Bank of England FPC member says stablecoins strengthen dollar dominance and demand for US Treasuries in speech

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.

Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach said the clearest use case for stablecoins today is in cross-border payments, telling Bloomberg TV that such transfers take days and carry unclear fees. "If you make a cross-border payment, it takes days; the fees are unclear. From a working capital perspective for a company, if you could move the money instantly, it would be so much better," Miebach reportedly said. Mastercard, alongside Visa, Stripe and other partners, launched the Open USD stablecoin on Solana last month. Miebach said the company was keen to create a stablecoin focused particularly on moving money rather than on investment purposes.

JPYC, the company that issues the Japanese yen stablecoin JPYC, announced on October 9 that it had submitted information to the Japan Fair Trade Commission regarding the competitive environment in the cashless payment market. The submission was made on September 14, explaining how JPYC works and the changes taking place in the payments market. The company pointed out that card merchant agreements could hinder discounts offered to customers who use JPYC for payments, arguing that passing on payment cost savings to customers should be left to each store's own free business judgment. JPYC is an electronic payment instrument issued and redeemed at 1 JPYC to 1 yen, and since issuance began on October 27, 2025, it has become usable at more than 150 stores and businesses, including restaurants, retailers, and e-commerce sites. Payments in JPYC work by having the user send funds to the store on a blockchain, and JPYC does not collect merchant fees from stores, which the company says keeps store cost burdens lower than existing cashless payment methods. What the company takes issue with are three prohibited clauses said to be widely present in credit card and other merchant agreements, which ban charging card users extra, offering discounts to cash users, and encouraging the use of other payment methods. In its April 2022 fact-finding survey report, the Japan Fair Trade Commission stated that uniformly prohibiting different pricing for card users and cash users may risk being problematic under the Antimonopoly Act when it could weaken competition among stores to attract customers. JPYC believes the view set out by the commission also applies to discounts for customers using new payment methods such as stablecoins, and it has set up a consultation desk for stores that are uneasy about offering discounts or that have been asked by payment providers to stop doing so.