[Monthly Crypto] 2026.07.06
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
1️⃣ Payments and Banking Giants Back "Open USD," a Neutral Shared Stablecoin
On June 30 a group of payments, banking, tech and crypto heavyweights — including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, BlackRock, BNY, Coinbase and Ripple — unveiled Open USD (OUSD), a stablecoin run by an independent operator called Open Standard rather than any single issuer. The project promises fee-free minting and redemption with no volume caps, reserve earnings shared among partners and governance by a partner board, positioning itself as neutral payments infrastructure ahead of a launch later in 2026.
[Decrypt]
2️⃣ Ethereum Institutional Nonprofit Launches to Court Wall Street
On July 1 a new independent nonprofit called Ethereum Institutional launched to accelerate institutional adoption of Ethereum, backed by Standard Chartered, Bitwise, Etherealize, Aztec Labs and Spark. The group aims to close what Standard Chartered called a "longstanding communications gap" between Ethereum and the world's largest financial institutions through education, advocacy and strategic communications.
[CoinDesk]
3️⃣ Robinhood Chain Goes Live on Mainnet With 24/7 Tokenized Stock Trading
Around July 2 Robinhood launched the public mainnet of Robinhood Chain, an Ethereum Layer-2 built on Arbitrum's tech stack, with Uniswap among its day-one partners. The launch enables 24/7 trading of tokenized US stocks and adds Lighter-powered perpetuals, with agentic crypto trading planned to follow.
4️⃣ Standard Chartered Becomes First Global Systemic Bank to Offer USDC Minting
On July 2 Standard Chartered became the first Global Systemically Important Bank (G-SIB) to offer institutional clients direct USDC minting and redemption through a partnership with Circle, with no separate Circle accounts required. The service launches out of the Dubai International Financial Centre and brings onchain settlement, treasury and liquidity management inside the bank's existing risk and compliance frameworks, with global expansion planned.
5️⃣ ESMA Adds 37 Firms to MiCA Register in First Wave After EU Deadline
Following the close of MiCA's transitional period on July 1, EU regulator ESMA added 37 firms to its register of licensed crypto-asset service providers in the first major authorization wave under the fully enforced regime. The batch — which includes Standard Chartered securing MiCA and e-money licenses via its Luxembourg entity — signals Europe moving from grandfathered national rules into a single, bloc-wide licensing framework.