Onchain finance: Payoneer ships stablecoins | Deutsche Bank taps Ripple | Coinbase expands loans
Onchain Finance - Edition 4: Feb 17th - 23rd
Onchain finance had a “shipping week”! Stablecoins showed up where businesses actually move money, asset managers pushed regulated onchain exposure forward, and the rails race accelerated. Meanwhile, crypto credit broadened again as lending support expanded beyond the usual majors.
✔️ Stablecoins moved from “treasury idea” to day-to-day payments UX
✔️ Institutions leaned into onchain rails + regulated wrappers
✔️ Credit + market infrastructure kept filling in the gaps
Ready for the signals? 🔍
🚨 Featured Story of the Week:
Bridge Pushed Stablecoins Toward “Bank-Grade” Infrastructure
Bridge (Stripe-owned stablecoin infrastructure) received conditional OCC approval to organize a federally chartered national trust bank - a major signal that stablecoin plumbing was moving closer to traditional financial supervision.
Simultaneously, Bridge’s rails also showed up in mainstream distribution: Payoneer embedded stablecoin receive/hold/send powered by Bridge inside its global business payments platform.
Why it matters
This is not yet another “stablecoin partnership”- it connected regulated infrastructure + real distribution: Bridge aims to operate under a clear federal framework, while fintechs could ship stablecoin features to millions of businesses without building the stack themselves.
What it signals?
A credible compliance lane is forming: Bridge says the charter path (once fully approved) would let it run stablecoin products under direct federal oversight, covering functions like issuance, custody, orchestration, and reserves management.
Stablecoins are becoming a default fintech feature: Payoneer’s launch plan framed stablecoins as day-to-day operating money for global businesses-receive, hold, send - inside the same platform they already use.
We broke down why Bridge’s conditional OCC trust-bank approval matters industry-wide: stablecoin infrastructure is moving closer to the regulated banking perimeter. It gives enterprises a cleaner compliance and audit path, makes stablecoin rails easier to embed into payouts and treasury workflows, and supports nationwide scale under one federal wrapper, speeding up mainstream adoption. Have a look.
🚀 Startup Spotlight: Brich Hill
Birch Hill is building institutional-grade onchain credit infrastructure for onchain lending and tokenized asset markets, with an emphasis on capital preservation, structured risk controls, governance, and real-time collateral risk monitoring.
This week, Birch Hill raised $2.5M pre-seed in a SAFE round co-led by ParaFi Capital and Castle Island Ventures, with participation from Nascent, FalconX Ventures, JST Digital, and Flowdesk.
Why it looks like early product–market fit: Birch Hill is launching institutionally curated lending strategies on Morpho and plans to expand to additional protocols such as Euler, positioning itself as a “compliant wrapper + risk engine” for institutions that want onchain yield without cowboy risk.
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What’s on the onchain menu today?
🏁 Onchain Highlights: Biggest moves across money, markets, and tokenization
🧩 ‘Byte’ Buzz: Onchain Finance updates, sorted by segment
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Edition 3 brings you the onchain finance stories that shaped how money, markets, and assets moved this week »
Last Week’s Top Onchain Tea!♨️
Stablecoins reached the “last mile” (payouts + business operations)
↳ Payoneer to launch a suite of stablecoin capabilities embedded within the Payoneer platform, powered by Bridge.
↳ Wirex launched stablecoin push-to-card payouts via Visa Direct, enabling stablecoin-funded disbursements to eligible cards globally.
Asset managers brought onchain exposure into regulated products
↳ BlackRock started acquiring ETH to seed its upcoming Ethereum staking ETF.
↳ BNP Paribas AM piloted tokenized money-market fund shares on Ethereum under a permissioned model.
Blockchain settlement rails picked up institutional momentum
↳ Deutsche Bank partnered with Ripple to enhance cross-border payments and settlement via blockchain.
↳ Robinhood’s Layer-2 testnet logged 4M transactions in its first week as it ramped its onchain infrastructure.
Regulated crypto market expanded
↳ Crypto.com received conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to create a national trust bank in the United States.
↳ Coinbase expanded U.S. crypto-backed lending to support XRP, DOGE, ADA, and LTC.
Now, for the ‘byte’-sized onchain buzz -
Onchain Money felt very “payments-native” this week - cards, licences, and machine-to-machine checkout all tightened the loop from onchain balance!
Quantoz became a Visa principal member for stablecoin cards - Quantoz partnered with Visa to issue virtual Visa debit cards for spending e-money and stablecoins, and to act as a BIN sponsor for fintech partners.
↳ Implication: stablecoin spending is sliding into regulated card issuance i.e. principal membership and BIN sponsorship, making “stablecoin accounts” behave like normal card balances.BVNK secured a MiCA CASP licence in Malta -BVNK obtained a MiCA licence from Malta’s MFSA, enabling it to passport regulated crypto-asset services across the EEA.
↳ Implication: Europe is rewarding firms that can run EUR rails + stablecoin settlement inside one compliance wrapper.XRPL shipped x402 payments for AI agents - an x402 “facilitator” went live on XRP Ledger, enabling AI agents to pay per-request using XRP and RLUSD via HTTP 402 “Payment Required.”
↳ Implication: agentic commerce is getting a native checkout pattern (HTTP-native micropayments) that can plug straight into onchain settlement.
Onchain Assets pushed deeper into capital-markets territory - tokenized equity started looking less like a demo and more like market structure.
Figure debuted tokenized stock alongside a $150M secondary offering - Figure launched a tokenized stock product tied to an upsized $150M offering to expand its trading platform and digital-asset services.
↳ Implication: tokenized equity is being packaged with real liquidity events (offerings and distribution), not only tech rails.BitGo + Figure completed first tokenized equity trades on Figure’s ATS - the firms executed blockchain-native equity trades through integrated infrastructure on Figure’s FINRA/SIPC-member Alternative Trading System.
↳ Implication: regulated venues (ATS) are becoming the bridge for tokenized equities to trade with familiar compliance guardrails.
Onchain Markets focused on two institutional basics: 24/7 access and regulated, venue-ready infrastructure.
CME announced 24/7 crypto derivatives trading starting May 29 - CME launched regulated crypto futures and options would trade 24/7 on Globex (pending regulatory review).
↳ Implication: continuous market hours are becoming table-stakes for regulated crypto, narrowing the gap with crypto-native venues.Antier launched a VARA-ready white-label crypto exchange stack for UAE/MENA - Antier introduced a compliance-forward exchange software suite designed for financial institutions entering regulated digital-asset markets under VARA-style requirements.
↳ Implication: exchange infrastructure is getting productized for licensing, making it faster for banks/brokers to launch regulated venues instead of building from scratch.
Onchain Infra was all about interoperability and 24/7 settlement, making movement across chains and between fiat rails less painfu
Enso integrated Chainlink CCIP for cross-chain minting in production: Enso announced live deployments using Chainlink CCIP to move assets cross-chain and deploy them into strategies in a single transaction flow.
↳ Implication: cross-chain execution is shifting from bridges-as-a-risk to composable messaging + atomic execution as a product primitive.Lightspark + Cross River teamed up for 24/7 real-time fiat settlement - the partners combined Lightspark’s Bitcoin-native payments stack with Cross River’s multi-rail banking infrastructure.
↳ Implication: regulated banks are plugging into crypto-native infra to offer always-on settlement without waiting for bank hours.
Onchain Yield got more “asset-manager-grade” - staking yield was being operationalized as a product
Bitwise to acquire staking provider Chorus One to deepen its onchain yield/staking strategy (Chorus One manages billions in staked assets).
↳ Implication: crypto asset managers want native yield capability in-house as staking becomes a core portfolio feature.Canary and Grayscale debuted their SUI ETF withstaking rewards (SUIS) - offering investors direct exposure to the token’s price along with the ability to earn staking rewards.
↳ Implication: ETFs are starting to blend spot exposure + protocol yield, pulling staking into familiar wrappers.
Onchain Lending expanded the collateral and credit toolkit - more ways to finance activity without dragging capital back into slow rails
Voltage launched a USD-settled revolving credit line integrated with Lightning - Voltage Credit let businesses send Lightning-style payments with instant finality, while repaying the facility in USD from a bank account.
↳ Implication: credit is being embedded inside payment rails, letting firms use Bitcoin/Lightning without holding BTC balance-sheet risk.Franklin Templeton and Binance rolled out tokenized MMF shares as off-exchange collateral - eligible institutions could use tokenized money market fund shares as collateral for Binance trading.
↳ Implication: yield-bearing RWAs are becoming prime-broker-style collateral for 24/7 crypto market structure.
And that’s a wrap 👋
We hope you enjoyed this edition of the Onchain Finance!
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