfin’s audit and Tickeron’s small print. Only one showed a dated live record. was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
TL;DR: EDX Markets and Apex Fintech Solutions announced a strategic relationship on October 26 to connect institutional digital-asset trading and clearing technology with Apex’s established financial infrastructure. The useful follow-up indicators are named customer launches, supported jurisdictions, assets, operating hours and the exact division of custody and clearing responsibilities.
The latest development in Apex’s corner of the digital-asset market is worth examining beyond the headline. A 2026-10-26 announcement describes a concrete change, but the investment consequences will depend on how it works in practice. The original record is available in the original company statement; here is what it establishes, why the distinction matters and what remains unproven.
EDX Markets and Apex Fintech Solutions announced a strategic relationship on October 26 to connect institutional digital-asset trading and clearing technology with Apex’s established financial infrastructure. EDX operates a professional-market trading venue and a central clearinghouse model; Apex supplies brokerage infrastructure used in more familiar investing environments. The partners say Apex will leverage EDX’s trading and clearing services for its digital-markets offering. The release does not establish that every Apex customer can immediately buy cryptocurrencies through the integration.
The underlying problem is market plumbing. Brokers need reliable execution, post-trade information, custody arrangements, risk checks and accurate customer books. A crypto exchange connection by itself is only one component of that chain. EDX’s appeal is its emphasis on institutional execution and clearing, while Apex can connect those functions with systems brokers already run. A smoother back end may eventually matter more to customers than another asset-selection screen in a trading app.
Clearing also introduces questions worth examining carefully. Netting trades and controlling counterparty exposure can simplify settlement, but the protections depend on legal agreements, margin rules and the specific asset or market structure. Traditional securities frameworks do not transfer automatically to digital tokens. The announcement describes a technology and commercial arrangement, not a universal declaration that crypto trades have become equivalent to clearing through a regulated stock-market utility.
For cryptocurrency investors, the central point is to distinguish an announced milestone from an immediate change in asset value. The underlying development can strengthen a company’s product, legal position or operating capacity without determining what a token will trade for tomorrow. The linked source establishes what was disclosed; the valuation question requires a separate assessment of customers, costs, execution and market conditions. That gap between a confirmed fact and a forecast is where much of the investment risk sits.
As digital assets move into mainstream brokerage stacks, infrastructure suppliers compete on operational dependability rather than solely on coin listings or transaction fees. Customers will expect reconciled balances, consistent order handling, transparent fee schedules and regulatory clarity across jurisdictions. Apex and EDX could help shorten the implementation process for participating brokers, though the most difficult work may involve adapting compliance and accounting processes to each product’s legal form.
The useful follow-up indicators are named customer launches, supported jurisdictions, assets, operating hours and the exact division of custody and clearing responsibilities. No transaction-volume forecast should be inferred from an integration agreement. The deal is significant as another example of traditional brokerage infrastructure being connected to specialised crypto venues, but the actual impact on customers will be visible only as live programmes emerge.
Market watchers should also avoid treating a company’s or regulator’s headline as a substitute for terms and conditions. Tokens, shares and regulated service agreements create different rights, even when they coexist in one wallet or platform. A reliable follow-up should ask which entity is responsible, what a holder can actually redeem or transfer, and whether the claimed advantages appear in live activity. Those questions are more informative than an unsupported price target or an assumption that adoption is inevitable.
Primary source: original company statement (2026-10-26).
Written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
Stablecoins are now a real buyer of short-term US debt. Here’s what that means for Treasury markets, and for you.
Here’s something most stablecoin holders never think about.
The digital dollar in your wallet is probably helping fund the US government.
Not in a conspiracy-theory way. In a plain, legal, slightly boring way. When you buy a reserve-backed stablecoin, the issuer takes your dollar and parks most of it in short-term US Treasury bills.
Do that across a market worth roughly $300 billion and you’ve got a buyer of US debt that barely existed six years ago.
So what does stablecoin growth mean for US debt markets? Stablecoins have become a steady, rules-driven source of demand for short-term Treasuries. Inflows can nudge T-bill yields lower, outflows can push them higher, and in most cases the holder funding all of it earns nothing.
That last part is the one I want to dig into.
I can explain the pipeline in about ten seconds.
In the US, those rules come from the GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025. The OCC’s proposed rules list what counts as a reserve: cash, bank deposits, Treasury bills maturing in 93 days or less, certain repos, government money market funds, and tokenized versions of these.
The law kicks in by January 18, 2027 at the latest.
So every stablecoin minted under these rules is a fresh bid for T-bills. Every redemption is a sale.
Quick context. The US national debt crossed $40 trillion in August 2026. In the first nine months of fiscal 2026, net interest alone cost $827 billion. That’s more than the US spent on defense.
Washington needs buyers. Stablecoins have turned into one.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has floated similar numbers. I’d treat them as scenarios, though. Growth has cooled this year alongside crypto trading volumes.
A little. And now we can actually measure it.
The BIS working paper Stablecoins and safe asset prices studied daily data from January 2021 to March 2026.
A $3.5 billion inflow lowered 3-month T-bill yields by 0.71 basis points on impact and up to 4 basis points within 10 days. Longer maturities barely moved.
An IMF working paper found the same direction. When stablecoin market cap jumps 1%, 1-month and 3-month yields fall. Small moves, but they’re real.
The part that gets less airtime is the exit. An earlier version of the BIS study found outflows pushed yields up two to three times as much as inflows pushed them down.
Money that arrives slowly can leave all at once. That asymmetry is the part of stablecoins and US debt that keeps regulators up at night.
There’s a fair counterpoint too. The Kansas City Fed points out that if people fund stablecoins out of bank deposits, banks may buy fewer Treasuries. So net new demand could be smaller than the headlines suggest.
T-bills pay yield. Somebody collects it.
With most reserve-backed stablecoins, that somebody is the issuer. The GENIUS Act bars payment stablecoin issuers from paying you yield, so the reserve income stays on their side of the table.
Put simply: you supply the dollar. The issuer buys the T-bill. The issuer keeps the yield.
And a lot of those dollars just sit there. By Sky’s estimate, roughly 80% of stablecoins aren’t deployed into any source of yield. That’s money quietly funding Treasuries without earning its holder a cent.
Which is why “who keeps the yield?” matters as much as “who buys the debt?”
Sky.money gives you non-custodial access to Sky Protocol, which handles the same dollar differently.
USDS is Sky Protocol’s fully backed stablecoin, and it’s overcollateralized. On October 23, 2026, Sky.money showed $16.24 billion in collateral behind 10.02 billion USDS, about $1.62 for every dollar. You can check the mix yourself on the Sky financial dashboard. Here’s what backs a stablecoin if you want the full checklist.
Where does the revenue come from? Sky Agents tap USDS liquidity and put it to work across collateralized loans, US Treasury bills and lending markets. What they earn flows back into Sky Protocol.
For you, it works like this:
The SSR is a variable protocol rate funded from aggregate Sky protocol surplus. SKY holders raise or lower it through public onchain votes.
One honest detail: sUSDS isn’t exposure to any specific Agent, strategy or T-bill. You get the rate, not a slice of one position.
The numbers are public. In Q2 2026, Sky Protocol recorded $107.35 million in Gross Protocol Revenue, and $53.91 million went to sUSDS holders through the SSR.
sUSDS supply closed the quarter at $5.52 billion, up 149% year over year. It’s the world’s largest yield-generating stablecoin.
Risks still apply. Smart contracts can fail, and the rate can change. Need USDS first? You can convert 1:1 through the Peg Stability Module.
Honestly? It depends who you ask.
The case for:
The case against:
Both sides can be right at once. That’s why what makes a stablecoin reliable matters more as this market grows: backing, liquidity, exits and transparency.
Stablecoins won’t fix a $40 trillion debt. They’re becoming part of how it gets financed, though.
Sky’s also working on ways to make capital movement data speak the same language in real time, whatever the vehicle or currency.
Q. Do stablecoins hold US debt?
A. Yes. Reserve-backed stablecoins keep most reserves in short-term Treasury bills, repos and cash, making issuers a growing buyer of US debt.
Q. Does sUSDS pay T-bill yield?
A. No. sUSDS accrues the Sky Savings Rate, a variable rate funded from aggregate Sky protocol surplus. Treasury bills are one of several strategies feeding that revenue.
In a big run, possibly. Outflows move T-bill yields more than inflows do. That’s why reserves you can verify matter.
. . .
Over to you. Should stablecoin holders get a share of the yield their dollars generate, or is 0% a fair price for a stable dollar? Tell me in the comments. I read every one.
If you’d rather your stablecoins didn’t sit still, put them to work with sUSDS.
Stablecoins and US Debt: Who Keeps the T-Bill Yield? was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
The US finalised its stablecoin yield rule on 21 October. The real border is not where you think, and the UK proves it.
On 21 October 2026, the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency finalised its rules under the GENIUS Act.
One line did most of the work: a permitted payment stablecoin issuer cannot pay a holder interest or yield simply for holding, using or storing the coin.
Most outlets filed that under American news.
It is not. It quietly redrew the map for everyone else.
Because “non-US investor” is not a category. It is roughly 190 different answers wearing one label.
If you are planning around a US border, you are planning around a line that has already moved.
Yes. In most jurisdictions, and often through fewer gates than a US retail investor now faces.
Onchain yield is produced by smart contracts on public blockchains. Those contracts do not read your passport. That is the design, not a loophole.
But three things sit between “the contract will accept you” and “you should proceed”:
Two routes exist in practice.
The first is permissionless DeFi yield, reachable with a wallet and nothing else.
The second is tokenized real-world-asset products built specifically for non-US investors under securities exemptions.
Those are aimed at you and still gated, usually with KYC, wallet allowlisting, minimums and lockups.
So the honest picture is split. One route is open. The other was designed for you and still asks for papers.
Permissionless at the protocol layer does not mean permitted at the personal layer.
Hold that, because the rest of this depends on it.
Here is what the “escape the US” takes keep missing.
The EU got there first. Under MiCA, interest on e-money tokens and asset-referenced tokens is already prohibited.
The US arrived at the same place with the GENIUS Act in July 2025, and this week’s final rule confirmed it.
Two of the world’s largest regulatory blocs now agree: the issuer of a payment stablecoin does not pay you for holding it.
So the interesting question is no longer whether you sit inside or outside America.
It is this: where does the yield actually come from, and who is paying it?
A rate funded by a protocol’s own surplus and set by token holder vote is a structurally different object from an issuer passing along reserve interest. That distinction now does real work.
Some scale for context. The total stablecoin market sat near $301 billion on 21 October 2026.
Most of those dollars are idle. Not because people chose idleness, but because the route to anything else was unclear.
This part surprises people.
The protocol layer is permissionless. Open-source smart contracts, deployed on Ethereum and other public chains. No gatekeeper. Reachable directly, or through any independent front end.
The interface layer is not. A front end is operated by a legal entity, and that entity geo-restricts.
Take a real example instead of a hypothetical. Sky.money publishes its prohibited jurisdiction list in its Terms of Use, version 2.0, updated 1 September 2026.
Thirty-five countries and regions are named. China, Hong Kong, Russia, Iran, Venezuela.
It also names the United Kingdom.
It does not name the United States.
Read that again. Meanwhile the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority published fresh DeFi consultation papers on 21 October 2026, with its full cryptoasset regime due in force from October 2027.
The border is not America versus the world. It is drawn country by country, by lawyers, and it moves.
So much for “non-US access.”
Tokens move freely. Trust does not.
An allocator in Singapore, a founder in Lagos and a saver in Sao Paulo share no vocabulary for “is this safe.” That gap is the real barrier to global onchain yield. Not geography.
Which is why two announcements this year matter more than they look.
On 7 October 2026, Moody’s assigned Sky Protocol a B3 counterparty risk rating with a stable outlook.
It was the first rating Moody’s has issued on any stablecoin protocol. S&P Global had already assigned a B- in August 2025, the first credit rating ever given to a DeFi protocol, and affirmed it this year.
Sky Protocol is currently the only stablecoin protocol formally rated by both.
Neither rating is investment grade. Nobody is pretending otherwise, and both agencies published what would need to improve. That is the point of a scale. A rating is not a compliment.
A credit rating is the one document that reads the same in Singapore, Sao Paulo and Lagos.
Then the backing, which anyone can check without asking permission:
That is roughly $1.62 of collateral value behind every $1 of USDS obligation, visible in real time rather than attested once a quarter.
If you want the mechanics, Sky.money has a plain-English explainer on what actually backs a stablecoin.
The protocol underneath is not running on fumes either. Sky Protocol generated $107.35 million in gross revenue in Q2 2026, its second consecutive quarter above $100 million and its fifth straight quarter of surplus.
Trailing twelve-month net protocol revenue stood at $159.63 million, and protocol collateral climbed 45.5% year over year.
Those are numbers a rating agency can audit. Which is exactly why one did.
In September 2026, Galaxy Digital put $100 million of sUSDS on its corporate balance sheet and approved it as collateral across its institutional trading business. Institutions do not do that on vibes.
The mechanics are deliberately boring.
What separates the Sky Savings Rate from most stablecoin yield:
The rate is variable and can change. Check it live on the sUSDS page rather than trusting a number in an article.
For anyone who wants something other than the baseline, there is Fixed Yield, where the rate is fixed only if you hold to maturity, Vaults curated on Morpho, stUSDS for advanced risk capital, and Sky Ecosystem Rewards. Different risks, different reasons. sUSDS stays the baseline.
Run this first:
Non-US investors can access onchain yield. Many have more routes open than US retail does right now.
But the useful question was never “am I non-US.”
It is: is my specific jurisdiction served, by this specific interface, for this specific product, today?
The protocol does not care where you live. The front end does. Your tax authority definitely does.
What makes any of this work at global scale is not permissionlessness on its own. It is measurement. Published collateral. Rates voted onchain.
Two independent credit ratings on the same scale a pension fund already uses. A shared language for capital that reads the same whatever the jurisdiction or currency.
That is the part that actually crosses borders.
This is informational only. Not legal, tax or financial advice. Yields are variable and not guaranteed.
Now tell me where you are reading this from. Which jurisdiction are you in, and has an interface ever geo-blocked you out of something you were perfectly entitled to hold? I want to see how wide the gap really is. Comments are open.
Onchain Yield for Non-US Investors: The Map Is Wrong was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
GCash parent Mynt's record ₱60.9B Philippine IPO puts digital lending in focus. Here's what PH users, merchants, and IT teams should watch next.
The post GCash Parent Raises ₱60.9B in Record PH IPO: What’s Next for Digital Lending? appeared first on TechRepublic.
GCash parent Mynt's record ₱60.9B Philippine IPO puts digital lending in focus. Here's what PH users, merchants, and IT teams should watch next.
The post GCash Parent Raises ₱60.9B in Record PH IPO: What’s Next for Digital Lending? appeared first on TechRepublic.
Send a bank wire and you send more than money. Somewhere in that message sits the name of the person paying and the person being paid.
Crypto never really worked that way. For a long time, a wallet address was about all you got.
That’s changing, and faster than many teams expected. The reason is the Crypto Travel Rule. Crypto businesses now have to tell each other who is sending and who is receiving when they move digital assets between themselves.
For exchanges, custodians, payment platforms and fintechs with a crypto feature, this isn’t something to plan for later. It’s already part of the plumbing.
What does it actually ask for, then, and why does it give teams so much trouble?
The rule traces back to FATF Recommendation 16. That global standard was written for plain old wire transfers.
Then in 2019, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) applied it to virtual assets as well, and to Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs): exchanges, custodial wallet providers, brokers.
When one VASP sends crypto to another, the originator and beneficiary details have to “travel” with it, immediately and securely.
Worth saying clearly: the rule isn’t there to stop crypto transfers. It’s there to make them traceable, the way regulated fiat payments already are.
Details differ by country. FATF guidance generally asks for the originator’s name, their account number or wallet address, and one extra identifier: a physical address, national ID number, customer ID, or date and place of birth.
On the receiving side, it’s the beneficiary’s name and their account number or wallet address.
FATF suggests a de minimis threshold of USD/EUR 1,000. Above that, the full data set should be collected and shared. Below it, a reduced set still applies, so small transfers don’t get a free pass.
Here’s where it gets messy. Each jurisdiction is free to implement the rule its own way.
A few examples:
Serving several markets? Then one workflow rarely covers it. Usually you end up maintaining a few.
Not every country has adopted the rule yet. The ones that have don’t all enforce it the same way.
That leaves a compliant VASP in an awkward spot. It may have to send data to a counterparty in a country where the rule doesn’t apply yet, or to one that simply can’t receive the data.
Before any data goes out, a VASP needs to know who is on the other end. Is the destination wallet held by another VASP, or is it self-hosted?
Answering that usually means combining blockchain analytics and wallet attribution data with due diligence on the counterparty VASP. Sometimes it also means simply asking the customer to declare it.
Travel Rule solutions don’t all speak the same language.
Most of the industry has settled on IVMS101 as a common data standard. Even so, two VASPs on different Travel Rule networks can still have trouble swapping information cleanly. A shared format doesn’t automatically mean a shared pipe.
With a self-hosted wallet, there’s no second VASP waiting to receive anything.
Depending on the jurisdiction, a business may have to collect the information from its own customer, verify who owns the wallet, or run extra risk-based checks instead.
Travel Rule data is personal data. That part gets overlooked.
VASPs have to share it securely and still meet their data protection obligations. In practice, that puts encryption, access control and secure API integration right at the centre of the build.
There’s real progress. It’s just uneven.
FATF’s seventh Targeted Update on virtual assets, published in July 2026, puts some numbers on it:
Laws on paper, in other words, are running ahead of enforcement.
FATF also points out that most identified on-chain illicit activity now involves stablecoins. For payment businesses running on stablecoin rails, that ties Travel Rule compliance directly to how they move money every day.
A workable Travel Rule setup tends to include:
The point is to have compliance happen inside the transaction flow. Not as a manual review someone does after the money has already moved, because by then fixing a missing field is far harder.
Stablecoin payments, on and off ramps, tokenized assets. All of it is drifting into mainstream finance, and the Travel Rule keeps dragging crypto infrastructure toward traditional AML frameworks.
A bank getting into digital assets will run into this. So will a fintech adding a crypto wallet, or a payment provider settling in stablecoins. Each ends up asking the same thing: can our systems share compliance data as fast as they move value?
In regulated crypto, the on-chain transfer is only half of it. The other half is the information that travels with it.
Build it in now and the later conversations get easier, with regulators, with banking partners, and when it’s time to expand.
The Crypto Travel Rule Explained: What VASPs Need to Know was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Everyone tells you to buy an ERC-20 token. Almost nobody tells you what that means or how it goes wrong.
I remember staring at Ethers can at around 1 a.m., refreshing the page like it would change something. Green checkmark. Transaction successful. And my tokens, about $400 worth [YOUR DETAIL: amount and year], sitting in a contract that had no idea what to do with them.
I wrote to support. I posted on Reddit. A kind stranger explained, politely, that the money was gone. Not lost, not delayed. Gone.
That night I realized I’d been buying and sending “ERC-20 tokens” for months without knowing what the term meant. So I went and learned. This is what I wish somebody had told me first.
That’s all it is. No mystery.
In 2015, Fabian Vogelsteller and Vitalik Buterin put forward a proposal for how tokens on Ethereum should behave. Before then, every project built its tokens however it liked, and a wallet that supported one coin might choke on the next. Think of a drawer full of chargers that all almost fit.
The ERC-20 rules fixed it. If a token follows them, any wallet or exchange on Ethereum can handle it without special code. The rules are six functions and two events. Check a balance, send tokens, see the total supply. And one slightly scary pair, approve and transferFrom, which let someone else spend your tokens. Hold that thought, because it comes up again below.
The reason this mattered so much is that it made launching a token almost embarrassingly easy. You didn’t need your own blockchain anymore. A developer with a free afternoon could write a small contract, deploy it, and have a coin that showed up in MetaMask by dinner. That’s how we got the 2017 ICO craze, and honestly, a lot of garbage along with the good stuff.
Today the big names you probably already hold work this way. Tether and USD Coin on Ethereum, Chainlink, Uniswap. When people say “the crypto ecosystem,” a big chunk of it is just contracts following this one old rulebook.
Now the part that actually costs people money.
When you swap on a decentralised exchange, your wallet asks you to approve a token. You click it. Everybody clicks it. I did for a year without thinking.
What you’ve done is give a smart contract permission to take tokens out of your wallet. And many apps ask for an unlimited amount by default, so you never have to approve again. Convenient. Also, a loose key under the doormat.
If that app gets exploited six months later, the attacker doesn’t need your password. The permission you gave is still sitting there. A lot of “my wallet got drained, and I didn’t do anything” stories are exactly this. They did do something. They clicked approve in March and forgot.
So I do three boring things now. I set a custom amount instead of unlimited when the wallet lets me. Every month or so I open Revoke. cash, look at the list of contracts I’ve approved, and cancel the ones I’m not using. And I keep a second wallet for experiments, so the one holding real savings never touches a sketchy site.
Ten minutes. Genuinely worth it.
Here’s what happened to me, and it’s baked into the standard itself.
The transfer function in ERC-20 doesn’t check whether the receiver can handle tokens. It subtracts from your balance, adds to theirs, and moves on. If you send tokens to a regular wallet, fine. If you send them to a smart contract that wasn’t built to receive and return them, they sit there forever, because the contract has no function to send them back out.
Developers have complained about this for years. Over time, huge amounts of tokens have ended up stranded in contracts this way, and nobody can touch them. Newer standards like ERC-223 tried to patch it. They didn’t take over, because by then the whole industry was built around ERC-20. Wallets, exchanges, lending apps. Replacing it would be like trying to replace the QWERTY keyboard. Flawed, familiar, and not going anywhere.
There’s a cousin of my mistake that catches even more people: the wrong network. USDT exists on Ethereum, Tron, and other chains, and the addresses can look similar. Send it over the wrong network to an exchange that doesn’t support it and you can be in for a long, painful support ticket, or no recovery at all. Always check which network you’re sending on, and send a tiny test amount first. I know it feels silly. Do it anyway.
Here’s something that surprised me. Calling a token “ERC-20” says nothing about quality. Anyone can make one in a few minutes, for free, with no approval from anyone. A scam coin and a serious project use the same standard.
So I run a short check every time.
First, the contract address. Scammers copy the name and logo of real tokens, and fake versions pop up constantly. I get the address from the project’s official site or Coin Gecko, never from a reply under a tweet.
Second, who owns the supply? Etherscan has a holders tab. If three wallets own 80% of everything, those three can crash the price whenever they feel like it. Not always a scam, but it should make you think.
Third, whether the code is verified on Etherscan and whether a known firm audited it. An audit isn’t a guarantee. Plenty of audited projects have still been hacked. But a big project with neither? I walk away.
I’m not a financial advisor, and this isn’t financial advice. It’s just the checklist I wish I’d had at 1 a.m. staring at that checkmark.
I used to think crypto was either genius or fraud, depending on who was shouting. ERC-20 changed my mind a bit. It’s a tool. A clever, simple, slightly flawed tool that lets anyone create digital money without asking permission.
That freedom is the whole appeal, and it’s also exactly why nobody is going to save you when you slip. The code does what it says, not what you assumed it said. No one picks up the phone.
You don’t have to become a developer. You just have to know what you’re clicking, and slow down for a few seconds before you do.
I paid $400 to learn that. If this post saves you the tuition, good.
Have you ever been burned by an approval or a wrong-address transfer? Tell me in the comments. Somebody scrolling by might dodge the same hole.
I Sent Crypto to the Wrong Address and Nobody Could Help Me. Learn From My Mess (ERC-20 Explained) was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Every time someone said “Web3,” I zoned out.
Wallets. Gas fees. DAOs. Every explanation came with three more explanations I hadn’t asked for, and the person explaining usually had a cartoon ape as their profile picture. Not a great look.
Then a friend who works in payments watched me nod along for the tenth time and said, “Stop thinking about the tech. Just ask who owns what.”
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. I wish someone had said it to me in 2021.
Web1 was a library. You walked in, read something, walked out. Late 90s, early 2000s. Somebody built the page and you looked at it.
Web2 is the one you’re on now. You can post, comment, upload, sell, review. Instagram, YouTube, Amazon. And it’s great, genuinely. But somewhere along the way the deal changed. You make the stuff. They hold the keys.
Web3 is the idea that you could read, write and own. The last word is the one doing all the work.
Think about something you’ve built online. A following, a channel, a gaming account you’ve put hundreds of hours into.
Who can switch it off?
Not you. I know people who’ve lost accounts to a wrong automated flag, then spent weeks pinging a support form that answered with a template. Weeks without income, waiting on a reply from something that isn’t even a person.
Web3 is a bet that this setup is a design choice, not a law of nature. What if your account and your money and your stuff were with you, and the apps just plugged in?
It sounds complicated and it mostly isn’t. Four pieces.
Blockchain. A shared record book. Thousands of computers each hold the same copy. Somebody writes “Priya sent Tom five euros,” every copy updates, done. To fake an entry you’d need to fool most of them simultaneously, which is why nobody needs a bank to vouch for the book.
Wallet. Your account, except no company holds it. You hold a private key. Think front door key. Lose it and there’s no locksmith and no “reset password” link. Some people hear that and feel free. Others feel sick. Both reactions make sense to me.
Token. A digital item recorded on a blockchain. Could be money, a ticket, a membership, a piece of art. It sits in your wallet, so nobody can quietly take it back.
Smart contract. A small program that runs on the blockchain and does what it was told. Payment lands, item gets released. No middleman. Which is lovely until the code has a bug, because then there’s nobody to phone.
NFTs, DeFi, DAOs, all the names you keep hearing: those are just these four stacked in different combinations.
She uploads a track to a streaming platform. The platform decides what a play is worth. Money arrives weeks later, after the label and the distributor each take a bite. If the platform changes the rules, she adapts or leaves.
Now imagine the split is written into a smart contract. Each sale divides automatically between her, the producer and the co-writer, in the percentages they agreed to. Minutes, not months. Nobody emails anybody about a missing payment.
Is that real today? In small pockets, yes. Will it replace Spotify next year? No chance. But it shows you the shape of the idea, and once you see it it’s hard to unsee.
Skipping this is how people get hurt, so here goes.
Web3 has an ugly history. In 2021 and 2022 people paid silly money for NFT images, and most of those prices fell off a cliff. Loads of crypto projects were pure speculation. Some were just fraud. People lost savings, and that’s not a small thing.
My own view, and you’re free to disagree: the technology and the casino that grew around it are two different things. A lot of people came for the casino and called it Web3. The dot-com crash wiped out a pile of companies in 2000 and the internet is still around.
Still, I’m careful. My rules:
Forget the memes. The serious work is in finance. Banks and institutions are testing tokenized assets, faster settlement and payments that carry their own rules. Cross-border transfers are slow and pricey today, and blockchain rails could change that. Central banks have been running experiments with digital versions of their currencies too.
Nobody tweets about settlement times. That’s partly why it’s easy to miss.
Know it. Don’t obsess over it.
You don’t need to buy anything this week. You don’t need a wallet by Friday. But the question underneath all of this, who owns your digital life, isn’t going away. More of our work, money and identity moves online every year, and someone will answer that question with or without your input.
Knowing the basics is also just self-defence. The people who get burned are usually the ones who didn’t know what they were buying.
If someone asks, try this: “It’s the idea of an internet where you own your accounts, your money and your stuff, instead of renting them from a few big companies.”
Good enough. Nod at the rest.
I Ignored Web3 for Years. One Question Finally Made It Click was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Receiving money from abroad, paying an international supplier, or getting paid by a foreign client should be straightforward. Yet, for many Africans, cross-border payments can involve high fees, currency conversion costs, delays, and limited payment options.
These challenges have increased interest in alternative ways to move money internationally. One option attracting attention is stablecoins, digital assets designed to maintain a relatively stable value.
Stablecoins like USDT and USDC are becoming part of conversations about remittances, digital payments, and international commerce.
Platforms such as SFx Money App support USDT and USDC transactions through its crypto wallet, alongside other international payment services.
Understanding how stablecoins work, where they may be useful, and what risks they carry can help Africans make more informed financial decisions.
Stablecoins are digital assets designed to maintain a relatively stable value, often by being linked to a traditional currency such as the US dollar.
Unlike Bitcoin, whose market price can fluctuate significantly, stablecoins such as USD Coin (USDC) and Tether (USDT) aim to maintain a value close to one US dollar. However, their prices can fluctuate, and neither is entirely risk-free.
Stablecoins can be transferred between compatible digital wallets through blockchain networks. Depending on the network and service provider, this can offer an alternative to certain traditional payment processes.
However, stablecoins are not the same as money held in a bank account. Their reliability depends on factors such as the issuer, the arrangements supporting their value, redemption options, and market conditions.
Transfers may also involve network fees, platform charges, and conversion costs. Users must understand these factors before deciding whether stablecoins suit their needs.
International payments support families, freelancers, and businesses across Africa. However, traditional transfers can involve intermediary charges, exchange-rate margins, processing delays, or restrictions depending on the countries and institutions involved.
Stablecoins offer another potential way to transfer digital value. Where compatible services are available, users can transfer stablecoins between supported wallets without relying entirely on conventional international banking processes.
This does not mean every stablecoin transfer is cheaper or faster. Network fees, platform charges, conversion rates, and the recipient’s ability to access the funds all affect the overall experience.
SFx Money App supports USDT and USDC transactions through its crypto wallet, alongside other international payment services.
2. Remittances and Family Support
Africans living abroad often send money home to helps families cover education, healthcare, housing, and other daily expenses.
Stablecoins helps with this by providing another option for transferring digital value to friends and loved ones. Recipients need to have access to compatible wallets and services to successfully receive and spend funds.
SFx offers suitable service to receive and convert these assets into local currencies for easy spending.
3. Opportunities for Freelancers and Businesses
African freelancers work with clients around the world, while businesses purchase software, equipment, and other services from international suppliers.
Receiving payments and settling invoices can be challenging when payment options are limited or currency conversion increases costs.
Stablecoins offer an additional way to receive or transfer digital value when both parties have access to compatible services.
SFx supports USDT and USDC transactions through its crypto wallet alongside other international payment services including foreign accounts like USD, GBP, EUR, AED, GHS, and TZS accounts.
Stablecoins are part of a wider shift towards digital financial services, alongside mobile payments, digital wallets, and online banking.
For African markets, these developments may create opportunities to improve access to certain financial services. However, reliable internet access, suitable devices, identity verification, and access to conversion services can influence whether people can use these products effectively.
It is important to note that access to an app does not automatically remove every barrier to financial inclusion. Services must be accessible, practical, and appropriate for the people using them.
Stablecoins have potential benefits, but users should understand their risks before making a transaction.
Value Risk
Stablecoins can lose their intended value peg because of market conditions or concerns about the issuer and the arrangements supporting the asset.
Fees and Conversion
Network fees, platform charges, and exchange rates can reduce the amount ultimately received.
Scams and Security
Fraudulent websites, phishing messages, and compromised wallets can cause financial losses. Blockchain transactions are often difficult or impossible to reverse once confirmed.
Regulations
Digital asset rules differ across countries and may change over time. Users should understand the requirements that apply to their location and intended transaction.
Before transferring stablecoins, verify the asset and network, research the service provider, check the fees, and use appropriate security measures.
Before using stablecoins for an international payment, ask yourself:
1. Does the service support the stablecoin and network I intend to use?
2. What are the total transaction and conversion costs?
3. How will the recipient access or convert the funds?
4. How can I protect my wallet and account?
5. What rules apply to this transaction?
These simple checks can help users avoid preventable mistakes and make more informed financial decisions.
Stablecoins are not a complete solution to Africa’s payment challenges, but they are creating new possibilities for transferring digital value.
They offer families another way to receive money from abroad and give freelancers and businesses additional options for certain international transactions.
SFx Money App illustrates how supported stablecoin transactions can exist alongside other international payment services, giving users different options to explore according to their needs.
As digital finance continues to develop, the focus should not simply be on whether stablecoins will replace traditional money. It should be on where they provide practical value, who can benefit from them, and how their risks can be managed responsibly.
The future of cross-border payments will depend not only on new technology, but also on making financial services more accessible, transparent, and useful for the people who rely on them.
What Are Stablecoins and Why Are They Becoming Important for Africans? was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
37 banks, one MiCA rulebook, and the awkward question nobody in Brussels wants to answer about euro stablecoin yield.
The euro is the second most used currency on earth. It accounts for roughly 20% to 30% of global FX reserves, SWIFT traffic and trade flows.
Onchain, it is a rounding error.
About 0.3% of all stablecoin value in the world is denominated in euros. Almost all of the rest is dollars.
Europe noticed. Thirty-seven banks now sit behind a single euro stablecoin project. They are arriving at a market that was effectively decided three years ago.
Here is what the euro stablecoin MiCA picture actually looks like in October 2026, and the structural problem underneath it that very few people are saying out loud.
Start with the scoreboard:
So euro stablecoins doubled. The entire category is still smaller than a mid-size lender’s overnight book.
Some of that growth was forced rather than earned. Europe’s crypto-asset service provider transition period closed on 30 June 2026, pushing unlicensed firms out of the EU market and consolidating whatever supply was left into the licensed names.
The market is also top-heavy. Circle’s EURC holds about 62.6% of euro stablecoin supply on its own. Societe Generale’s EURCV holds another 19.6%. Two issuers, 82% of the market.
That concentration is not a scandal. It is what a market looks like when almost nobody bothered to compete.
The vehicle is Qivalis, an Amsterdam entity. The timeline matters more than the headline.
September 2025: nine banks announce a MiCAR-compliant euro stablecoin issuer under Dutch supervision, including ING, UniCredit, CaixaBank, KBC, Danske Bank, DekaBank, Banca Sella, SEB and Raiffeisen Bank International. (announcement)
December 2025: BNP Paribas joins and Qivalis is incorporated in the Netherlands with twelve founding members. (BNP Paribas statement)
March 2026: Fireblocks is selected for tokenization, wallet infrastructure and custody.
May 2026: twenty-five more banks join, including ABN AMRO, Rabobank, Nordea and Intesa Sanpaolo. Membership reaches 37 institutions across 15 countries.
September 2026: confirmation that the token will issue on public Ethereum rather than a permissioned bank network.
The design is deliberately conservative. Backed 1:1. At least 40% of reserves in bank deposits, the remainder in short-term euro-area sovereign bonds spread across countries to avoid concentration risk. Redemption available 24/7. (reserve structure detail)
Thirty-seven banks. Fifteen countries. Zero tokens in circulation.
The e-money institution licence from De Nederlandsche Bank has not landed yet, and nothing ships until it does.
Yes, for issuers. This is the part most coverage skips entirely.
MiCA Article 50 prohibits issuers of e-money tokens, and the service providers distributing them, from granting interest to holders.
Article 50(3) closes the obvious loophole: any benefit tied to how long someone holds the token counts as interest. (legal analysis)
The intent is written into the regulation itself. Recital 46 states these tokens should function as a medium of exchange, not a store of value.
The practical effect is blunter than that. A regulated euro stablecoin earns on its reserve. The person holding it earns nothing.
Tether discontinued its euro token partly over this and the reserve custody rules.
Several platforms switched off stablecoin reward programmes for EU users on the day the rules bit.
This is the live question in Europe right now, and it is not a crypto-native complaint.
An April 2026 report from Blockchain for Europe argued that MiCA has produced a euro stablecoin segment that is safe but structurally uncompetitive. (report coverage)
The argument, compressed:
The European Commission has since reopened a MiCA review, and the remuneration ban sits near the top of the reform list.
There is friction from the top as well. ECB President Christine Lagarde said in early May 2026 that stablecoins are not Europe’s best route to strengthening the euro’s international role, and cautioned against building euro counterparts to dollar-backed tokens. The central bank’s own answer, a digital euro, is not expected before 2029.
Read that back. Thirty-seven banks are building a euro stablecoin their central bank is lukewarm about, under a rule that stops it paying holders anything, three years ahead of a public alternative.
Meanwhile, dollar stablecoins solved the same problem without changing a single law.
Their issuers do not pay holders either. The yield simply lives somewhere else in the stack.
Read the prohibition carefully. It binds issuers and the service providers distributing their tokens. It does not turn a separately governed protocol into an issuer.
That distinction splits the stack into two very different jobs:
Europe has spent two years regulating job one. Job two is where capital actually decides whether to stay.
By most estimates, around 80% of global stablecoin supply is deployed into no source of yield at all.
Sky Ecosystem is a global savings and capital allocation network, and it is built around job two rather than job one. Here is the full architecture, but the short version runs in six steps.
Two consequences are easy to miss.
The rate is variable and set by Sky Governance, published live rather than promised in marketing.
You can check it, and every collateral position behind it, at financial.skyeco.com.
And an sUSDS holder is not a claimant on any single allocator, borrower or strategy.
If one allocator takes losses, its own risk capital absorbs them first, then the Surplus Buffer, before anything reaches the protocol level.
On 7 October 2026, Moody’s Ratings assigned Sky Protocol a B3 counterparty risk rating with a stable outlook. It was the first rating Moody’s has issued on any stablecoin protocol. S&P Global had already affirmed a B-. (Moody’s report)
Two agencies. Two separate teams. Two sets of criteria. Two independent conclusions. No other stablecoin protocol currently meets that bar.
The published numbers behind it:
Qivalis is a serious project. Getting thirty-seven banks to agree on anything is genuinely hard, and a regulated euro settlement token has real uses in treasury operations and cross-border payments.
But a payment rail is not a savings layer. And right now Europe has no legal route to build the second one inside the issuer.
Does Europe want euro stablecoins that move, or euro stablecoins that people hold?
The rulebook has only answered the first half of that question. The second half is still open, and it is the half that decides whether the euro ever gets off 0.3%.
Dollar stablecoins did not win on regulation. They won because once the token existed, there was somewhere obvious for it to go next. Europe has built the token. The next part is still missing.
Your turn. Should the next MiCA revision lift the remuneration ban on euro stablecoins, or does paying holders quietly turn a payment token into a deposit substitute Europe cannot afford? Drop your take below. I reply to every serious argument.
Europe Finally Has a Euro Stablecoin Consortium. It Is Very Late. was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
There are already 195 stablecoins and 152 issuers. Two of them hold 85% of the money. The banks ran that math before they ran the press release.
On 1 September 2026, twenty-one of the largest financial institutions on earth agreed to build one coin.
Bank of America. Citi. Goldman Sachs. UBS. Deutsche Bank. Santander. BBVA. MUFG. Wells Fargo. Fidelity. Names that compete on everything, lining up behind a single dollar token.
They did not announce a company name. Or a CEO. Or a blockchain. Or who owns what.
What they announced was the shape of the thing. One coin. Not twenty-one.
That choice is the real story, and almost nobody wrote about it.
Any one of these institutions could have shipped its own dollar token this quarter. They chose not to. Liquidity does not split twenty-one ways.
Because a stablecoin is not a product. It is a network.
The market already ran this experiment, at full scale, with real money. As of 1 October 2026 there were 195 stablecoins from 152 issuers across 47 blockchains, about $300.9 billion in total supply, and 308.4 million holder addresses.
Out of all of that, two names hold roughly 85.9%. No third issuer clears $10 billion.
That is the whole lesson in one line:
Banks understand shared rails better than anyone. Correspondent banking, card schemes, CLS, SWIFT.
Every one of them is a case of rivals agreeing to pool the boring layer so they can compete on the layer above it.
The consortium is not being generous. It is being correct.
Strip out the commentary and here is what was on the page:
It grew out of something smaller. In October 2025, ten global banks said they were exploring a reserve-backed digital payment asset on public blockchains. Eight of those ten are still in.
Read the verb carefully, though. They committed to form a company. Nothing has launched.
Section 4 of the GENIUS Act is blunt. A permitted payment stablecoin issuer cannot pay the holder any form of interest or yield, in cash, tokens or anything else, purely for holding the token.
So picture the finished product in 2027.
A corporate treasury holds the consortium dollar. The reserves sitting behind it are earning in Treasury bills. The treasury holding the token earns zero.
That is not an oversight. Congress wrote it that way on purpose, so a payment token would not quietly turn into a competitor for bank funding.
There is already a well-worn workaround, and it is worth knowing about. Issuers cannot pay holders, but they can pay distribution partners, and nothing stops those partners from paying users.
Circle discloses that it passes a share of its reserve income to Coinbase. The money still reaches the end holder.
It just takes a detour through someone else’s balance sheet, and picks up someone else’s incentives on the way.
The consortium is building a very good dollar. It is not building a reason to hold one.
Here is the part that matters for anyone planning around 2027. The restriction names issuers. It does not name third parties. Which means the yield question does not disappear.
It just moves one layer out, to whoever is willing to put that capital to work and take responsibility for how.
Six consortium members, among them Citi, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, PNC, Santander and TD, are also backing The Clearing House’s shared tokenized deposit network. Seventeen institutions, announced in June, same H1 2027 target.
Two competing designs. Overlapping backers. Identical deadline.
Tokenized deposits stay inside the banking system as bank liabilities. A GENIUS stablecoin is a separate instrument with segregated reserves.
Nobody at that table knows which one wins, so several of them bought tickets to both.
And they are not the only ones racing:
Almost everyone is building the issuance layer. Very few are building the layer underneath it.
Ask anyone who has run a treasury desk. The hard question was never how to hold the dollar. It was always what the dollar is doing while you hold it.
Minting a fully backed token is an engineering problem with known answers.
Deciding where billions in collateral actually go, under limits anyone can audit, with a rate that holds up when conditions change, is a different kind of problem.
It is operational, it is continuous, and you cannot ship it once and walk away.
That second half is what Sky Ecosystem is built around.
Sky Protocol is a capital allocation network. Independent allocators, the Sky Agent Network, access USDS liquidity under risk parameters set in public by Sky Governance.
They deploy it across diversified strategies. The revenue those deployments generate flows back to the protocol.
The allocators are operating businesses, not line items on a slide. Spark runs lending markets. Grove runs institutional credit.
Figures as shown on the Sky Ecosystem dashboard at the time of writing:
You can check all three yourself. That is the point of publishing them.
USDS is the base unit. Fully backed, converts 1:1, deep liquidity, no drama.
sUSDS is where the Sky Savings Rate lives. Hold sUSDS and the position accrues the governance-set rate programmatically. No lockups, no minimums, redeem back to USDS whenever you want.
The distinction worth holding onto: the rate is not a promise from an issuer. It is the output of an allocation network that has to keep working for the number to hold.
And institutions have started treating it that way.
On 23 September 2026, Galaxy Digital (Nasdaq: GLXY) put $100 million of sUSDS on its balance sheet and approved sUSDS as eligible collateral across an institutional trading business carrying a $1.4 billion average loan book and more than 1,600 counterparties.
The detail I keep coming back to: clients who post sUSDS against a loan keep accruing the Sky Savings Rate on the full position for as long as the loan runs. Collateral that does not go to sleep while it is pledged.
That relationship did not start there. Grove had already extended Galaxy a $500 million warehouse lending facility. Galaxy has since borrowed on Spark as well.
For context on the base underneath it: Sky Protocol entered Q3 2026 with $5.41 billion supplied through independent allocators and institutional tokenized funds, including anchor positions in BlackRock’s BUIDL and Janus Henderson’s JTRSY.
sUSDS supply closed Q2 2026 at $5.52 billion, up 149% year on year, on $107.35 million of Gross Protocol Revenue and $33.29 million of Protocol Surplus for the quarter.
My guess is the consortium ships, roughly on time, and the coin is clean, compliant and boring in the best possible sense. Widely accepted, too. Twenty-one distribution networks is a serious advantage.
And on day one, its holders will start asking the question the GENIUS Act will not let the issuer answer.
If you are tracking this, watch the follow-on announcements rather than the launch. Which chain they pick. How custody is handled.
Whether the euro version slips. Those three will tell you more than any launch-day release.
By 2027 there will be no shortage of dollar tokens. There will be a shortage of places to put them.
So, back to the title.
Twenty-one separate bank stablecoins would have been twenty-one failures. One shared coin is the right call, and the people who made it know exactly why.
But a shared dollar with no allocation engine behind it is half a product. The other half already exists, it is already audited in public, and it is already on a Nasdaq-listed balance sheet.
Which half do you think decides 2027: who issues the dollar, or who puts it to work? I would genuinely like to be argued with in the comments.
Twenty-One Banks Are Building One Stablecoin Together. Why Not Twenty-One Stablecoins? was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
If you take card payments, even five a day, read this before your bank emails you first.
The mistake is simple. You think your payment provider takes care of PCI DSS for you.
It doesn’t. Some of it, sure. But if your checkout page looks like most checkout pages, a big chunk of the responsibility is still sitting on your desk.
[Add two or three sentences of your own here. A time you or a client assumed “Stripe handles it” and found out otherwise. Real beats polished.]
I’ll get to the gap in a second. First, the title.
Mostly no, and I’d rather say so now than have someone say it for me in the comments.
PCI DSS isn’t a federal law. The card brands wrote it, and you agreed to it when you signed your merchant agreement, probably without reading page nine. Break it and your bank can fine you, raise your fees, or close your account.
But a few US states have pulled PCI DSS into their own law. Nevada is the best known. Minnesota and Washington have versions too. And after a breach, nobody asks whether the standard was legally binding. They ask whether you followed it. A lawyer on the other side will enjoy that question.
So “breaking the law” is a little strong, and “breaking your contract” is accurate nearly everywhere. Either way, you don’t want to be there.
Open your checkout page. Right-click, view source, and search for “script.”
Go on. I’ll wait.
Analytics. A chat widget. Maybe a heatmap tool somebody trialled once. A font library. A retargeting pixel from a campaign in 2022 that nobody turned off. Every one of those is code written by a stranger, running in the same window where your customer types a card number.
Attackers love this. It’s called web skimming, and you’ll also see the name Magecart. They don’t bother attacking your bank. They compromise one small third-party script, add a few lines of JavaScript, and copy card details as people type. Your site looks fine. Your processor sees normal transactions. It can go on for weeks.
This is the gap. Your provider secures its side. It has no control over the fifteen scripts you invited onto your side.
The old version, 3.2.1, was retired in March 2024. Version 4.0 replaced it, and a batch of requirements that started out as “best practice” became mandatory on March 31, 2025. The current release, 4.0.1, only clarifies wording. It doesn’t relax anything.
Two of the new rules hit online sellers hardest.
Requirement 6.4.3 says you need an inventory of every script on your payment pages. You have to confirm each is authorized and write down why it’s there.
Requirement 11.6.1 says you need a way to detect unauthorized changes to those pages and be alerted when something shifts.
So if nobody on your team can name every script on your checkout, you have a compliance problem and a security problem. They happen to be the same problem, which is almost funny.
The card brands don’t bill you directly. They penalize your acquiring bank, and the bank passes it along, usually with a little extra for its trouble. Figures commonly reported run from about $5,000 to $100,000 a month of non-compliance, depending on your size and how long it drags on.
That’s the fine. A real breach is its own bill: forensic investigators, reissuing cards, lawyers, notifying customers, and the quiet loss of people who just stop buying from you.
Target in 2013 is the example everyone uses, because it’s true. Attackers got in through a third-party vendor (an HVAC contractor, of all things) and left with around 40 million payment card records. A company that size absorbs it. A small shop usually can’t.
None of this is glamorous. That’s sort of the point.
Start by asking your bank or processor which Self-Assessment Questionnaire applies to you. It depends on how card data touches your business, and plenty of merchants fill out the wrong one. They end up compliant on paper and exposed in practice.
Then shrink your scope. If you use a fully hosted payment page or tokenization, card numbers never touch your servers, and that’s less for you to secure and explain. Do an audit of your payment page scripts while you’re at it, and delete anything that isn’t earning its spot. Your heatmap tool doesn’t need to sit next to the card field.
Never store the CVV after authorization. Ever. Turn on multi-factor authentication for any account that can reach card data. If you’re required to run quarterly external scans, use an Approved Scanning Vendor and put the dates in your calendar, because PCI DSS is yearly, not once and done.
And write a security policy. One page is fine. One page your team has read beats sixty pages nobody opened.
I don’t think PCI DSS exists to make your life miserable, though it can feel that way around audit time. It exists because card fraud is automated and endless, and small merchants are favorite targets because they assume nobody’s watching.
The businesses that stay out of trouble mostly aren’t the ones with big security budgets. They just ask three dull questions early. What touches card data? Who has access to it? What’s running on my checkout page?
Ask them this week. Your future self will be grateful, and so will your bank.
Do you know which SAQ applies to your business? Tell me in the comments. [Add your own honest answer here.]
This is general information, not legal or compliance advice. Confirm your requirements with your acquiring bank or a Qualified Security Assessor.
Your Payment Page Is Probably Breaking the Law. Here’s the PCI DSS Mistake Nobody Tells You About was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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