forbes.com
"You know, guess the biggest RWA in the world," Anton Lobintsev said on the On The Margin podcast, using the shorthand for real-world assets put on a blockchain. The host guessed a house, then a company. "No, Tether. Because Tether is the biggest RWA. What are they doing? They tokenize the dollar. That's it."
That logic is now spreading down-market fast. On Tuesday, Mosta, an AI-native business banking platform built on Lobintsev's company SquareFi, launched MainUSD, its own U.S. dollar stablecoin issued by the regulated provider Brale. A few years ago, minting a dollar token was a moonshot reserved for Tether and Circle. It is becoming a product feature.
"Global businesses should not have to choose between the speed of stablecoins and the usability of traditional financial rails," Denis Spasio, Mosta's co-founder, said in the announcement. The pitch is that 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. Mosta already supports $USDT and $USDC, with the euro coin EURC said to be coming.
Stablecoins move into the back office
Mosta is a small name attaching itself to a very large shift. Stablecoin payment volume hit roughly $390 billion in 2025, more than double the year before, and business-to-business stablecoin flows grew more than 700% to over $3 billion a month by the end of the year, according to data compiled by Reap. The total stablecoin supply sits near $321 billion, with Tether's $USDT and Circle's $USDC accounting for more than 80% of it.
"There's somewhat of a crypto winter happening in terms of just retail buying and selling of crypto," Sami Start of the on-ramp firm Transak said on the On The Margin podcast. "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."
The bigger players are moving the same way. 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. What changed for the smaller fish is that they no longer have to build the hard part themselves.
Why launching a coin got easy
That hard part is Brale's business. The Des Moines company, founded by Dwolla veteran Ben Milne, runs reserve management, compliance and issuance so its clients do not have to. It 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.
"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, Brale's head of product. 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.
Issuing the token is only half the job. The money still has to land somewhere. "The on-chain leg has to synchronize with the off-chain leg, which is the fiat part where payouts are happening," Raj Kamal, co-founder and chief executive of cross-border payments firm TransFi, said on the On The Margin podcast. That off-chain leg is where the licenses live.
The hard part is the licenses
Lobintsev is blunt about where the real work goes. "License is just the ten percent of the effort, another ninety percent is the partner work," he said. 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. "It's almost impossible to get seriously into the fiat world with an offshore companies," he said. "It's okay for crypto, for the crypto only projects, but it's completely unacceptable in the traditional finances world."
The payoff he describes is concrete. A worker in Bangladesh, he said, could be paid by a local partner that redeems MainUSD on demand: SquareFi mints the coin against crypto it holds as collateral, sends it over, and the partner converts it to local currency "in like a few minutes." It is the kind of route that today moves slowly and expensively through correspondent banks.
Whether a flood of branded dollars actually changes anything is the open question. Stablecoins still account for only about 1% of global cross-border payment flows, and not everyone is convinced that issuing one is the same as reinventing banking.
"Everyone's taking the easy way out in the Web3, Web2 world today," said Neo, chief executive of the onchain neobank UR, on the On The Margin podcast. "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." For Mosta, the bet is that owning the dollar moving through the system beats renting someone else's. "It's just a completely different game," Lobintsev said.