Financial services giant Fiserv to launch a stablecoin on Solana

Fiserv, one of the leading financial services providers, will offer a new payment stack through a native Solana stablecoin. The FIUSD asset will use the infrastructure of Paxos and Circle to build payment gateways for business clients. 

Fiserv, one of the leading providers for payment gateways, will launch a Solana-based stablecoin. The new asset, FIUSD, will be tailored to institutional usage, and it will be a part of Fiserv’s larger digital asset platform. 

Solana will be the first blockchain to host FIUSD

Initially, FIUSD will launch on Solana, while Fiserv announced it would explore partnerships with other public blockchains. Solana already carries USDC, relying on the fully regulated stablecoin for worldwide acceptance and trading access. The chain carries over 11B in stablecoin liquidity, mostly used for crypto native trading.

Fiserv’s move follows the advancement of the US Genius Act, offering more favorable regulations for stablecoins. Other payment companies like Stripe or large tech corporations have also explored the addition of stablecoins to their stack. 

“With our scale, reach, and technology leadership, Fiserv is uniquely positioned to advance stablecoin-powered payments and help democratize access to blockchain financial services. Together with our other cloud-native banking and merchant platforms, we believe FIUSD will provide our clients with the efficiency and optionality they need to thrive in the evolving banking and payments ecosystem,” said Takis Georgakopoulos, COO of Fiserv.

FIUSD will be tailored to the needs of 10,000 financial institutional clients and millions of merchant locations. 

Fiserv’s stablecoin will be able to carry a part of the $90B in annual transactions, due to the asset’s speed and scalability. It also announced that the new stablecoin will not add to processing costs for clients. 

Following the stablecoin announcement, FI traded at $163.38, in the middle of its range for the past 12 months. 

Fiserv to offer stablecoins to institutional clients

The FIUSD stablecoin will target the needs of large-scale institutional clients and use Paxos’s fully regulated approach to issue and distribute the asset. The partnership arrives just days after the launch of Paxos Labs, a platform for creating third-party branded stablecoins.

Circle will further partner with Fiserv to embed the new stablecoin into merchant sites and payment gateways, similar to other fintech solutions. 

Fiserv’s stablecoin was announced soon after JP Morgan Chase patented its own JPMD stablecoin for large-scale clients with bank deposits. Unlike JP Morgan, FIUSD will work directly for live payments, instead of running a sandbox program. 

Similar to JP Morgan Chase, Fiserv will also explore the offerings of tokenized deposits, which differ from stablecoins in that they reflect balances in the bank’s own books. Tokenized deposits can give banks more flexibility in asset transfers. 

Stablecoins have been proposed as a tool for 24/7 transfers and for streamlining business processes where other tools are unavailable.

Stablecoins as a whole have expanded to a new peak of $247.2B, encompassing a mix of tokens backed by US treasuries, bank deposits, or by other crypto assets. Stablecoins remain a key payment tool and are now more widely used by online merchants.