October kept the spotlight on stablecoins and institutional momentum. Stripe unveiled Open Issuance, giving enterprises a turnkey path to launch their own digital currencies. At the same time, Sui and Jupiter expanded the ecosystem with new stablecoins built on Ethena’s framework, while Polymarket drew Wall Street’s attention with a $9 billion valuation led by ICE.
October was another month with institutions diving into stablecoin rails and enterprise blockchains. Stripe has unveiled Open Issuance, a new platform play where anyone can launch a stablecoin with Stripe handling mint/redeem. Reserves can be with partners such as BlackRock, Fidelity, or Superstate. On top of that, Stripe paired it with an Agentic Commerce built with OpenAI where agents can pay autonomously. The first crypto-native issuers already using this platform have been Native Markets with USDH, MetaMask with mUSD, and Phantom with CASH. Visa has also kept itself active by pushing pilots that let businesses pre-fund Visa Direct with USDC/EURC so cross-border payouts don’t lock up cash for days. Even more, on the recent earnings call, Visa talked about supporting multiple currencies on four unique blockchains, although not fully disclosed in detail. As another indication of an ongoing institutional adoption, it has been rumored that Mastercard is in late talks to acquire Zerohash for nearly $2 billion, a startup building stablecoin and blockchain infrastructure which enables payments and crypto trading. This comes after recent BVNK acquisition conversations which were led by Mastercard, and which Coinbase seems to be at the forefront of now by supposedly targeting a $2 billion deal.
In Europe, regulatory clarity continued to attract new entrants. French banking giant ODDO BHF, with over €150 billion under management, launched its own euro-backed stablecoin, EUROD, which is listed on Bit2Me and supported by partners such as Telefónica and BBVA. This makes ODDO BHF one of the first legacy banks to issue a MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin directly. Meanwhile, Revolut secured a full MiCA license in Cyprus, granting it passporting rights to offer crypto services across all thirty European Economic Area markets and positioning the company to issue its own stablecoin next year. Canada has also started pushing its own stablecoin framework in the most recent federal budget document, requiring issuers to hold adequate reserves, establish redemption policies, and implement risk management frameworks. Across the pond, Japan moved on two fronts. First, JPYC launched as the country’s first legally recognized yen stablecoin (fully reserved, live on multiple chains), and three banks - MUFG, SMBC, Mizuho - agreed to a common stablecoin standard so Japanese corporates can actually use tokenized yen/dollars in production.
Traditional financial institutions, such as banks, have kept pushing on their end too. JPMorgan did its first fund-servicing transaction on its own Kinexys chain. Broader rollout is expected early next year. Furthermore, JPMorgan allows its clients to let institutions post BTC and ETH as loan collateral. A sharp pivot where even the biggest crypto skeptic Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, has stopped his ongoing scrutiny around crypto, acknowledging the value proposition blockchain technology brings. Blackrock has also rolled out its GENIUS-compliant liquidity fund specifically targeted at servicing stablecoin issuers who must hold high-quality reserves. Erebor Bank, run by Palmer Luckey, got preliminary OCC approval to be a real U.S. bank for crypto/AI/tech clients in an effort to rebuild the lost Silicon Valley Bank slot. Western Union is also planning a stablecoin launch on Solana for early 2026 called USDPT.
On the more crypto-native institutional side, FalconX has agreed to acquire 21Shares, which is one of the largest crypto ETP providers with over $11 billion in assets. This move consolidates FalconX’s prime brokerage infrastructure with 21Shares’s ready product distribution within Europe and other jurisdictions. Another major acquisition was done for an onchain private investment platform which democratizes access to private fundraises, Echo. Coinbase led the acquisition for $375 million and alongside it announced that it is pursuing a federal charter from the OCC to bridge traditional banking infrastructure with crypto-native payments and settlement.
Looking more onchain, Solana’s largest DEX aggregator Jupiter has dropped Ultra v3 with Iris meta-routing, private landing, 34x better sandwich protection, lower fees, and gasless trades. Furthermore, prop AMMs have been capturing more than half of Solana’s DEX volume. Prop AMMs are venues which use private, protocol-owned liquidity usually managed by professional trading firms, rather than relying on public liquidity providers. Instead of using inefficient deterministic onchain bonding curves, prop AMMs employ dynamic offchain quoting engines that monitor external markets, oracles, and conditions to generate time-sensitive, signed quotes. Hyperliquid had yet another big month with the release of HIP-3. This update will bring permissionless perp markets which will mandate HIP-3 market hosts to stake 500.000 HYPE which are put up as collateral and at risk of slashing, in case of any malpractice. The expectation is that HIP-3 markets will enable the trading of a wide array of assets on Hyperliquid, such as indices, stocks and bonds. Also, Hyperliquid has announced aligned stablecoins which would provide fee benefits if the issuers are to stake in total 1.000.000 HYPE and 50% of the deployer’s offchain reserves income are to flow to the protocol. Earlier this quarter, MegaETH set the tone for the next wave of protocol native stablecoins with the launch of USDm, built in collaboration with Ethena and backed by USDtb reserves primarily held in BlackRock’s BUIDL fund. In addition to that, the Sui Group announced the issuance of two new stablecoins through Ethena’s framework: suiUSDe, a yield bearing version designed to accrue returns from off chain reserves (akin to USDe design), and USDi, a non yielding counterpart intended for payments and regulatory simplicity (USDtb design). This dual token structure allows the Sui ecosystem to separate compliant, low risk stable value from higher yield products while maintaining a shared settlement base. Jupiter has partnered with Ethena to launch JupUSD, a native Solana stablecoin modeled after Ethena’s USDtb architecture. The collaboration involves converting $750 million USDC into JupUSD, integrating directly with Jupiter’s trading infrastructure to facilitate onchain settlement, liquidity routing, and leverage markets.
Prediction markets had another month of amazing growth going for them. Polymarket received a near $2 billion investment from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the owner of the New York Stock Exchange. This investment valued Polymarket at $9 billion. Supposedly, Polymarket is again looking to fundraise for a $12-15 billion valuation. Kalshi has also raised $300 million valuing the prediction market at $5 billion. Furthermore, prediction markets are getting more and more integrated. NHL has closed a multi-year licensing agreement with both Kalshi and Polymarket which puts pressure on traditional sportsbook companies, clashing decentralized models head to head with centralized, untransparent, and more expensive counterparts. One of those players, DraftKings, has integrated Polymarket as a clearinghouse for their upcoming prediction markets product.
