In June 2026, BNY Mellon — a global, systemically important bank operating under some of the strictest supervisory requirements in finance — announced that USDC would become the first stablecoin supported on its digital asset custody platform. The news drew modest attention, but it deserved more: a bank whose custodial credibility has been tested and reaffirmed for decades was pairing it with an issuer whose credibility is still being built. When BNY moves, it is not endorsing a stablecoin. It is claiming a position.
Major shifts in financial infrastructure often pass through a period before a rulebook is written, when credibility — rather than formal permission — determines who will shape what comes next. In that interval, credibility buys the ability to define the standard before any government does.
Cross-border tokenized finance is in that period now, as no globally accepted framework has yet established who sets the operating rules between institutions. At the same time, institutions worldwide are manoeuvring to establish a position early, because whoever occupies it first tends to keep it.
Circle, the issuer of USDC, offers an example. After launching USDC in 2018, it began publishing independently attested reserve reports before US regulation required them. TerraUSD’s collapse in 2022 made transparency impossible for the market to ignore; Circle’s reserve reports, already several years old by then, gave USDC a credibility advantage that less transparent competitors could not claim. Later, in 2025, federal stablecoin legislation codified key transparency practices that Circle had already adopted.
By this point, Circle’s early credibility was beginning to translate into institutional recognition. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) in the United States went further in July 2026, approving Circle to charter a national trust bank for its stablecoin infrastructure and converting the credibility it had built since 2018 into federal recognition. The charter did not create credibility — that came before, with the reports — but it did help formalize it.
Institutions racing to set tokenized finance standards today are applying that same principle at a bigger scale. When no single jurisdiction can dictate terms to another, the institution that sets the operating standard for cross-border tokenized finance does more than win market share: it can shape the terms on which every later entrant must interoperate.
In other words, credibility does not become a standard on its own. Instead, it becomes one by being adopted early enough, by enough institutions, that leaving costs more than staying. That threshold has less to do with which technology is best than with who moved first.
In 1973, 239 banks across 15 countries built a shared messaging cooperative — SWIFT — to replace the slow telex network. There was no prior treaty signed by regulators; rather, it was simply a solution born from a problem shared by many institutions. Each bank that joined made the network more valuable to every bank already on it, until no bank could afford not to be where everyone else already was. More than 50 years on, the network effect remains difficult to dislodge.
Libra shows the opposite lesson. Facebook’s 2019 proposal for a global payment network met a regulatory response that was swift and almost uniformly negative. To be clear, this was not a technology failure, but rather a trust issue, as Libra tried to claim the self-reinforcing effect of a standard without first earning the incremental adoption that makes one.
SWIFT and Libra together show that the threshold is durable once crossed, but unforgiving to any institution that tries to skip it.
As that threshold comes into view, it becomes part of the calculation for any institution with systemic scale. Standing still carries its own risk, whether the position being protected is defensive, opportunistic or simply commercial. That risk is what pulls institutions to move before someone else gets there first.
In March 2026, Mastercard agreed to acquire BVNK — a London-based stablecoin payments company operating in more than 130 countries — in a deal valued at up to US$1.8 billion, bringing an existing infrastructure footprint, and the credibility already invested in it, into a global payments network.
In November 2024, Paxos chose a different route, launching USDG through the Global Dollar Network, a coalition of financial and crypto-native firms built specifically so that no single member would control the standard. Unlike issuers that retain reserve income, the Global Dollar Network shares it with participating partners. By July 2026, the coalition had grown to more than 150 partners.
Only a handful of institutions, including BNY, could extend their credibility directly into the new terrain. Most others had to acquire or pool a foothold, as Mastercard and Paxos did. When enough institutions converge on the same standard, competition changes form and institutions begin coordinating around a common infrastructure rather than continuously evaluating alternatives.
A different kind of convergence is under way at Open Standard, where members already have credibility to spare. Announced in June 2026, it proposed a coalition-based model for stablecoin infrastructure, with more than 140 institutional partners — including direct competitors such as Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and Coinbase — inside the same structure. The unveiling coincided with a one-day fall of more than 17 percent in Circle’s shares, underscoring the significance that a coalition, rather than any single rival, would be contesting the position Circle had spent eight years building.
Once enough participants organize around the same infrastructure, abandoning it becomes collectively more costly than improving it. Across these cases, institutions are moving to establish themselves before formal rules fully settle the field.
Make the Emerging Standard Accountable
Within this context, governments and regulators should identify which private arrangements are becoming de facto infrastructure and require transparency around governance and interoperability before they become difficult to unwind. The OCC’s 2026 approval of Circle’s national trust bank charter illustrates what this can mean in practice: once privately built stablecoin infrastructure receives federal recognition, regulators should make clear not only how the institution itself will be supervised, but what obligations follow once other institutions depend on it.
Financial institutions seeking to become infrastructure should recognize that credibility carries obligations: once other institutions come to rely on their networks, the standards they create can no longer be treated as proprietary commercial choices. Paxos’s Global Dollar Network reflects that shift in practice: institutions that join the network gain a seat on its governance advisory committee, rather than simply accept rules set unilaterally by Paxos.
At the same time, multilateral institutions should build coordination mechanisms before coalition-based standards harden into institutional facts that no single regulator is positioned to act on. This could mean, for instance, extending the Financial Stability Board’s (FSB’s) cross-border cooperation provisions for global stablecoin arrangements to cover coalition-based standards. The FSB’s own October 2025 review found that implementation of its existing recommendations remained uneven across jurisdictions.
Whether that accountability arrives soon enough will decide which of two outcomes follows. Implemented early enough, credibility-led standards could accelerate adoption, lower coordination costs and reduce the risks created by fragmented infrastructure. If, however, it is done too late, private standards may ossify before public oversight arrives, raising switching costs and turning market concentration into institutional dependence.
The institutions now racing to acquire and coalesce around tokenized finance infrastructure are competing to become the environment other institutions’ decisions must coordinate around. Being early does not stop mattering once the rulebook is finally written. By then, the institutions that moved first may already have narrowed the choices the rulebook can accommodate.
