DFNS’s new “Stablecoin FX” report is the most thorough map we’ve seen of a market everyone assumes exists and almost nobody has actually built.
A Few Things Stood Out
1. Moving dollars and converting currency are two different problems, and only one of them is solved.
Stablecoins have already won the “move value” fight. Visa, Western Union, MoneyGram, and JPMorgan’s clients all use them today. But turning those dollars into pesos, reais, euros, or won still runs at bank speed and bank cost. The report puts it simply: a stablecoin payment just needs a blockchain and two wallets. A stablecoin FX trade needs everything a real currency market needs, dealers willing to take the other side, a price both sides trust, settlement that can’t half-complete, and redemption at par on both ends. That’s a much harder problem, and it’s the one still up for grabs.
2. The people building this market disagree on which missing piece matters most, and that disagreement is worth paying attention to.
The report lays out six things a functioning currency market needs: dealers, clearing, redemption at par, settlement, a shared benchmark, and compliance. Fiat FX has all six. Stablecoin FX has fragments, built by different companies racing to solve different parts of the puzzle. Ubyx and Keyrails are betting the missing piece is clearing infrastructure. Nick argues the opposite, that a clearing house only pays off if you’re also acting as a market maker, and “there’s not enough demand for the non-USD FX yet.”
3. Ask who’s actually holding the reserves.
“Who’s the underlying custodian, and what is the scale of that custodian?” — Nick van Eck
A stablecoin is only as reliable as what’s actually backing it and who’s holding those reserves. It’s why AUSD is backed by reserves managed by VanEck and custodied by State Street, real institutional infrastructure, not a workaround. As stablecoin FX matures, this is the question every treasurer and partner should be asking before they trust a rail with real volume.
Where this leaves us
We share the economics on AUSD with the partners and platforms that use it, instead of keeping the reward for ourselves. If the demand side of this market is really the bottleneck, as the report suggests, that’s the piece we’re betting on.
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