The firms behind the dollar tokens

Two issuer strategies

Issuers split into two businesses that happen to print a dollar-shaped token.

The first keeps a balance sheet. It takes dollars, buys cash and bills (or crypto, or a hedge), and keeps the reserve yield. Circle, Tether, Sky, Ethena, Ripple and World Liberty Financial sit here. The second rents the mint. A regulated trust issues the token; a brand puts its name on it and owns the customer. Paxos does this for PayPal and for the Global Dollar Network. Agora sells a white-label version of the same idea under a Bermuda licence.

Issuer-as-a-service is that second model: the firm that holds the reserve and mints the token is not the brand the holder sees. PayPal's PYUSD is issued by Paxos Trust Company. If the brand and the issuer ever part, the holder discovers which of the two names was doing the legal work.

Circle is a public company, listed on the NYSE from 5 June 2025, issuing USDC. On 4 September 2026 DefiLlama put USDC at 74.46 bn USD. A 10 September reading on the same dashboard was 74.26 bn USD. Circle keeps most of the reserve interest: the knowledge base records 95% of revenue as reserve interest. It then pays a distribution share to Coinbase under a collaboration agreement dated 18 August 2023. The Polish edition's 2024 figure for that share is 908 mn USD. Circle's neighbour is Tether. Same fiat-backed construction, different book, different supervisor, different distribution. Circle collected licences (NYDFS BitLicense 2015, French EMI 2024, OCC national trust charter in 2026). Tether did not.

Tether issues USDT from an El Salvador base, after the January 2025 DASP licence. On 4 September 2026 DefiLlama put USDT at 183.34 bn USD; on 10 September, 183.38 bn USD. The buffer on that book includes gold and bitcoin, which sit outside GENIUS Act's eligible-reserve list, the stated reason a separate USAT token is being built through Anchorage Digital Bank rather than putting USDT itself through the federal box. Chapter 3 has the reserve composition. This chapter only needs the neighbour test: Circle's book is cash and a Treasury fund under US and EU licences; Tether's book is larger, more mixed, and offshore, with a second token aimed onshore.

Sky, formerly MakerDAO, rebranded in 2024. It is not a company in Circle's sense. USDS is minted against crypto vaults, tokenized Treasuries, and a swap window into USDC. On 4 September 2026 the Polish edition's DefiLlama read puts USDS at 6.60 bn USD; USDS plus leftover DAI together were 11.4 bn USD. A Peg Stability Module is a contract that swaps the protocol's dollar token 1:1 for another dollar token, here USDC, so arbitrage can defend the peg without touching the crypto vaults. About 35 to 38% of Sky's USDS reserve sits in USDC through that module. On 11 March 2023, when USDC printed about 0.87 USD, DAI printed about 0.88 USD, because the module that made arbitrage cheap was also a pipe. The DAO's flagship token depends on the centralized competitor it was built to route around. Whether USDS or DAI is a GENIUS Act payment stablecoin is unresolved as of September 2026. This series does not issue a verdict.

Ethena's USDe launched 19 February 2024. It holds a long spot position against a short perpetual futures position and calls the result delta-neutral. On 4 September 2026 DefiLlama put USDe at 4.28 bn USD, down from an October 2025 peak the Polish edition records at about 14.7 bn USD. USDe is a hedged derivative, not a fiduciary reserve. It is not a US payment stablecoin under the GENIUS Act definition in chapter 1, so the statutory yield ban does not formally apply to it. Germany's BaFin banned public USDe sales and forced Ethena's local entity to shut, the third issuer pushed out of the EU in that telling. sUSDe is a wrapper beside USDe, not USDe itself.

Paxos, founded 2012 as itBit and renamed Paxos Trust Company in 2015 under an NYDFS limited-purpose trust charter, is the other pole. It issues PYUSD for PayPal (launched 7 August 2023) and USDG for the Global Dollar Network (launched 4 November 2024 with Anchorage, Bullish, Galaxy, Kraken, Nuvei and Robinhood). On 4 September 2026 the Polish edition puts PYUSD at 3.00 bn USD; on 10 September DefiLlama put it at about 2.80 bn USD and USDG at about 3.25 bn USD. Both dates stay. Paxos formerly issued BUSD. OCC conversion to a national trust was announced by Paxos as approved 12 December 2025; a secondary source dates a conditional batch, with Circle and Ripple, to December 2024. Both dates stay.

PayPal is the brand on those Paxos rails, not a second reserve. It serves PayPal and Venmo users from August 2023, funds its own rewards from its own margin rather than from the reserve, and sits in Mastercard's settlement set. When the rewards campaign ended, PYUSD supply fell from a first-quarter 2026 peak around 4.08 to 4.1 bn USD to 3.00 bn USD in September in the Polish edition. Part of that supply was bought with an incentive.

Ripple's RLUSD began trading 17 December 2024, issued through Standard Custody & Trust Company, a New York limited-purpose trust Ripple acquired in June 2024. On 4 September 2026 DefiLlama put it at 2.40 bn USD; RWA.xyz on 10 September had about 2.37 bn USD. Dominant on the XRP Ledger, BNY Mellon as reserve custodian as of July 2025, Dubai DFSA approval beside the NYDFS charter.

World Liberty Financial's USD1 launched in March 2025. RWA.xyz put the market cap at 4.248 bn USD on 10 September 2026. BitGo provides minting and reserve custody; RWA.xyz's registry instead labels USD1 as "issued by BitGo." The two descriptions both sit here. The risk stack is specific: a disputed Trump-family ownership stake, an HTX address-freeze dispute in June 2026 after the UK sanctioned Huobi Global S.A., and 100 mn USD received from a businessman under money-laundering investigation, reported in August 2026. OCC granted conditional approval on 14 August 2026 for World Liberty Trust Company, National Association; final approval had not been given.

Agora is the smaller rented-rails case. AUSD supply was 273.2 mn USD on 4 September 2026 (RWA.xyz 273,217,942 USD on 10 September), under Agora Bermuda Limited's Digital Assets Business Class F licence, effective 5 September 2025. Public launch around 2 April 2024. White-label, Bermuda, not a household brand.

Infrastructure and custody

Minting a reserved token is copyable. The firms that connect fiat to that token, and the firms that hold the keys to the reserve, are the ones that attracted billion-dollar cheques.

Stripe paid about 1.1 bn USD for Bridge and closed the deal in February 2025, Stripe's largest acquisition. Bridge sells orchestration, issuance, cards and wallets as an API, founded 2022, serving businesses rather than retail. Mastercard agreed to buy BVNK for up to 1.8 bn USD (1.5 bn base plus 300 mn contingent), announced 17 March 2026, closed 3 August 2026. BVNK is UK-founded, 2021, a single API for send, receive, convert and spend. Neither firm needs a consumer ticker. Payment companies bought the rails rather than building a USDC rival.

Fireblocks sells MPC wallet infrastructure and states it is not a custodian by default; a separately chartered Fireblocks Trust Company has held a NYDFS limited-purpose trust charter since 14 August 2024. Client counts of 2,400-plus, and a marketing figure of "over 10 trillion" in assets secured, are company claims. This chapter does not treat the trillion figure as an audited AUM. BitGo, by contrast, is a custodian that listed on the NYSE as BTGO on 22 January 2026. Assets-under-custody figures in the research log disagree across sources for similar periods: past 100 bn USD in the first half of 2025 in one report, 90 bn USD at IPO filing in another, about 104 bn USD as of 30 September 2025 in a third. All three stay; none is an audited fact in this material.

Anchorage Digital is the first federally chartered US digital-asset bank, OCC national trust from 19 January 2021, and BlackRock's spot crypto ETF custodian. Tether Ventures invested 100 mn USD in February 2026 at a 4.2 bn USD valuation. Anchorage acquired Mountain Protocol on 12 May 2025 and wound USDM down. An OCC consent order for BSA/AML deficiencies, 21 April 2022, was terminated in August 2025.

Zodia Custody is the bank-backed counterpoint: Standard Chartered, SBI Holdings, Northern Trust among named shareholders, UK FCA and Luxembourg CSSF registrations, five offices. No dollar AUM figure and no dated funding-round amounts were located. That absence is the fact.

Cantor Fitzgerald sits in a third relationship: not a licensed crypto custodian in this material, custodian of the US Treasuries backing USDT since 2021, and a reported 5% Tether shareholder from November 2024. The firm that stores the bills is also on the issuer's cap table.

Distribution

Coinbase sits in two layers at once. It holds more than 25% of USDC's circulating supply in its own products, in the knowledge-base figure used here, and also custodies 300 bn USD of third-party assets in that same source. The 18 August 2023 collaboration agreement with Circle pays Coinbase on USDC held in Coinbase products plus a share of residual economics on USDC held elsewhere. Exact 2025 dollar amounts were not retrieved from Circle's 10-K exhibit, which redacts percentage tiers. Coinbase is why Circle's reserve interest does not equal Circle's keep.

Binance issues nothing. It distributed BUSD until the NYDFS halt, then promoted FDUSD (First Digital, Hong Kong, launched 29 May 2023), then added USD1 pairs on 11 December 2025 and committed to converting remaining Binance-peg BUSD collateral into USD1. On 10 September 2026 CoinMarketCap put leftover BUSD at 34.42 mn USD and FDUSD at 329.49 mn USD. Distribution without issuance is a layer, not a missing issuer.

Visa's stablecoin settlement reached a 3.5 bn USD annualized run rate as of 30 November 2025, USDC over Solana for named bank partners Cross River Bank and Lead Bank, with a US bank launch dated 16 December 2025. Mastercard's Multi-Token Network, from a 28 June 2023 Hong Kong pilot, expanded on 3 June 2026 to six named stablecoins (USDC, PYUSD, USDG, USDP, RLUSD, SoFiUSD) across eight chains. Visa settled one issuer's token inside VisaNet. Mastercard bought BVNK and listed six tokens. Different widths, same job: settlement, not issuance.

Banks enter from the side

Banks prefer a tokenized deposit to a public stablecoin. Chapter 1 already split those instruments: a tokenized deposit is the same bank claim on new rails; a stablecoin is a new private liability. JPMorgan's JPM Coin, ticker JPMD, is a permissioned deposit token, live on Base since 12 November 2025 in the series' dating, expanded to Canton on 7 January 2026. It is not a stablecoin and is not fungible with another bank's deposit. A consortium owned by The Clearing House, including JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, plans a tokenized-deposit network for early 2027, explicitly not a stablecoin. A May 2025 WSJ report of talks toward a joint bank stablecoin is a separate, earlier story; the 2026 product that has a date is the deposit network.

Société Générale-FORGE is the bank that did issue. EURCV launched in April 2023 (The Block); SG-FORGE's own page also marks 1 July 2024 against MiCA inception. USDCV launched in June 2025, 25 June on SG-FORGE's product page, 10 June in The Block, making Société Générale "the first major European bank to launch a U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin" in that reporting. On 10 September 2026 SG-FORGE's dashboard put EURCV at 165.6 mn EUR and USDCV at 12.5 mn USD. MiCA EMT, French EMI, a bank on the hook rather than a nonbank partner.

Who disappeared, and why

The empty tickers are the same weight as the live ones. Five names recur.

BitUSD launched on BitShares on 21 July 2014, crypto-collateralized against the chain's own BTS token at 2:1. When BTS fell in 2018, BitUSD went into global settlement on 25 November 2018. The peg did not return. Collateral that moves with the token it secures is not collateral. Chapter 2 is the narrative; the lesson here is the ending.

NuBits presented on 23 September 2014 as a two-token seigniorage design. It broke twice: a three-month gap from May and June 2016, and a second break in March 2018 that printed 0.25 USD and ended the project. Same family as Terra, smaller.

Terra/UST is the large version. UST's April 2022 peak is 17.5 or 18.7 bn USD depending on the read date. The May collapse is recorded as more than 40 bn USD in one set of sources and 45–60 bn USD in others that count UST and LUNA together. All three figures stay. The sister token was the reserve. There was no independent pile.

BUSD was about 16 bn USD, third-largest, when NYDFS told Paxos on 13 February 2023 to stop minting, over due diligence on the Binance relationship, not over reserve quality. The halt took effect 21 February 2023. Holders could redeem through February 2024 or convert to USDP. Brand-issuer risk, in one order. Paxos is still here. The Binance ticker is not.

The USDX cluster is November 2025. Stream Finance disclosed a loss of about 93 mn USD in off-chain strategies on 4 November 2025. xUSD lost about 77% of its peg in hours. Elixir's deUSD fell 98%, from 1 USD to below 0.02 USD, because Elixir had lent Stream about 65% of its own collateral. USDX followed. About 285 mn USD of linked debt sat in the cluster. None of the three recovered a peg in the period this material covers. BitUSD 2018 rebuilt inside DeFi.

Mountain Protocol's USDM is a sixth empty ticker with a cleaner death. Anchorage acquired it on 12 May 2025 and wound it down in three phases: minting stopped immediately, rewards ended by 11 July, primary-market operation ended 22 August 2025, leftover reserves moved into a Uniswap USDM/USDC pool. No default, no hack. A going-concern Treasury-backed token became a pool claim, then not a primary-market product.

Silvergate's SEN and Signature's Signet, closed in the same March 2023 week as SVB, are the banking-rail version of disappearance. Circle had to move mint and redeem onto BNY Mellon in an emergency. Prime Trust and Fortress Trust, 2023, are the custody version. Those layers fail without a depeg print.