SoFi Bank launched its own stablecoin, SoFiUSD, on Thursday, on the public blockchain.
The launch makes good on plans SoFi had alluded to last month when it launched SoFi Crypto, its cryptocurrency trading product for retail customers. The challenger bank said at the time that it had a stablecoin in the works, and that it planned to integrate crypto into its lending and infrastructure services.
Thursday’s launch will not only offer SoFiUSD to customers, but will allow SoFi to offer its stablecoin infrastructure to other banks and fintechs. Other banks and fintechs will be able to white-label SoFi’s stablecoin, and those stablecoins will be interchangeable with SoFiUSD, a spokesperson for the company told Banking Dive.
CEO Anthony Noto called blockchain “a technology super cycle that will fundamentally change finance, not just in payments, but across every area of money,” in a prepared statement Thursday.
“With SoFiUSD, we’re using the infrastructure we’ve built over the last decade and applying it to real-world challenges in financial services,” Noto said.
“Companies today struggle with slow settlement, fragmented providers, and unverified reserve models,” he added. “SoFi is helping address these gaps by combining our regulatory strength as a national bank with transparent, fully reserved on-chain technology to provide a safer and more efficient way for partners to move funds,” he said.
SoFi said it’s the first national bank to launch a stablecoin on the public blockchain. JPMorgan Chase and Société Générale have launched stablecoins, but JPMorgan’s is private, and SocGen is headquartered in France.
SoFiUSD is being built first on the ethereum blockchain, with plans to expand cross-chain overtime, the spokesperson told Banking Dive.
Since the passing of the Genius Act, which put forth a regulatory framework for stablecoins, other banks including Citi and PNC have announced plans to step into the stablecoin space through partnerships with Coinbase’s crypto-as-a-service arm.
In its first move to implement Genius Act provisions, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. board voted Tuesday to issue a proposed rule that would implement procedures and application provisions for FDIC-supervised banks to issue payment stablecoins through a subsidiary.
The agency also acknowledged “significant uncertainty” about how many of its roughly 2,700 supervised banks would pursue payment stablecoin issuance or other stablecoin activities as the market develops. The FDIC assumed that 10 would file an application each year, on average, in its analysis.
