September was a defining month for stablecoins. Tether rolled out USAT, its GENIUS Act–compliant stablecoin, and is reportedly raising funds at a $500 billion valuation, putting it on par with global tech leaders. At the same time, Stripe introduced Tempo, a payment-focused blockchain designed for large-scale financial services.
September saw headlines revolving around stablecoin adoption and positive regulatory developments, as a result of this we saw an increase in institutional interest in digital assets. On the stablecoin side, Tether is at the forefront of the news. In light of the recent GENIUS Act developments, the US treasury has been taking their next steps by filing a request for public input on innovative methods to detect illicit activity involving digital assets. Meanwhile, Tether has announced USAT, a GENIUS Act compliant stablecoin. This is needed because their current stablecoin, USDT, is not GENIUS Act compliant. Bo Hines, Trump’s former Executive Director of the White House Crypto Council, has been named as CEO of Tether’s new US arm to lead its expansion. Alongside this, there have been rumours of Tether raising as much as $20 billion in private placement at a $500 billion valuation. This puts Tether at a similar valuation to the ones of OpenAI and SpaceX which are leaders within their own respective industries. Showing the market acknowledging the consistent adoption and future growth of stablecoins.
Zooming in on the stablecoin landscape besides Tether, fintech giant Stripe, in partnership with Paradigm, has introduced a payments-focused blockchain Tempo. The blockchain is currently live on private testnet, and is tailored for high-scale real world financial service applications. Tempo is already working with major firms such as Anthropic, Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, Nubank, OpenAI, Revolut, and Shopify. Tempo is just another example of Stripe’s proactive involvement within the crypto sphere, adding Tempo to its already existing crypto product offerings alongside Bridge and Privy. Diving deeper into payment infrastructure, in partnership with Coinbase, Cloudflare, one of the largest content delivery networks worldwide, is launching a x402 protocol. This protocol is meant for machine-to-machine value exchange on the web. It is meant to standardize payment negotiation between websites and automatic agents, powering agentic commerce. Complementary to this, Cloudflare is launching a NET, a US dollar-backed stablecoin, to power these agentic commerce transactions. Although most of the stablecoin developments have been done on the US side, in the EU, at last, nine major European banks have joined forces to launch a euro-denominated stablecoin regulated under the MiCAR. The banks involved are: ING, Banca Sella, KBC, Dankse Bank, DekaBank, UniCredit, SEB, CaixaBank, and Raiffeisen Bank International. This consortium is a reaction, albeit potentially delayed, to the rising dominance of US stablecoins with no widespread EU counterparts. Finally on the stablecoin front outside of the US and EU markets, Moneygram, the ubiquitous send and receive cash network giant, has made US dollar-backed stablecoins and blockchain rails as the digital backbone of its revamped mobile app. This pilot, powered by Circle’s stablecoin USDC and blockchain Stellar, will start in Colombia and later spread to other countries.
Crypto exchanges and crypto service providers have also been an interesting topic of the month. BitGo, a crypto custodian, has filed for an IPO with $4.2 billion in the first half of 2025 revenue. The filing showed a quadrupling in revenue when compared to the same period a year earlier, although the net income for the first half-year in 2025 was only $12.6 million, tightened from $30.9 million same period year prior. On the crypto exchange side, Upbit, the largest South Korean crypto exchange, is set to be acquired by the South Korean internet giant Naver via its payments subsidiary. Across the pond in the US, Kraken has integrated with Legion, a public private-funding platform aiming to democratize access to venture-like opportunities. On top of this, and perhaps more importantly, Kraken has raised $500 million at a valuation of $15 billion. In the latest second quarter, Kraken has generated $411 million in revenue and nearly $80 million in post-EBITDA earnings. This funding is expected to be the last one before the long-announced and long-awaited Kraken IPO. Finally, the FTX estate is expected to distribute $1.6 billion to its creditors.
On the Web3 side, Hyperliquid’s native stablecoin USDH has officially launched, starting the conversions from USDC to USDH from which the revenue will be redirected to buying HYPE tokens. Interestingly enough, Circle, who used to be the biggest stablecoin provider on Hyperliquid and is to be replaced by USDH, is now investing in HYPE and looking to become a validator operator. Also, Circle is exploring various incentivization programs to support HIP3 markets with their stablecoin USDC. This shows Circle is acknowledging the importance of Hyperliquid as a distribution channel for its stablecoin. In the vein of value accrual to native tokens Ethena has announced publicly that fee-switch parameters were met according to its risk-committee. The fee-switch parameters had mandates of having the USDe supply above $6 billion, cumulative lifetime protocol revenue above $250 million, and that USDe is integrated on 4 of top 5 centralized crypto exchanges. Ethena’s latest USDe integration has just enabled that, and already within 5 days amassed more than $2.6 billion in supply. On the DeFi native side, Pendle has launched V1.0 of their latest product Boros. Through Boros, users can have exposure to perpetual funding rates of specific assets without holding the asset itself. This exposure allows traders to hedge their positions more efficiently at a more predictable funding rate while it allows speculators to bet on the increase or decrease of specific funding rates. Quite a substantial development as it will allow sophisticated fund managers to advance their strategies further, on-chain.
Looking closer at the infrastructure layer, the Ethereum foundation has presented an end-to-end privacy roadmap outlining current progress and future plans. The roadmap centers around three areas of focus: a) private writes which focus on making private on-chain actions as cheap and seamless as public ones, b) private reads which enable reading from the blockchain without revealing identity or intent, and c) private proving which makes proof generation and verification fast, private, and accessible. What we can look towards in the short term, Ethereum’s next major fork, Fusaka mainnet upgrade, has been tentatively set for December. Fusaka introduces PeerDAS which enables validators to verify large datasets, known as blobs, by sampling small portions from peer nodes instead of downloading entire datasets. This upgrade also incorporates proposals to increase the block gas limit from 30 million to 150 million units, to support more transactions. Finally, it includes implementation of Verkle Trees to optimize data storage for smaller proof sizes, as well as improvements to the EVM performance and enabling faster smart contract execution.
Finally, some major developments we expect to take place in October are the deadlines for SEC to make their final decision regarding SOL ETFs. This is expected to be around the 16th of October, if approved, SOL ETFs from multiple providers will go live promptly. An approval of an ETF for SOL would indicate the continued embrace of digital assets by the regulatory authorities in the US.
