Common Ground - Issue #601 Thursday, January 8th 2026 08:25AM
The Focus
Cross-border payments have always exposed the limits of coordination.
For decades, financial infrastructure has been built nationally and connected internationally through exception handling. Each jurisdiction added rules, controls, and interpretations designed to protect local systems. The result was not fragility, but friction — visible only when value needed to move across borders at scale.
Stablecoins entered this environment with an implicit promise: fewer intermediaries, faster settlement, and programmable logic. Yet their adoption has advanced unevenly. Not because the instruments lacked utility, but because they inherited the same fragmentation that shapes the broader payments ecosystem.
What has changed recently is not market appetite, nor technical capability, but posture. Regulatory initiatives on both sides of the Atlantic are beginning to acknowledge that unilateral frameworks are insufficient for assets designed to operate across jurisdictions. Oversight that stops at the border simply shifts risk rather than containing it.
This moment is less about convergence than recognition. Recognition that predictability matters more than permissiveness. Recognition that cross-border use cases demand coordination before scale. And recognition that regulatory clarity, when designed with equivalence in mind, can lower operational risk without flattening innovation.
The implications extend beyond stablecoins themselves. Alignment influences how institutions allocate capital, how fintechs design infrastructure, and how compliance is embedded into products from inception rather than retrofitted later. It also reshapes who can participate. When rulebooks stop diverging, entry barriers fall quietly.
None of this resolves the remaining questions around governance, supervision, or systemic impact. But it does suggest a shift in how those questions are being approached — less as isolated national challenges, more as shared design constraints.
The article below examines how recent initiatives in the U.K. and U.S. may shape that trajectory, and what coordinated regulatory intent could mean for the next phase of cross-border stablecoin adoption.
Read the full article:
How U.K. and U.S. initiatives could unlock the next wave of cross-border stablecoin innovation - by Krishna Subramanyan
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