Upcoming Stablecoins

Roughrider Coin

ROUGHRIDER

North Dakota's Bank of North Dakota, the only state-owned bank in the US, cleared its biggest hurdle on March 25 when the Industrial Commission unanimously approved the bank-to-bank use case for Roughrider Coin. Ten local banks have already expressed pilot interest, CEO Don Morgan rates the risk as 'low to moderate,' and the project is expected to be cost-neutral to the state. The coin runs on Solana via Fiserv's infrastructure, backed by USD reserves and 93-day Treasury notes under the GENIUS Act's state-issued stablecoin exemption. It won't be publicly tradeable. This is pure interbank settlement plumbing, voluntary for ND banks and credit unions. September 2026 remains the target, pending Fiserv contract finalization. As the second US state stablecoin after Wyoming's FRNT, Roughrider represents an emerging pattern: state treasurers discovering that blockchain settlement is cheaper than correspondent banking.

Fiserv USD

FIUSD

FIUSD is Fiserv's pre-launch Solana dollar stablecoin built on Circle and Paxos infrastructure: a payments-rails play with four-partner coordination risk. Fiserv wants to make stablecoins just another rail in the infrastructure it already runs for roughly 10,000 financial institution clients and six million merchant locations, so FIUSD is less a single stablecoin and more a platform: Paxos handles issuance, Circle provides ecosystem interop, PayPal enables interoperability, and Mastercard connects the payments network. The centralized-dependent classification captures this architecture accurately; FIUSD depends on an entire constellation of custody and redemption partners, any of which could become a bottleneck. After the original end-of-2025 target slipped, CEO Mike Lyons said at June's Bernstein conference, "FIUSD goes live in July." July has now come and gone without a public launch confirmation, leaving Pharos still tracking the token as pre-launch. The interbank settlement pilot with Huntington and Bank of North Dakota remains the opening act, with the white-labeled Roughrider Coin queued behind it. The real test is whether four fintech giants can ship on one timeline.

Qivalis Euro

QEUR

QEUR is a pre-launch MiCA-oriented euro stablecoin from a banking consortium that ballooned to 37 institutions across 15 countries by May 2026, up from 12 a few months earlier, targeting H2 2026 issuance under a Dutch EMI license. Qivalis is the European banking establishment's answer to USDC and Tether: a MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin now backed by names like BNP Paribas, ING, UniCredit, BBVA, ABN Amro, Intesa Sanpaolo, Rabobank, and Nordea. The reserve design puts at least 40% in bank deposits and the remainder in short-term euro-area government bonds spread across EU countries. It reads like a money market fund with a blockchain address. The chain question is settled: Ethereum mainnet first (ERC-20F with a permissioned KYC layer), then Polygon and Base. Only pre-verified participants can hold or transfer the token. This is the consortium's compromise between public-chain liquidity and institutional control. CEO Jan-Oliver Sell (ex-Coinbase Germany) is lining up exchange partnerships, and the EMI license application sits with De Nederlandsche Bank, filed but not granted; Qivalis says it will launch the moment approval lands. The central tension is unchanged and arguably sharper at 37 members: whether dozens of banks that compete fiercely everywhere else can cooperate long enough to ship before Circle's EURC and SocGen's EURCV finish eating the MiCA-compliant euro market. The ticker itself isn't even public yet. Custody sits across consortium banks and 1:1 redemption rights remain pre-launch commitments.

KlarnaUSD

KLARNAUSD

Klarna's planned USD stablecoin runs on Tempo through Stripe Bridge Open Issuance, but it remains testnet-only with mainnet timing undecided. Klarna, the Swedish fintech with 114 million customers and $112B in annual GMV, is building the coin through Stripe's Bridge infrastructure on the Tempo L1. Tempo mainnet went live on March 18, 2026 with sub-second finality and fees under $0.001, and its Machine Payments Protocol, co-authored with Stripe, targets autonomous AI agent payments, yet KlarnaUSD was absent from a mainnet launch partners list that included Anthropic, Mastercard, Visa, and Revolut. The regulatory basis is firmer than the timeline: Bridge's conditional OCC national bank trust charter, approved in February, supplies regulated custody and an attestation framework, while the redemption window is scoped to Klarna's settlement flows rather than open DeFi liquidity. KlarnaUSD remains on Tempo's testnet: Klarna's Q1 and Q2 2026 earnings calls did not mention it, it is absent from Bridge Open Issuance's live issuer list, and the November 2025 announcement remains the only official word.

HKDAP

HKDAP

The first HKMA-licensed HKD stablecoin under the Stablecoins Ordinance, now live in an institution-only beta and finally measurable. After two missed launch windows, HKDAP went out on August 12 2026 attested by its distributors rather than its issuer. OSL Group and HashKey Exchange announced themselves as authorised, while anchorpoint.hk read "has not yet officially launched." DefiLlama picked the token up on August 27, and the Ethereum deployment's supply, a few hundred thousand HKDAP in its first weeks, is now independently verifiable. On August 14 BlockSec published a review of that same contract: the KYC proof argument is passed in and then discarded, so any proof, including an empty string, passes; de-registering a compromised KYC provider does not stop the wallets it onboarded from transacting; a single key can mint, burn, pause, or freeze, with two keys controlling every upgrade and role and no timelocks or multi-signature anywhere on the high-risk path. Debug logging left in the proxy fallback, an optimizer set to zero runs, and test files uploaded to Etherscan point to a pre-production build sitting on mainnet. The regulator vetted the issuer, not the bytecode. Pharos still holds HKDAP pre-launch, though the reason has changed: supply is no longer missing; price is, with DefiLlama reporting null and CoinGecko carrying a preview listing with no market data. The licensing playbook rests on segregated custody, HKMA-mandated attestation, and a regulated redemption path scoped for HKD-denominated RWA settlement. None of this is enforced by the contract that actually moves the tokens.

HSBC HKD Stablecoin

HKD-HSBC

HSBC's HKD stablecoin is the second HKMA-licensed entry, pre-launch with an H2 2026 target, and the one with the distribution advantage that matters: 3.3 million PayMe users who already use the app for peer-to-peer payments and won't need to download anything new. The integration into HSBC's HK App for tokenized investment subscriptions points to the actual product thesis. HSBC is building a settlement layer for its own digital asset products, with standalone DeFi as a secondary use case. The reserves will be HKD-denominated high-quality liquid assets in segregated custody accounts per HKMA rules with HKMA-mandated attestation and redemption routed through PayMe and the HSBC HK app, and the symbol hasn't even been confirmed yet. The interesting tension: HSBC is building a stablecoin specifically to avoid depending on anyone else's stablecoin, which is either strategic autonomy or institutional NIH syndrome depending on your perspective.

OKRW

OKRW

OKRW is the pre-launch native KRW stablecoin of Maroo, the Layer 1 that Hashed Open Finance built specifically to host it. Maroo is positioned as the first 'sovereign L1' purpose-built for Korean Won stablecoins, with a dual-track design that offers both a regulated path (bank-backed, KYC-gated) and an open path (permissionless issuance). The testnet went live in May 2026 with OKRW as the native token, and mainnet is targeted before year-end. In a country where crypto trading volumes regularly rival the stock market but regulated stablecoin infrastructure is virtually nonexistent, the thesis is less about technology and more about regulatory positioning: whoever builds the compliant KRW on-ramp first captures a market that has been using USDT as a proxy currency by default.

B3 BRL Stablecoin

BRL-B3

BRL-B3 is a pre-launch Brazilian real settlement stablecoin from B3, Latin America's largest stock exchange, designed for its tokenized real-world-asset trading platform. When Latin America's largest stock exchange decides it needs its own stablecoin for tokenized asset settlement, the signal is less about crypto adoption and more about what traditional financial infrastructure considers table stakes in 2026. B3's BRL stablecoin is branded B3RL, built on Polygon, and backed by cash and government bonds inside B3's own clearing infrastructure. It fills the gap left by Brazil's Drex CBDC narrowing its scope: the central bank's digital currency was meant to handle settlement, but as that project slowed, B3 decided to build the settlement rails itself. The timeline has moved: the first-half-of-2026 window floated at May's Tokenization Day has come and gone, and by July's Expert XP conference the line had softened to a launch 'in the coming months,' with asset tokenization itself pushed to early 2027. B3 clears trillions annually. The open questions are whether Brazil's regulators will let a stock exchange run the settlement rails the central bank once reserved for itself and whether 'coming months' survives contact with the CVM.

Flipcash USDF

USDF

Flipcash's USDF is the first stablecoin minted through Coinbase's Custom Stablecoins platform, a stablecoin-as-a-service product that lets any business launch a branded dollar backed 1:1 by USDC. Flipcash is the test case, and the product itself is less interesting than the platform it proves out: if Custom Stablecoins works, every fintech, neobank, and loyalty program can have its own branded dollar without touching reserve management. The dependency chain is explicit: USDF is a wrapper around USDC, so its backing is only as good as Circle's reserve stack. Governance is centralized-dependent because the token's existence depends on Coinbase continuing to operate the platform. USDF went live on Solana in May 2026 with Coinbase Onramp fiat access, but as of July 2026 it remained in Coinbase-exchange operational-only backend testing with no trading, deposits, or withdrawals, no public Solana mint address, and no DefiLlama or CoinGecko listing under the Flipcash identity, so it cannot yet enter Pharos runtime data. Whether the market needs branded USDC wrappers or whether this is a new distribution channel for Circle's existing product stays open; until a public supply surface exists, USDF is a platform demonstration.

BDACS KRW1

KRW1

KRW1 is BDACS's KRW-backed stablecoin, developed with Woori Bank as the reserve custodian and launched on Avalanche in September 2025, but it remains in a proof-of-concept phase rather than public circulation. The structural advantages are real: real-time banking-API reserve attestation through Woori, KISA's endorsement of Avalanche for public-sector reliability, and a February 2026 Plume partnership that positions KRW1 as the Korean institutional settlement rail for tokenized RWAs (Plume hosted roughly $645M in tokenized assets at the time). The commercial gating is Korea's still-pending Digital Asset Basic Act framework, where BDACS is explicitly trying to make KRW1 the technical standard. The strategic weakness is distribution. BDACS is a B2B custodian without a consumer app or retail footprint, which makes KRW1 likely to win on the institutional side and lose to bank-led or super-app issuers if Korea's eventual framework favours retail surfaces. Real-time banking-API attestation runs through Woori Bank custody, with KRW1 positioning itself as the settlement rail for Korean institutional RWA flows and redemption routed through regulated banking channels.

EURR is live, and Pharos tracks it pre-launch anyway. Revolut launched it on August 26 2026 as the first product of a stablecoin programme long assumed to be arriving in dollars or sterling, phased into Denmark, Poland, and Portugal with the rest of the EEA promised later in the year. The structural surprise is the issuer: Bridge Building S.A., the Luxembourg arm of Stripe-owned Bridge, holds the EMI licence and MiCA authorisation from the CSSF, while Revolut Digital Assets Europe distributes under its CySEC permission. Europe's biggest neobank built the distribution and outsourced the balance sheet. EURR also arrived as Revolut finished pulling Tether's USDt from European retail on August 31, so the euro rail it removed and the euro rail it added are the same shelf. Supply went from a few hundred tokens at launch to more than a million within two weeks, then stalled at about 1.67 million EURR through mid-September; the Polygon deployment holds three tokens. Bridge's reserve page is the first disclosure of what stands behind the token: reserves equal to supply, held entirely as cash deposits at credit institutions, redeemable at par to an EEA IBAN within two business days. Custodian names and an independent attestation remain unpublished, and no accepted price source resolves the token, which is why it sits here rather than in the tracked set. A stablecoin distributed by a bank, issued by a payments company, and priced by nobody is a fair snapshot of where regulated euro tokens currently are.

iM Bank KRW Stablecoin

KRW-iM

iM Bank's KRW stablecoin proof-of-concept on Kaia is symbolic of a regulatory thaw rather than a commercial product, and it has a feature that most stablecoins won't need for a decade but makes excellent press releases: quantum-resistant post-quantum cryptography via BTQ Technologies. Set aside the security theater angle, and the actual significance is that a Korean commercial bank is building a KRW stablecoin at all. South Korea's regulatory stance on private stablecoins has been cautious to the point of paralysis, and a bank-led PoC signals that the regulatory ice may be thawing. The Finger partnership handles the wallet and DeFi integration layer, while iM Bank brings the banking license and the KRW reserves. Whether this moves beyond proof-of-concept depends entirely on whether Korean regulators want to compete with Hashed's OKRW for the title of first regulated KRW stablecoin or whether they'd prefer neither existed. As a bank-issued PoC, the stack assumes regulated custody of KRW reserves, statutory attestation, and a banking-rail redemption path that has yet to face commercial traffic.

Tenbin Gold

tGLD

tGLD is Tenbin's tokenized gold note, but unlike PAXG or XAUT it holds no vaulted metal. Each token is a Tenbin AssetCo (BVI) debt-note representing the U.S.-dollar value of one troy ounce of gold, collateralized by USDC and hedged with CME gold futures rather than allocated bullion. Mint and redemption are KYC-gated through a Controller and a backend signer that holds the on-chain minter role, and redemptions settle in a USD stablecoin instead of physical metal. Launched on Ethereum mainnet in February 2026 after a $7M Galaxy Ventures-led seed and four security audits, it remains in private beta with a small float (under 150 tGLD across a few dozen holders in mid-September 2026, roughly triple June's figure), its only public market a near-dormant Uniswap V4 pool and no independent proof-of-reserves attestation, which the docs still describe as coming soon. In May 2026 Tenbin retired LayerZero and moved tGLD's cross-chain messaging to Chainlink CCIP, and in August it published a second audit round from Zellic and Verilog with remediation notes; a staked yield variant (stGLD) and the FX siblings tBRL and tMXN, now on Ethereum mainnet, round out the line-up. Pharos lists tGLD as pre-launch until its public price feed updates frequently enough to clear the gold pricing-freshness gate.

EJPY

EJPY

EJPY is Japan Blockchain Foundation's pre-launch yen stablecoin, and its whole pitch is a legal classification: a trust-type Type III electronic payment instrument that escapes the ¥1M-per-transaction ceiling JPYC has spent years working around. JBFD, the consortium operator behind Japan Open Chain, would be the settlor, with reserves parked in a licensed trust bank that, as of the May 2026 announcement, it is still negotiating with and has not named. That gap is the tell: trust-segregated custody and statutory redemption rights are the entire value proposition, yet the trustee, the reserve mix, and the launch date are all blank. The plan is to issue on Japan Open Chain first and Ethereum next, sometime within fiscal 2026 (which runs through March 2027), aimed squarely at B2B settlement rather than retail DeFi. EJPY is a credible institutional play in a market suddenly crowded with yen-stablecoin contenders. JPYSC, JPYC, and a megabank consortium all circle the same FSA framework. Right now, this is a decision to issue, not a token you can hold.

BILS

BILS

BILS is the first shekel stablecoin to clear an Israeli regulator, and unlike most entries on this list it is approved rather than merely announced; Bits of Gold spent two years in a sandbox before the Capital Market, Insurance and Savings Authority signed off in April 2026. The conditions are unusually concrete for a pre-launch asset: 1:1 New Israeli Shekel backing held in segregated bank accounts inside Israel (foreign custody explicitly barred), an Ernst & Young audit, Fireblocks issuance infrastructure, and QEDIT zero-knowledge privacy, all on Solana via token extensions. Reach is limited: the regulator required a deliberately gradual, small-scale rollout, and Bits of Gold announced in July 2026 that the pilot was complete and BILS was moving to wide distribution, with roughly 100,000 BILS minted on Solana by early August. That throttled debut, plus a peg Pharos doesn't yet price (tracked as OTHER until shekel support lands), is exactly why it sits in pre-launch rather than the live table. Note the regulatory lane: the approval is under the CMISA rulebook, while the broader Israeli Stablecoin Law is still stuck in draft. A real, audited, regulator-blessed shekel, just not one you can buy in size yet.

Open USD

OUSD

Open USD is what happens when 140-plus of the biggest names in payments and banking, including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, BlackRock, BNY Mellon, and Coinbase, decide they would rather split reserve income among themselves than hand it to Circle. Announced June 30, 2026 and operated by an independent company, Open Standard, whose board is drawn from its own partners, OUSD promises fee-free minting, no volume limits, and most of the reserve yield routed back to the businesses that adopt it. The pitch is GENIUS Act compliance and neutral, shared governance; the reality, still, is a launch announcement with no mainnet contracts, named custodian, or attestation. Markets took it seriously anyway. Circle's stock fell roughly 15-17% on the news, even though some OUSD backers such as BlackRock and BNY are also core partners in Circle's own ecosystem. The unresolved question is the one that has dogged every mega-consortium before it: 140 partners are easy to announce and very hard to align. Launch is promised 'later in 2026,' natively on Solana, with Stellar and Plasma named as launch partners. As of mid-August, the token still isn't live.

RAI Dollar

RD

RAI proved a stablecoin could be steered by an on-chain controller rather than a committee, and the market followed the redemption price faithfully; that price was not a dollar, and most of the market could not get past it. RAI Dollar keeps the machinery and pins the target. RD is an immutable CDP stablecoin on Ethereum where a PI controller reads a 24-hour TWAP of the market price and moves one system-wide borrow rate, bounded to 0.25-50% APY around a 2% bias, until supply and demand pull the price back to $1, with Liquity's redemption arbitrage as the floor. The par lever RAI made famous survives, bounded to $0.75-$1.30 and moving no faster than a tenth of a cent an hour, held for the extremes rather than left to float. Collateral sits in eight isolated branches: WETH, wstETH, rETH, weETH, WBTC, tBTC, sUSDS, and PAXG, each with its own troves, stability pool, and shutdown path. The question Liquity V2 left open is answered by routing a slice of healthy-branch fees to repair an undercollateralized branch rather than convening a vote. Borrowers who dislike the redemption queue can pay a floating Redemption Shield surcharge that funds a matching discount for everyone who does not. All of it is still theoretical: no contracts are deployed, the address registry reads TBD, the core repository is private, and the audits, part-funded by an August 2026 Ethereum Foundation subsidy, are still in progress. Immutability cuts both ways, and whatever ships is what runs, permanently.

Revolut GBP Stablecoin

RGBP

Revolut's pre-launch UK GBP stablecoin remains sandbox-only, and the Bank of England rules once called structurally unviable have been substantially softened. Revolut got its full UK banking licence in March 2026 after a 20-month mobilisation. It then confirmed its proposed GBP stablecoin would not be issued from the new banking entity, since BoE rules constrain issuing stablecoins across affiliated subsidiaries; issuance falls back to Revolut Ltd, the e-money arm. The regulatory weather has since turned: the BoE's June 2026 final policy statement scrapped the proposed £20,000 individual holding cap in favour of a temporary per-coin issuance ceiling of roughly £40bn, and lifted the share of reserves allowed in yield-bearing short-dated UK T-bills from 60% to 70%. This change retreated from exactly the provisions legal analysts had called commercially fatal. What survives is still austere: the remaining 30% sits unremunerated at the Bank, holders receive no yield, par redemption within 24 hours is mandatory, and the timeline runs through rules finalised by end-2026, regulated sterling coins from 2027, and full UK authorisation only in October 2027. The priority use case, per Revolut's House of Lords testimony, remains the UK→India remittance corridor, the world's seventh-largest, rather than retail payments. Revolut's real asset is its millions of UK users who already open the app daily, with bank-style custody and redemption bolted on top. The BoE no longer says the product cannot work; until its rules are final at end-2026, the sandbox is the only place the product exists.

Revolut USD Stablecoin

RUSD

Revolut's USD stablecoin is still unannounced, and the August 2026 launch of its euro sibling made the shape of any dollar token considerably clearer, mostly by invalidating the assumption everyone was working from. The legal substrate looked settled: a MiCA CASP licence from CySEC in October 2025, plus Revolut's Bank-of-Lithuania EMI supplying the e-money-token issuer foundation MiCA Title IV requires. Then Revolut shipped EURR on August 26 and the issuer of record turned out to be Bridge Building S.A., the Luxembourg entity of Stripe-owned Bridge, under a CSSF licence, with Revolut Digital Assets Europe merely distributing. Revolut, holding every licence it needed to issue in-house, chose to rent the issuance instead. That reframes RUSD: the nearest live precedent for a Revolut dollar is a third-party regulated-issuer relationship, which trades balance-sheet control and reserve-disclosure ownership for speed to market. The US path now has a regulatory document behind it: on September 2 2026 the OCC conditionally approved Revolut Bank US, N.A., with opening targeted for the first half of 2027, and the decision records that the bank will offer Revolut-branded stablecoins through a third party, will not be the issuer, and will not manage reserves. That is the EURR template written into a charter, and why Pharos now carries 2027 as the expected launch. Ticker, chain, issuer entity, and reserve and custody disclosure model for a USD token all remain unannounced, with redemption rights sitting behind whichever issuer Revolut rents next.

Polaris USDp

USDp

USDp, the token Polaris's documentation now labels in place of the earlier pUSD name, is Polaris Finance's pre-launch Liquity-style immutable CDP stablecoin on Ethereum, built by co-founders TokenBrice and 0xLuude as what they call the successor to Liquity's ethos: immutable core contracts, no admin keys, and no off-chain assets. USDp is minted against pETH collateral via CDPs, and the yield-bearing angle comes from protocol revenue: borrowing interest, swap fees, conversion gains, and DEX fees, rather than from depositing reserves into Aave. The public testnet is live on Sepolia with audits still ahead and no mainnet date set, since the team says it prioritises security over speed, which leaves it time to prove that you can ship immutability without sacrificing usability. For a market saturated with centralized fiat-backed tokens and yield products built on leverage, USDp is a deliberate bet that there's still demand for the Liquity V1 philosophy, upgraded.

Polaris GOLDp

GOLDp

GOLDp (labelled pGOLD in Polaris's earlier posts) is a pre-launch synthetic gold exposure that shares infrastructure with its sibling USDp but pegs to gold rather than the dollar, with no physical backing and the protocol risk that comes with a decentralized design. Unlike XAUT or PAXG, which tokenize actual bars in Swiss vaults, GOLDp is minted from the same pETH collateral pool via CDPs on Ethereum. This makes it arguably more decentralized than any gold-pegged token on the market, at the cost of carrying all the risks of crypto collateral in a down market. Whether DeFi users want synthetic gold exposure from immutable contracts instead of custodied metal from Tether or Paxos is an experiment Polaris is willing to run.

Bridge USDB

USDB

Bridge's USDB is Stripe's stablecoin rail, with reserves in cash and BlackRock MMFs under a conditional OCC trust charter and distribution embedded in Stripe's payment flow, so most people who touch it will never know they are using it. Bridge, Stripe's stablecoin subsidiary, powers Stablecoin Financial Accounts in 101 countries, turning every Stripe merchant into a potential stablecoin endpoint without the merchant ever touching a token. The OCC conditional national trust bank charter from February 2026 gives Bridge the federal regulatory cover that most stablecoin issuers spend years pursuing, with institutional custody behind the reserves. Stripe can embed stablecoin settlement into existing payment flows without asking permission from anyone downstream, and Bridge Open Issuance now also mints branded dollars for MoneyGram and Deel. Pharos holds USDB at pre-launch until a verified runtime price and circulating-supply source exists; the DefiLlama rows carrying the USDB ticker today belong to Blast USDB and FantOHM.

ARC

ARC

ARC is India's first attempt at a regulated rupee stablecoin, built by Anq with Polygon's backing and designed for a 1:1 INR peg backed by cash, fixed deposits, and Indian government securities. Its stated purpose is to stem the USD liquidity outflow that India's regulators have been panicking about since USDT volumes on Indian exchanges started dwarfing domestic payment rail throughput. It reads like a mutual fund prospectus, with custody at regulated Indian banks, and the two-tier framework is explicitly designed to complement rather than compete with the RBI's digital rupee CBDC. The Uniswap v4 whitelisting for compliance is a novel technical approach to the 'permissioned token on a permissionless chain' problem, and primary redemption will run through KYC-gated issuer rails rather than open market making. The tentative January 2026 debut passed with no RBI confirmation and no live supply, and in July 2026 the RBI told a Parliamentary Standing Committee it favours barring banks and regulated entities from private stablecoins, rupee-backed ones included. Whether India's regulatory apparatus will actually let a private rupee stablecoin operate alongside its CBDC remains the existential question that no amount of technical architecture can answer.

RD Technologies HKDR

HKDR

HKDR is the pre-launch HKD stablecoin from RD Technologies, a Hong Kong fintech founded by former HKMA chief executive Norman Chan, in the HKMA sandbox since 2024 but absent from the April 2026 first licence cohort. Its subsidiary RD InnoTech was in the first July 2024 cohort admitted to the HKMA stablecoin issuer sandbox, where it tested digital-asset trading rails and cross-border trade payments; the firm has been positioning for licensing under the Stablecoins Ordinance that took effect August 1 2025. On April 10 2026 the HKMA gazetted the first stablecoin issuer licences (FRS01 and FRS02) to Anchorpoint and HSBC, with RD InnoTech absent from that cohort. RD remains a credible later-license contender. A $40M Series A2 round in July 2025 and a memorandum of understanding with ZA Bank both point to a serious operational build-out, but the regulatory window has shifted to a slower queue: in June 2026 the HKMA said the remaining applications stay under review with no timetable for further grants. The entry remains pre-launch until licence issuance is confirmed. The eventual product still routes through HKMA-mandated attestation, segregated custody, and a regulated redemption window.

BRD Stablecoin

BRD

BRD is a Brazilian real stablecoin announced January 6 2026 by Tony Volpon, a former deputy governor of the Central Bank of Brazil, through his company CF Inovacao. The distinctive structural choice: BRD is backed by Brazilian National Treasury bonds and explicitly designed to pass the Selic-linked yield, around 15% at announcement, back to holders rather than retaining it as issuer revenue. That is the same model Crown's BRLV already operates in institutional channels; Crown raised $13.5M from Paradigm in December 2025, but BRD is positioning as the first to make yield-sharing the primary product framing rather than a niche feature. The competitive set in Brazilian BRL stablecoins is small but real: Transfero BRZ, BBRL, BRL1, plus cREAL on Celo. The harder gate is Brazilian regulation: BCB's FX-classification regime took effect February 2 2026 and final Consulta Publica 111 output is still pending, which is why Volpon has not published a launch date alongside the announcement.

Itau Unibanco BRL Stablecoin

BRL-ITAU

Itau Unibanco, Brazil's largest private bank by assets, confirmed in April 2025 that it is evaluating its own stablecoin, with peg currency and design pending BCB regulation; Head of Digital Assets Guto Antunes told a Sao Paulo industry event the bank is 'always open to understanding whether it makes sense for our clients to have a stablecoin, even one in real, within Itau'. The peg-currency choice (BRL or USD) is explicitly undecided and gated on the final shape of Brazil's regulatory framework via BCB Consulta Publica 111, especially the open self-custody question that Antunes flagged as a major design constraint. Itau already participates in the DREX wholesale CBDC pilot, providing distribution-rail experience but also a competing institutional product that may shape final positioning; primary redemption would presumably run through Itau's bank network. The placeholder is BRL-denominated because Brazil's retail base and Itau's franchise make a real-denominated launch the most likely first design, while Itau has not ruled out a USD-denominated option.

Gyndore

gynUSD

gynUSD is a pre-launch CDP stablecoin built around a single, blunt proposition: cbBTC is the only collateral. By focusing exclusively on Bitcoin through Coinbase's wrapper, Gyndore sidesteps the generalized risk models that force multi-asset lending markets into conservative LTV ratios. It then passes the capital efficiency benefit directly to borrowers, with a 110% minimum collateralization ratio enabling up to 90.91% LTV. Seventy percent of borrow fees flow to Stability Pool depositors, removing the idle-liquidity drag that burdens pool-based lending markets. The governance story has two possible endings depending on launch conditions: the protocol can either start with a bootstrapping admin key and transition to GYND token governance once the fee switch triggers, or mint GYND from day one if pre-launch capital formation is sufficient. The Pareto Controller constrains GYND voters to ±10bps rate adjustments and requires 80% consensus. This governance behaves more like a thermostat than a parliament. The cbBTC dependency is the structural asterisk: Coinbase custody sits at the base of every loan, so the trust-minimized pitch has a ceiling.

GEL₮ is Tether's pre-launch Georgian Lari stablecoin, announced in May 2026 alongside the Government of Georgia and framed by Tether as the country's 'official' stablecoin. The framing is the story: a sovereign government handing its national currency's digital rails to the world's largest stablecoin issuer, while the National Bank of Georgia runs its own separate digital-lari pilot. The legal scaffolding is real. NBG Order No. 52/04 lets licensed issuers mint Lari-pegged tokens under 100% reserves, full redemption rights, and a GEL 500,000 capital floor, deliberately built for compatibility with the US GENIUS Act. Everything that matters for an assessment is still blank: no chains, no contracts, no reserve attestation, no named custodian, no launch date. With prime-minister and central-bank endorsements but a non-USD peg Pharos doesn't yet price, this is a flag planted on a map rather than a token you can hold. Whether 'official' means anything more than a sharper logo on a 1:1 Tether liability is the question the missing disclosures will eventually answer.

RAKBank AED Stablecoin

AED-RAKBANK

AED-RAKBANK is RAKBank's pre-launch dirham stablecoin, notable less for what it is than for who is issuing it: the first conventional commercial bank to win CBUAE in-principle approval for an AED payment token, as opposed to the digital-bank and sovereign-wealth vehicles (Zand AED, AE Coin, the FAB/ADQ/IHC effort) that got there first. The January 2026 nod arrives under the UAE's Payment Token Services Regulation, which permits payment use only for dirham-backed tokens and demands a published white paper plus full reserves. RAKBank's plan ticks the regulatory boxes: it calls for 1:1 dirhams in segregated regulated accounts, full par redemption, audited contracts, and real-time reserve attestation. However, 'in-principle' is doing heavy lifting: no ticker, no chain, no issuing subsidiary, and no launch date have been disclosed, and the regulation may force RAKBank into a separate licensed issuer it hasn't confirmed. Pharos tracks the AED peg as OTHER until dirham support is built. A pilot is promised 'in due course,' which in regulatory dialect means watch this space.

Kerne USD

kUSD

kUSD is Kerne Protocol's Base-native synthetic dollar. A first external audit from Hexens landed in late July with zero criticals and every finding confined to the yield vault. The audit followed a patched Peg Stability Module cutover that opened permissionless 1:1 USDC minting. Circulating supply remains at genesis scale. DefiLlama indexes the supply with no usable price, and CoinGecko still does not resolve the coin, so Pharos keeps it on the upcoming tracker. The live KerneVault still runs pre-audit bytecode with deposits closed until the remediated version deploys, so the audited code and the deployed code are not yet the same thing. Current backing is USDC in the PSM contracts, covering outstanding kUSD slightly above 1:1. The ambitious delta-neutral design, using a WETH vault and Hyperliquid short, remains degraded and excluded from reserves. Since August 6, kUSD role administration and PSM configuration sit behind a 48-hour timelock whose sole proposer and executor is a 2-of-3 Safe, and hourly signed proof-of-reserves is published at kerne.fi/verify. The durable constraint is distribution: the protocol keeps shipping before users arrive.