Stablecoin Issuers & Distribution

Startale Japan has begun offering digital retail bonds with a 5% annual interest rate. Interest payments and redemption will use JPYSC, a trust-type yen-denominated stablecoin. The bonds are managed on infrastructure built with Hyperledger Fabric, while JPYSC is issued on Ethereum, meaning the bonds and the funds for interest payments do not sit on the same blockchain. The company sees the connection costs of horizontal specialization as a challenge, and has set out a vertical integration strategy that provides everything from base layers such as Strium, a blockchain dedicated to on-chain finance, through to JPYSC and wallets. This initiative is positioned as the current form of efforts to promote the adoption of JPYSC.

Sumitomo Mitsui Banking and eight other companies announced on October 6 that they have completed the second phase of "Project Trinity," a proof-of-concept experiment to settle digital securities using stablecoins. The second-phase trials ran from April to September 2026 between Daiwa Securities and SBI Securities, using security tokens issued by SBI VC Trade and trust-type stablecoins issued by Sumitomo Mitsui Banking for the purpose of this verification. Assuming trading on the Osaka Digital Exchange's security token trading market "START," two transactions were settled. Progmat handled the issuance and management infrastructure for the security tokens, while Progmat and Datachain provided the technology linking security tokens and stablecoins on different blockchains. In the trials, in addition to purchasing and redeeming stablecoins and ordinary settlement, the participants also tested responses for cases where stablecoins were insufficient or transaction details did not match. The companies said the results met expectations within the anticipated scope, and explained that they have set a near-term goal of delivery-versus-payment settlement at T+2, two business days after execution, and have confirmed to a certain degree that this is achievable.

The US economy added just 29,000 jobs in September, well below expectations of 89,000, while the unemployment rate rose to 4.2% against an expected 4.1%, a miss that host Scott Melker said weakens the case for further Fed rate hikes and points toward cuts. Prior months were revised sharply lower, with July cut by 31,000 to 10,000 and August by 29,000 to 133,000, leaving combined employment 60,000 lower than previously reported, and wage growth slowed to 0.1% monthly and 3% annually. Separately, the SEC proposed dedicated custody rules that would let registered investment advisors, investment funds and business development companies hold crypto assets directly under federal securities law, with state-chartered trust companies able to serve as permitted crypto custodians and client assets segregated from the trust company's own assets. In other news, Fiserv launched the Roughrider stablecoin, a bank-to-bank settlement token on Solana serving a North Dakota network of more than 90 banks and credit unions, and the Ethereum Foundation launched zero-knowledge APIs, built with the Open Anonymity Project, that let users pay for AI models without revealing identity. Near Intents was hit by a 3.8 million dollar exploit, with no customer funds lost, and another Trump meme coin dinner was advertised for top token investors.

The crypto market entered Friday evening, October 2, 2026, in a phase of powerful strategic accumulation, with the industry's total market capitalization standing in the $2.94–$3.03 trillion range. U.S. labor market data came in weak, as Non-Farm Payrolls rose by just 29,000 against expectations of $84,000–$90,000, while the unemployment rate climbed to 4.2%. The headline also points to the biggest USD stablecoin returning to Bitcoin after 12 years.

SBI Digital Trust, a subsidiary of SBI Holdings, announced on October 1 that it will jointly conduct verification with two Korean companies, payment provider NICE Information & Telecommunication and blockchain infrastructure firm DSRV Labs, on cross-border remittance and payments between Japan and Korea using stablecoins. The three companies signed a basic agreement on September 30 aimed at future commercialization, and will examine fund flows from users to merchants, methods for connecting each company's systems, expected transaction volumes, and costs, with the goal of completing the work by the end of December 2026. In the verification, a Japanese user will scan a QR code at a NICE Information & Telecommunication merchant, and stablecoins will be used to settle with the Korean-side merchant, while the companies also check instruction methods for remittance and payment and operational issues. NICE Information & Telecommunication supports a network of about 1.2 million merchants in Korea, and the companies will consider payment and settlement operations at physical stores and methods for connecting with existing systems to confirm whether the business can work in an actual merchant environment, while DSRV will verify the blockchain technology and system architecture needed to transfer stablecoins. SBI Digital Trust will consider a Japan-Korea payment scheme in light of Japanese regulations and payment systems, working with companies across the SBI Group. In Korea, work is underway to develop rules for stablecoins, but the details are still under discussion, and the three companies will focus on the technical and operational aspects that can be verified at this point, deciding whether to commercialize based on regulatory developments. The SBI Group also signed a basic agreement with a Korean company in August to build a blockchain-based Japan-Korea payment network for financial institutions, and while the previous effort targeted a payment network intermediated by financial institutions, this time the focus is on payments by Japanese travelers at physical stores in Korea.

U.S. payments giant Stripe held its annual conference, Stripe Tour Tokyo 2026, in Tokyo on September 30, with co-founder John Collison taking the stage. Collison said stablecoin usage has reached an "inflection point" this year, and predicted that adoption in Japan will advance first in cross-border transactions such as international remittances. The company processes more than 1.9 trillion dollars in payments annually, equivalent to roughly 1.6% of global GDP. In its annual report published in February 2026, it disclosed that total payment volume in 2025 rose about 34% year on year to roughly 1.9 trillion dollars, that global stablecoin payment volume doubled to about 400 billion dollars, and that roughly 60% of that is estimated to be business-to-business usage. Volume on Bridge, the stablecoin payments platform it acquired, increased more than fourfold. The company is working to enable AI agent transactions without human involvement, using its payments protocol Machine Payments Protocol and its digital wallet Link, which has more than 300 million users.