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Stablecoin at $10.61T, South Korea CBDC Live & GENIUS Act Slippage | Jul 13-19
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Stablecoin volume hits $10.61 trillion, South Korea's CBDC goes live in September, and the US GENIUS Act misses its rulemaking deadline — this week's institutional digital finance inflection points, explained. From Citadel's $400M Crypto.com bet to MiCA reshaping Europe's stablecoin market, the shift from theory to infrastructure is accelerating.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Citadel Securities just put four hundred million dollars into Crypto.com, and that single move may tell us more about where institutional finance is heading than anything else this week. The valuation landed at twenty billion dollars.
That context matters when you look at the broader funding picture. The week of July thirteenth through nineteenth saw seventeen blockchain funding events totaling eight hundred and twelve million dollars.
Underneath all of this sits a number that reframes the entire narrative. Monthly on-chain stablecoin volume hit ten point six one trillion dollars in the first half of twenty twenty-six.
South Korea is about to test something no central bank has done at this scale. Project Hangang Phase Two launches in September with nine banks, up to five hundred thousand users, and real government subsidy disbursements through programmable deposit tokens.
The contrast with the United States is stark. The GENIUS Act passed, but Treasury and federal regulators missed the July eighteenth rulemaking deadline.
In Europe, the MiCA transition completed July first, and the immediate effect was the delisting of USDT from major exchanges. Approximately twelve euro-denominated tokens are now authorized across fourteen licensed issuers.
The signal worth carrying into next week is this: institutional capital is moving, infrastructure funding is consolidating, and government digital asset adoption is no longer theoretical. The unresolved variables are US implementation rules, South Korean parliamentary approval, and whether merchant adoption can sustain the stablecoin volume trajectory.
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