The stablecoin market is fragmenting beyond Tether and Circle, with companies like Mosta launching their own branded dollar tokens for global payments. Business-to-business stablecoin transaction volume surged more than 700% to over $3 billion monthly by the end of 2025, according to data compiled by Reap, marking a fundamental shift from retail trading toward institutional settlement infrastructure.

What Changed to Make Branded Stablecoins Feasible?

A few years ago, launching a stablecoin required building reserve management, compliance infrastructure, and regulatory licensing from scratch. That barrier has crumbled. On June 23, 2026, Mosta, an AI-native business banking platform, launched MainUSD, its own U.S. dollar stablecoin issued through the regulated provider Brale. The key difference: Mosta didn't have to build the hard infrastructure itself.

Brale, founded by Dwolla veteran Ben Milne, now handles the technical and regulatory heavy lifting for clients. The Des Moines-based company is a registered money services business across 45 U.S. jurisdictions, publishes monthly reserve attestations, and in June ran a private settlement proof-of-concept with Visa. This outsourcing model has opened the door for smaller companies to issue their own tokens without reinventing the wheel.

"We built Brale to make it easy for companies like Mosta to launch their own stablecoins without having to build reserve management, compliance, and issuance infrastructure from scratch," said Chase Merlin, head of product at Brale.

Chase Merlin, Head of Product at Brale

MainUSD is designed to fit the GENIUS Act, the federal payment-stablecoin law signed in July 2025, whose implementation rules are still being written and are not expected to take full effect until late 2026 or early 2027.

How Are Companies Using Branded Stablecoins for Real Payments?

• Cross-Border Worker Payments: A worker in Bangladesh could be paid by a local partner that redeems MainUSD on demand, with the stablecoin converted to local currency in minutes, replacing slow correspondent bank transfers.
• Flexible On-Ramp and Off-Ramp: Mosta customers can convert incoming funds or crypto into one MainUSD balance, hold it, and move it out through either fiat or stablecoin rails, with swaps the company says can go down to zero fees depending on the plan.
• Multi-Currency Support: Mosta already supports USDT and USDC, with the euro coin EURC said to be coming, allowing businesses to operate across multiple stablecoin ecosystems.

The total stablecoin supply sits near $321 billion, with Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC accounting for more than 80% of it. However, stablecoin payment volume hit roughly $390 billion in 2025, more than double the year before, demonstrating explosive growth in transaction throughput.

Why Are Bigger Players Also Building Their Own Stablecoin Infrastructure?

The shift toward branded stablecoins is not limited to startups. MoneyGram launched its own MGUSD coin in June, issued through Stripe's Bridge. Mastercard agreed to buy the stablecoin infrastructure firm BVNK for as much as $1.8 billion. Stripe, Circle, Visa, and PayPal are all building settlement rails of their own.

"There's somewhat of a crypto winter happening in terms of just retail buying and selling of crypto, but the stablecoin adoption is orthogonal to that, and institutions are just adopting stablecoins for real-world use cases at the moment, and that's why we're seeing it grow," said Sami Start of the on-ramp firm Transak.

Sami Start, Transak

The motivation is clear: owning the dollar flow within a system represents a fundamental business advantage. Rather than renting access to Tether or Circle's infrastructure, companies can control their own branded tokens and the economics attached to them.

What's the Real Challenge Behind Launching a Stablecoin?

Issuing the token is only half the job. The money still has to land somewhere, and that requires navigating complex licensing requirements and integrating with traditional fiat systems. The on-chain leg of the transaction has to synchronize with the off-chain leg, which is the fiat part where payouts are happening.

"License is just the ten percent of the effort, another ninety percent is the partner work," said Anton Lobintsev, founder of SquareFi.

Anton Lobintsev, Founder of SquareFi

SquareFi anchors its main entity in Canada rather than an offshore haven, registered as a money services business and leaning on licensed "umbrella" partners in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia to reach customers elsewhere. Lobintsev emphasized that it is almost impossible to get seriously into the fiat world with offshore companies, even though that approach works for crypto-only projects.

Is This Actually Changing How Payments Work?

Not everyone is convinced that a flood of branded dollars truly revolutionizes banking. Stablecoins still account for only about 1% of global cross-border payment flows, a tiny fraction of the total market. Some skeptics argue that issuing a stablecoin is not the same as reinventing banking infrastructure.

"Everyone's taking the easy way out in the Web3, Web2 world today. Easy USDC stablecoins, you issue a card, suddenly you're a neobank and you can spend, and it's very cool. But structurally at its core, nothing's really changing," said Neo, chief executive of the onchain neobank UR.

Neo, Chief Executive of UR

However, proponents argue that the advantage lies in control. For Mosta and similar platforms, the bet is that owning the dollar moving through the system beats renting someone else's infrastructure. As Lobintsev put it, "It's just a completely different game".

The stablecoin market is entering a new phase where infrastructure democratization is enabling a broader range of companies to issue their own branded tokens. Whether this fragmentation strengthens or weakens the overall ecosystem remains an open question, but the trend toward business-controlled stablecoins is unmistakable.