U.S. Bank has completed a live cross-border payment using its own dollar-backed stablecoin, moving funds between the bank’s entities in North America and Europe over the Stellar blockchain. The transaction, announced Tuesday, makes the Minneapolis-based lender one of the first major US banks to push a proprietary stablecoin through a public network rather than a permissioned ledger.
The pilot tested the full lifecycle of the token, which the bank calls USBDC. That includes minting, payment redemption, freezing and clawback, the controls a regulated issuer needs before the product can touch real client money. U.S. Bank said the run also validated its internally built Digital Asset Platform, the layer it uses to issue and manage tokenized assets while keeping them connected to core finance, risk, compliance and operations systems.
A bank token on a public chain
Most bank experiments with tokenized money have stayed inside closed networks. USBDC is different in that it lives on Stellar, an open blockchain pitched at institutional payments with near-instant settlement and sub-cent transaction costs. The bank framed the choice as a way to bridge gaps in global banking with around-the-clock capability, a pitch that has become common among custody banks as stablecoin legislation settles into place in Washington.
Gunjan Kedia, U.S. Bank’s chair and chief executive, said the pilot shows the bank can accelerate global cash management and money movement. Jamie Walker, who leads digital assets at the bank, described the test as a step in a broader strategy aimed at client problems rather than technology demonstrations. Both executives emphasized that the bank intends to keep the usual controls in place even when the rail is a public network.
“This live pilot demonstrates our ability to accelerate global cash management and money movement capabilities,” said Gunjan Kedia, chairman and chief executive officer at U.S. Bank.
What the pilot actually tested
The bank listed the specific functions it exercised: minting new tokens, redeeming them for cash, freezing balances and clawing back transfers. Those last two matter most for a regulated issuer. A bank token that cannot be frozen in a sanctions or fraud scenario would never clear a compliance review, so building the controls in from the start is a condition of doing this at all, not an optional extra.
The pilot also served as a test of U.S. Bank’s Digital Asset Platform, the internal system that handles issuance, management and movement of tokenized assets. The bank said the platform lets traditional banking infrastructure interact with blockchain networks, which is the unglamorous plumbing work that determines whether any of this reaches production. Reconciliation between an on-chain ledger and a bank’s core systems is where most tokenization projects stall.
Future applications under exploration include liquidity management, collateral mobility and cross-border treasury operations. Those are the bread-and-butter jobs of a corporate treasury desk, and they are where bank executives have argued tokenized money earns its keep, since settlement that once took days through correspondent chains can compress to minutes. A treasurer who can move collateral between regions at midnight on a Sunday, with finality, has a genuinely different operating model from one who cannot.
The work builds on an existing relationship with the Stellar Development Foundation. Stellar has positioned itself as a rail for regulated financial institutions, and the foundation has signed similar pilots with other issuers. The network processes stablecoin transfers at a fraction of a cent, which matters when the use case is high-volume corporate settlement rather than retail speculation. Stellar’s design, with short settlement times and low fees, has made it a default choice for payment pilots even as Ethereum dominates institutional tokenization elsewhere.
A crowded field
U.S. Bank is not early so much as late to a fast-moving pack. SoFi became the first national bank to run stablecoin settlement across Mastercard rails earlier this month. Citi said Monday it will let corporate clients accept stablecoin payments through Coinbase’s infrastructure with automatic conversion to cash, with Citi acting as the bank of record. Goldman Sachs opened its $100 billion treasury fund to digital-asset firms through the Lynq settlement network without tokenizing the fund at all, a deliberate contrast with BlackRock and Franklin Templeton, which chose tokenized wrappers for similar products.
The pattern across these launches is consistent. Banks are not building consumer crypto apps. They are wiring stablecoins into the corporate payment and treasury functions they already own, where the client never needs to touch a crypto exchange and the token is just a faster version of a wire.
The GENIUS Act, passed in July 2025, remains the operative US framework for payment stablecoins, and the OCC has continued issuing crypto-specific bank charters. That regulatory footing is what separates this wave of bank tokens from the corporate coin projects of earlier years, which mostly died in pilot purgatory after their sponsors lost interest. A bank that can point to a federal framework has a much easier time defending the project internally.
For the stablecoin market, the significance is supply-side. USDT and USDC still dominate circulation, with total stablecoin supply near $270 billion earlier this year and USDT holding roughly two-thirds of it. Bank-issued tokens add competitors that arrive with existing corporate client relationships, regulatory standing and the ability to freeze and claw back funds, features that make compliance teams comfortable and crypto purists uneasy. Whether corporate treasurers actually prefer a bank token over USDC will depend on pricing, and that fight has not started in earnest yet.
U.S. Bank did not announce a commercial launch date. The pilot phase continues as the bank evaluates institutional use cases, and the company said future decisions will depend on client demand and the regulatory picture. The bank serves clients across treasury, payments and custody, which gives it several internal channels through which a product like USBDC could eventually reach production without any retail marketing at all.