The line between payments infrastructure and blockchain infrastructure is collapsing. A 60-million-customer remittance giant became a Solana validator today, the Bank of England put a number on how big a stablecoin is allowed to get, and a South Korean bank signed up to replace its wire-transfer rails with onchain settlement. Traditional finance is not adopting crypto cautiously. It is rebuilding its core plumbing.
- MoneyGram becomes an official Solana validator, deepening its multi-chain stablecoin payment strategy
- Bank of England drops individual holding caps and sets a £40 billion issuance ceiling for systemic stablecoins, clearing the way for a 2027 market launch
- South Korea’s Toss Bank and the Solana Foundation agree to pilot stablecoin-based remittances for 15 million customers
- Intercontinental Exchange and OKX launch a 50-50 joint venture to bring tokenized NYSE equities and ICE futures to global crypto users
- Baillie Gifford and BNY put a 118-year-old investment firm’s bond fund on Ethereum and Solana, live today
The day’s throughline is infrastructure. Every story is about the rails: who controls them, what they settle on, and how fast the old guard is moving to own a piece of the new ones.
MoneyGram becomes a Solana validator amid stablecoin payment push
Source: CoinDesk
MoneyGram announced on June 22 that it has become an official validator on the Solana network, helping process and secure transactions on the proof-of-stake chain. The company also joined the Solana Developer Platform alongside Mastercard, Worldpay, and Western Union. The move follows MoneyGram’s June 2 launch of MGUSD, its own dollar-denominated stablecoin issued on Stellar through a partnership with Bridge, and its role as an anchor validator on blockchain payment network Tempo.
CEO Alex Holmes framed the logic clearly: “MoneyGram has spent the past several years integrating blockchain into our payment infrastructure. We believe the future of global money movement will be built on open, interoperable stablecoin rails that anyone, anywhere can access.”
Zypto take: MoneyGram validating Solana while running MGUSD on Stellar is the stablecoin multi-chain strategy in its most concrete form. A payment network with 60 million customers and nearly 500,000 retail locations is not experimenting. It is deciding which blockchains matter for the next decade of money movement and putting infrastructure-level commitments behind those choices.
This matters for how remittance rails evolve. When a validator earns staking rewards, it also gains direct participation in how a network prioritizes and processes transactions. MoneyGram is not just using Solana’s speed for payment throughput. It now has a governance-adjacent stake in the network’s health. That is a different relationship to blockchain than “we accept crypto.”
Zypto is an Official Partner of MoneyGram, activating the USDC to Cash service in Zypto App through MoneyGram’s global network on Stellar. MoneyGram’s decision to deepen its blockchain commitments, becoming a Solana validator while running MGUSD on Stellar, shows a payment network at serious scale making multi-chain infrastructure bets, not dabbling.
Source: CoinDesk
Bank of England drops individual holding caps and sets £40 billion stablecoin ceiling
Source: CoinTelegraph
The Bank of England published its revised stablecoin regulatory framework on June 22, making substantial changes from earlier drafts. The central bank abandoned proposed caps that would have limited individual holdings to £20,000 and corporate holdings to £10 million. In their place, it introduced a single macro-level guardrail: a temporary £40 billion (approximately $50.6 billion) aggregate circulation limit for any single systemic stablecoin.
On reserves, the BoE relaxed requirements further. Issuers may now invest up to 70% of reserves in short-term UK government debt (T-bills under six months). The remaining 30% must sit in non-interest-bearing central bank deposits. Issuers cannot pay interest or dividends to token holders directly, but activity-based rewards such as cashback or loyalty points tied to payment transactions remain explicitly permitted. Regulated stablecoins are expected to launch in the UK in 2027, when the country’s full crypto regulatory framework takes effect.
Zypto take: The holding-cap reversal is the right call, and the BoE knows it. Capping individuals at £20,000 would have made sterling stablecoins functionally unusable for any business with real payment volumes. The industry pushed back hard, the House of Lords backed them, and the central bank listened. That is how regulatory frameworks are supposed to work.
The £40 billion issuance ceiling is the more interesting piece. It signals that the BoE’s primary concern is systemic risk to UK credit provision, not consumer protection per se. A stablecoin large enough to trigger capital flight from the banking system is the tail risk they are managing. That is a legitimate concern, and it is structured sensibly. It is a temporary guardrail, explicitly subject to review, not a permanent limit baked into law.
What the activity-based rewards carveout means in practice: stablecoin issuers can build reward programs around payment activity. That is the product layer that makes stablecoins competitive with card loyalty programs. The UK is deliberately preserving that design space.
Source: CoinTelegraph
South Korea’s Toss Bank pilots stablecoin remittances on Solana
Source: The Crypto Times
South Korea’s Toss Bank signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Solana Foundation on June 19, announced publicly on June 22. The agreement covers a proof-of-concept to evaluate whether stablecoin rails on Solana can support overseas remittances and cross-border settlement for the bank’s 15 million customers. Toss Bank describes it as the first direct strategic cooperation between a South Korean internet-only bank and the Solana Foundation.
The pilot will connect Toss Bank’s existing overseas transfer service to Solana’s network to measure speed, cost, and reliability. The goal is to determine whether a blockchain settlement layer can sit above current banking rails without compromising compliance or service levels. No live product has been announced. This is research-stage work with a defined product path.
Zypto take: Fifteen million banking customers is not a small user base for a remittance pilot. Toss Bank is South Korea’s leading internet-only bank, with a mobile-native customer base, a young demographic, and high international payment demand. The fact that they are looking at Solana rather than traditional SWIFT rails for their rebuilt transfer product is a statement about where the industry’s velocity of development sits.
Stablecoin remittances have the clearest value proposition of any crypto payment use case: the settlement is near-instant, the fees are a fraction of correspondent banking, and there is no need for a bank account at the receiving end. What this pilot tests is the compliance layer: whether a fully regulated Korean banking entity can route international value over a public blockchain and satisfy its AML, travel rule, and reporting obligations simultaneously. If it works, the model scales fast.
For anyone using a multichain wallet to move value across borders today, this is what the mainstream version of that experience looks like when a bank builds it natively.
Source: The Crypto Times
ICE and OKX form a 50-50 joint venture to put tokenized NYSE equities in crypto wallets
Source: Fortune
Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, and crypto exchange OKX announced a 50-50 joint venture on June 22 to build infrastructure for tokenized and digitally native financial products. The venture will operate as a US-registered broker-dealer and futures commission merchant, enabling OKX’s global users to access ICE futures contracts and tokenized versions of NYSE-listed equities.
The joint venture will be co-chaired by former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. ICE invested roughly $200 million in OKX in March at a valuation of approximately $25 billion. The rollout is targeted for the second half of 2026, subject to regulatory approval. OKX’s 120 million global users would gain access to the NYSE’s tokenized equity market as part of the agreement.
Zypto take: The owner of the New York Stock Exchange building a 50-50 venture with a crypto exchange to put tokenized NYSE stocks into digital wallets is not a small move. ICE runs the financial market infrastructure that most of the world’s pension funds, asset managers, and institutions route through. When that entity commits capital and equity ownership to a blockchain-native distribution channel, the direction of travel becomes clear.
Tokenized equities and crypto assets in the same wallet changes the product question from “should I be in crypto or in stocks” to “how do I allocate across both inside one self-custody environment.” That is a much bigger shift than it sounds. The portfolio boundary between the two asset classes disappears at the wallet layer.
Source: Fortune
Baillie Gifford and BNY put a 118-year-old investment firm’s bond fund on Ethereum and Solana
Source: CoinDesk
Baillie Gifford, the Edinburgh-based investment manager founded in 1908, launched the Baillie Gifford Enhanced Yield Fund (BAGEY) on June 22 in partnership with BNY. The fund is a dollar-denominated, actively managed portfolio of short-duration public corporate bonds currently offering approximately 7% yield. It is structured as a UK-regulated Open-Ended Investment Company and issued natively on both Ethereum and Solana, with BNY providing tokenization infrastructure and custody.
According to Theo Golden, head of digital assets at Baillie Gifford, “the blockchain serves as the register of record” for the fund. BNY’s Katey Neate said the launch demonstrates how “tokenisation has moved from concept to real-world application.” The fund is available to eligible investors in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and the Cayman Islands.
Zypto take: A 118-year-old firm that manages roughly $340 billion in assets issuing a bond fund natively on a public blockchain is the RWA story in its most mature form. Baillie Gifford is not a crypto-native business experimenting with tokenization. It is a deeply institutional asset manager concluding that blockchain-based fund infrastructure is good enough for its investors and its compliance obligations.
The detail that matters: the blockchain is the register of record, not a parallel record alongside a traditional back office. That is a different architectural commitment than most tokenization pilots, which maintain off-chain registers with a blockchain mirror. It also means settlement, transfers, and ownership verification happen onchain by default.
Zypto supports real-world assets within Zypto App. As tokenized funds like BAGEY become more widely available, the infrastructure to hold, transfer, and manage those assets in a self-custody environment becomes more relevant: not for speculation, but for genuine portfolio participation.
Source: CoinDesk
Key Takeaways
- Traditional payments infrastructure is not just adopting crypto. It is becoming blockchain infrastructure. MoneyGram validating Solana and Toss Bank piloting stablecoin rails signal that the settlement layer is changing from the inside out.
- Regulation is maturing in a usable direction. The Bank of England’s holding-cap reversal and the US GENIUS Act rulemaking both landed this week on the side of workable frameworks, not prohibitive ones.
- Tokenized finance is moving off the whiteboard. A bond fund issued natively on Ethereum and Solana, backed by one of the world’s largest custodians, is real-world asset tokenization as a live product, not a roadmap item.
- The wallet is becoming the universal account. When NYSE equities, bond funds, stablecoins, and crypto assets all settle onchain, the distinction between a crypto wallet and a financial account starts to dissolve.
- For anyone already using crypto for real-world participation, whether for payments, remittances, or savings, the infrastructure underpinning that activity just got significantly deeper roots.
