June extended the institutional convergence that has defined the year, but the centre of gravity has shifted towards stablecoins. The month's defining event was the launch of OpenUSD, a revenue-sharing stablecoin backed by more than 140 of the largest names in payments and finance, an arrangement widely read as a direct threat to Circle. Around it, the largest US banks moved to defend their deposit base with a shared tokenised network of their own, the tokenisation of public equities and private shares became a live commercial product rather than a pilot, and the perpetual futures opening we covered at the end of May hardened into an outright legal confrontation between CME and the CFTC.
The headline development was the unveiling of Open USD (OUSD), a new stablecoin launched by the Open Standard consortium with participation from more than 140 companies. The roster reads like a cross-section of global finance and technology. Some of the notable names include Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover on the payments side, BlackRock, BNY and Standard Chartered among the institutions, Google, Shopify and IBM in technology, and Coinbase, Bybit, OKX, MetaMask, Ripple and Galaxy representing crypto. What makes OpenUSD unique is its economic model. Although, we have seen this model deployed before with the Global Dollar Network and their stablecoin USDG, but this time with bigger partners at the table. Businesses will be able to mint and redeem the token without fees or volume limits, and most of the income generated by its reserves will be distributed back to the participating businesses after a small management fee, with governance shared across partners rather than concentrated in a single issuer. The token is expected to go live later this year.
The market read the announcement as an existential challenge to Circle. Circle's model depends on retaining the reserve income that OpenUSD proposes to hand back to its partners. Still, it should be acknowledged that OpenUSD still faces an uphill battle for adoption. Circle has reached significant liquidity depth which has begetted more liquidity. Furthermore, Circle has been laying down the necessary plumbing and infrastructure to ensure seamless UX. The extent of commitments of this partnership and initial consortium is not still fully clear. Time will tell. In the meantime, Circle spent the month reinforcing its own position. It expanded its partnership with BNY so that institutional clients can now custody, mint and burn USDC directly through the bank, making USDC the first supported asset on BNY's Digital Asset Custody platform. It also debuted cirBTC on Ethereum, a wrapped bitcoin product aimed squarely at Coinbase's foothold in that market.
The banks, meanwhile, moved on a front of their own. America's largest lenders, including JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citigroup, are preparing a shared tokenised deposit network through what they call The Clearing House. Its launch is targeted for the first half of 2027. The network is designed to keep customer funds inside the regulated banking system while offering the round-the-clock settlement speed that has made stablecoins attractive. It is the clearest institutional expression yet of the deposit-flight fears that drove Jamie Dimon's opposition to the CLARITY Act, which we covered last month.
The activity was not confined to the US. Japan's three largest banks, MUFG, Mizuho and SMBC, established a council to develop a jointly issued stablecoin, with a launch targeted by the end of 2026. MoneyGram launched its dollar-backed MGUSD on Stellar, issued through Stripe-owned Bridge with contracts from M0 and wallet infrastructure from Fireblocks, and separately became a Solana validator, its third network after Tempo and Midnight. Mastercard expanded its settlement capabilities to include USDC, PYUSD and RLUSD, enabling intraday, weekend and holiday settlement across multiple chains. On the regulatory side, the Federal Reserve proposed a rule requiring stablecoin issuers to maintain a customer identification program which would significantly change how stablecoin issuers operate today. Right now, this rule is open for debate, and left unclear whether this requirement would become an official ruling, yet.
The CFTC advisory that opened a domestic path for crypto perpetual futures, which we covered at the very end of May, provoked incumbent backlash. CME's chief executive confirmed the exchange's plans to sue the CFTC, arguing that under the Dodd-Frank Act the products the agency approved as futures are in fact swaps, and that treating them as futures sidesteps the requirements that govern the swaps market. The dispute over whether perpetuals are futures or swaps also surfaced around Kalshi's crypto perpetuals, and it now sits at the centre of how the most liquid segment of the market will be regulated onshore. Although its relevance is mostly for regulated onshore markets, it does raise a question what the second-order effects will be for unregulated offshore perpetuals exchanges, such as Hyperliquid. Regardless, regulated established parties such as Coinbase launched pre-IPO perpetual futures starting with SpaceX.
Prediction markets, meanwhile, had a standout month. Even more, Charles Schwab has launched yes-or-no binary options on the S&P 500 with Cboe. On the back of the world cup, Polymarket's volume jumped roughly 300% while Kalshi set open interest records, Kalshi entered early IPO talks with investment banks, and Galaxy Digital opened an institutional over-the-counter prediction-market desk, executing a $10 million trade tied to the passage of the CLARITY Act with the hedge fund Arca at launch. The growth came with scrutiny, as the Wall Street Journal reported that Polymarket had paid creators to stage fake winning bets on dummy sites, a reminder that the integrity questions around these venues are scaling as fast as the volumes.
The Ethereum Foundation concluded a months-long restructuring, emerging with a new five-cluster operational structure and roughly 20% fewer staff, or 54 people. The clusters span the protocol, access, user, community and institutional layers, supported by dedicated operations and management functions. The protocol cluster sits at the core, tasked with hardening the base layer while advancing post-quantum security, zkEVM development and L1 privacy, the same priorities that have anchored the roadmap all year. The access layer adopts a standard requiring that a credible intermediary-free alternative always exists for any intermediated path, while the community cluster is explicitly charged with differentiating the Foundation from what it called "zero-sum financial crypto" and "corpo-compromised crypto." The institutional layer, meanwhile, formalises the Foundation's engagement with the banks, enterprises and governments now moving on-chain.
In parallel, a group of prominent former Foundation researchers launched Ethlabs, a nonprofit backed by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin alongside the two largest ETH treasury firms, BitMine and SharpLink. Its goal is to prepare the network for institutional adoption at scale, focusing on what large allocators need to move on-chain. Taken together, the two moves mark Ethereum's pivot from internal restructuring into a focused delivery phase, with a leaner Foundation on one side and a treasury-backed institutional vehicle on the other, pushing a more focused effort.
Range, a stablecoin compliance startup, raised $8.3 million. The company provides a unified platform for firms operating across both stablecoins and fiat, and counts Circle, the Solana Foundation, Stellar, Squads and Jupiter among its clients. Its two core products are Unify, a real-time system of record that consolidates bank accounts, custodians, wallets and exchanges into a single ledger, and Protect, a pre-execution control layer that screens on-chain transactions for sanctions, fraud and policy violations before they settle. Range says it tracks 99.41% of all stablecoin payments and tens of billions of dollars in monthly volume, with Unify protecting more than $30 billion in customer assets across integrations with over 10,000 banks, custodians and wallets. Its raise lands in the middle of the stablecoin buildout described above, as the compliance layer that institutional issuance will increasingly depend on.
On the prediction market front, Polysights raised $1.5 million in a pre-seed round. The platform provides AI-powered surveillance for prediction markets, using wallet clustering and anomaly detection to flag suspicious activity, and its data underpinned Bloomberg's reporting that roughly $45 million in bets tied to the Iran conflict were flagged as anomalous on Polymarket. With Congress already probing Polymarket and Kalshi over insider-trading concerns and volumes climbing on the World Cup, the surveillance layer Polysights is building has become more relevant. Adjacent, meanwhile, closed a $2.5 million pre-seed round to build an independent index and benchmarking provider for prediction markets and event contracts, launching its first family with the RED and BLUE indices that track forward expectations of political control in the US
Finally, Maple deepened its institutional lending footprint through a partnership with Kraken, building an on-chain warehouse facility to power Kraken's over-the-counter lending program, through which institutional and wealthy clients borrow USDC against BTC, ETH and other collateral. The structure mirrors the asset-backed securities long used in traditional credit markets: Maple provides senior financing through a bankruptcy-remote special purpose vehicle, while Kraken acts as loan originator, servicer and junior lender, taking the first-loss position.
