21 Banks Plan a Joint Stablecoin to Rival USDT, USDC
Bank of America, Citi, Goldman and 18 more firms are building a joint dollar stablecoin for a 2027 launch. Circle stock fell 6% as USDT and USDC dominate.
Traditional finance just stopped watching from the sidelines. On September 1, twenty-one of the world's largest banks and asset managers agreed to form a company behind a new dollar-backed stablecoin. This is not a fringe crew. North American backers include Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and Fidelity; Europe brings Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank, UBS, Santander, BBVA and Crédit Agricole. Launch is targeted for the first half of 2027, pending closing conditions.
The target is USDT and USDC
The stablecoin market sits at $310.4 billion, per DefiLlama. Tether's USDT owns $183.3 billion, or 59%; Circle's USDC holds $73.8 billion, or 24%. Two issuers control more than four-fifths of the float. That concentration is exactly what the banks are aiming at.
Their edge is not the tech. Minting a fully reserved token is trivial. The edge is distribution. The consortium brings millions of corporate and retail relationships, working compliance stacks and direct access to payment rails. Tether and Circle spent years building that reach. The banks already have it.
Why Circle's stock cracked
The tape was blunt: Circle's shares fell roughly 6% on the news, underperforming the broader crypto complex. The logic is simple. Circle earns the spread on the reserves backing USDC. If regulated megabanks ship their own token, the addressable market for the first mover shrinks. Tether, privately held and opaquely valued, faces the same pressure without a listed proxy to price it.
The details are still missing
The parts that matter most are undisclosed: company name, token name, chains, reserve custodian, governance and redemption terms are all blank. The group says the next milestone is the formal corporate structure later in 2026. A euro token is slated to follow, then stablecoins tied to other G7 currencies.
For traders, direction beats timeline. The market is shifting from a two-issuer duopoly toward a field where regulated banks compete directly. That compresses incumbent margins over time and moves the question from "whether" to "who." In the near term, USDT stays the exchange liquidity layer. Anyone expressing this through Circle equity has to price the 2027 competition today.