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US CBDC Ban Live, Circle's Bank Charter & the Stablecoin Infrastructure Gap
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The US CBDC ban takes effect tonight, Circle wins a federal trust bank charter, and stablecoin last-mile infrastructure startup Infinia closes a $13.5M Series A — here's what it all means for digital finance. Plus: EDX Markets' $76M raise, Norm AI hits unicorn status, and fintech funding collapses 62% week-on-week.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Stablecoins are in hundreds of millions of wallets. They're settling billions in value daily.
That context matters even more given what happened on the regulatory side. The US CBDC ban takes effect tonight, embedded in the twenty-first Century ROAD to Housing Act.
Circle got its answer from regulators too, and it's a significant one. The OCC granted Circle unconditional approval to operate Circle National Trust, making it a federally chartered trust bank focused on digital asset custody.
Two other raises are worth noting for what they tell us about where institutional and enterprise money is going. EDX Markets, the digital asset trading venue backed by traditional finance names, closed a seventy-six million dollar Series C from SBI Holdings, the Japanese financial services group.
Stepping back from individual deals, the broader funding picture deteriorated sharply. Weekly fintech funding landed at three hundred and fifty million dollars across ten deals.
The thread connecting most of this is the same: institutional digital finance is maturing, but the infrastructure still has gaps. Circle's custody approval is real.
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