Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) and Circle (NASDAQ: CRCL) will help Bermuda shift its national economy onto blockchain rails and expand use of the USDC stablecoin in the process.
On January 19, Circle announced that it and Coinbase have partnered with the government of Bermuda to help transform the nation into “the world’s first fully onchain national economy.” Circle said this means “using digital assets as everyday financial infrastructure,” so “merchants can accept fast, low-cost, dollar-denominated payments.”
Circle says Bermudian government agencies “will begin piloting stablecoin-based payments,” local financial institutions will integrate tokenization tools, while “nationwide digital literacy programs” will help the locals get up to speed on the changes coming their way.
Circle claims Bermuda’s onchain economy will “over time … deliver tangible benefits for residents and businesses.” Said benefits will include lower transaction costs plus “greater access to global finance through modern digital wallets, and infrastructure that keeps economic value circulating locally.”
More details are expected in May during the Bermuda Digital Finance Forum 2026. The 2025 event saw Coinbase and Circle airdrop 100 USDC tokens to each attendee so they could explore stablecoin acceptance at local merchants.
Bermuda’s premier, The Hon. E. David Burt, said his country “has always believed that responsible innovation is best achieved through partnership between government, regulators, and industry.” With Coinbase/Circle’s support, Bermuda is “accelerating our vision to enable digital finance at the national level” and “ensuring Bermudians benefit from the future of finance.”
Coinbase and Circle have been cultivating their ties to Bermuda for years. In 2019, back when Circle was still operating the Poloniex digital asset exchange, it transferred the exchange’s operations to Bermuda, praising the country’s “exceptionally well designed and comprehensive regulatory framework.”
In 2023, Coinbase launched its Coinbase International Exchange derivatives platform from Bermuda, based on the company’s view that the country was one of the jurisdictions “moving forward with responsible crypto-forward regulatory frameworks to strategically position themselves as crypto hubs.”
Digital asset payment card volume soars
Circle recently released an annual report titled “Beyond Stablecoins: The Rise of the Internet Financial System.” Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire claimed Circle is perfectly positioned to take advantage of a shift to “a world where money could move freely as a software object on the public internet.” Allaire hailed “the beginning of what I see as the economic operating system for the internet.”
Circle says its market share of circulating stablecoins hit 29% in the third quarter of 2025, up 59% year-on-year. Meanwhile, its share of stablecoin transaction volume hit 40% in Q3, a 2.3x year-on-year improvement. Analysts have suggested the transaction volume rise is in part due to USDC’s status as the preferred token of decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms.
In most countries, USDC’s share of stablecoin payment volume is dwarfed by that of its rival Tether, issuer of the market-leading USDT stablecoin. But there are some notable outliers in which USDC’s share is nearly equal to USDT, including India (47.4%) and Argentina (46.6%), with Mexico and Nigeria slightly lower down the scale.
Stablecoins are getting a boost from increased use of digital asset payment cards. A new report from Artemis Analytics says these cards were generating a monthly volume of over $1.5 billion late last year, up from just $100 million in early 2023, pushing annual stablecoin card volume to over $18 billion. That’s only ~$1 billion below peer-to-peer stablecoin payments, and the cards’ annual growth of 106% dwarfs P2P’s 5.3% growth.
Of that $18 billion card volume, around one-fifth ($3.5 billion) is handled by Visa (NASDAQ: V) and its stablecoin-linked cards. While both Visa and rival Mastercard (NASDAQ: MA) have roughly the same amount of co-branded card programs, Artemis says Visa’s early efforts to partner with infrastructure providers like Rain and Reap—versus Mastercard’s strategy of partnering with centralized exchanges—have allowed Visa to capture “over 90% of on-chain card volume.”
Earlier this month, Rain co-founder/CEO Farooq Malik used his company’s announcement of a $250 million Series C funding round to report that “our active card base has increased 30x and our annualized payment volume has increased 38x” to over $3 billion.
USDC dominates collateral deposit volume for Rain cards, claiming an ~80% share in November 2025. Together, USDC and USDT account for over 96% of crypto card collateral deposit volume.
But while the U.S. narrowly beats out Singapore in terms of the top stablecoin flow markets, Artemis noted the “insurmountable bootstrap problem” that could deter greater merchant acceptance of stablecoin payments in Western countries:
“No captive audience, no exclusive inventory, no problem solved better than cards for the average Western consumer or merchant. Every successful payment network in recent history launched with exclusivity or a forcing function—stablecoin checkout has neither. The real opportunity lies not at the point of sale but in behind-the-scenes settlement. Stablecoin-backed cards represent the synthesis: cards provide ubiquitous acceptance; stablecoins provide superior cross-border value storage. The builders who recognize this will focus on the integration layer rather than fighting behavioral economics with technology.”
Last one in the stablecoin infrastructure pool is a loser
With the above caveat in mind, it’s no surprise that the race to secure larger slices of stablecoin infrastructure shows no sign of stopping. Last week, Visa announced a strategic partnership with U.K.-based electronic money institution BVNK to power Visa Direct’s stablecoin payments.
Last November, Visa Direct began a pilot program to allow businesses/platforms to send USDC-based payouts directly to customers’ digital wallets. The Visa-BVNK partnership will initially focus on markets in which digital assets already have a firm foothold, moving into additional markets “based on customer needs.”
Visa Ventures invested in BVNK last May, and the latter’s CEO Jesse Hemson-Struthers said the firms share a belief in “the transformational potential of stablecoin technology, not just as a payment method, but as a powerful layer of payments infrastructure.”
BVNK, which now handles over $30 billion in annual stablecoin payments, was recently an acquisition target of Coinbase, whose venture capital unit made its own BVNK investment one year ago. Coinbase reportedly offered $2 billion to acquire BVNK, but the companies called off their talks in early November. BVNK was previously linked to similar discussions with Mastercard that also failed to achieve liftoff.
Around the same time, Mastercard was said to be in ‘late-stage’ talks to acquire Chicago-based stablecoin infrastructure firm Zerohash. But on January 20, CoinDesk reported that Zerohash had decided to remain independent, although Mastercard is said to be considering a strategic investment in Zerohash.
Ripple Labs recently invested $150 million in LMAX Group, a U.K.-based cross-asset marketplace for FX and digital assets that handled $8.2 trillion in trading volume in 2025.
The partnership will see LMAX integrate Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin as “a core collateral asset across its institutional trading infrastructure.” The plan is to use RLUSD in “enhanced cross-collateralization and margin efficiencies across spot crypto, perpetual futures and [contracts for difference] trading.”
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BRICS CBDC avengers… assemble?
For years now, the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, with a host of other nations not incorporated into the acronym) have contemplated ways to diminish the U.S. dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. Among these potential dollar-killers was the idea of a unified currency tradable equally among member states.
On January 19, Reuters reported that India’s central bank had proposed combining the central bank digital currencies (CBDC) of BRICS nations to improve cross-border trade and lessen reliance on the dollar. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) wants to discuss the idea at the 2026 BRICS summit, to be held in India at an as-yet-undetermined date.
While the major BRICS members have all individually piloted CBDC trials, adoption has been slow. India’s e-rupee has garnered only around seven million users in three years, and the country recently announced plans to explore issuing its own stablecoin (although the RBI would prefer the focus remain on CBDCs).
Russia’s digital ruble has been around for a couple of years, but only just began rolling out nationwide, while Brazil’s DREX token hit the wall last year after the central bank decided the costs and privacy concerns just weren’t worth it.
China’s digital yuan is by far the most advanced CBDC, with hard numbers to prove it. Just before the year’s end, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) said that as of last November, there had been 3.48 billion digital yuan transactions worth about US$2.3 trillion.
The digital yuan is said to account for over 95% of transaction volume on Project mBridge, the cross-border CBDC payment platform linking China with the UAE, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). But the digital yuan remains a financial minnow compared to the volume enjoyed by the financial rails utilized on major tech platforms like WeChat.
China has been keen to boost the digital yuan’s use in international remittances and is therefore looking for ways to increase the CBDC’s popularity among its citizens. This included the recent announcement that digital yuan deposits can now earn interest at select banks.
Digital asset bribery, on the other hand, can earn you years in prison. Chinese media recently reported that Yao Qian, the former head of the PBoC’s Digital Currency Institute, has been accused of receiving $8 million worth of Ethereum’s ETH token as bribes from crypto businesspeople.
Yao, who was turfed from the Chinese Communist Party in 2024 for engaging in “power-for-money transactions using cryptocurrencies,” reportedly helped certain crypto figures raise money via token sales on exchanges. Yao allegedly received a 10% cut of the proceeds of these sales and used some of the ill-gotten gains to purchase a $3 million home in Beijing. Subtle, he wasn’t. Incarcerated, he is.
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US busts Venezuelan USDT launderer
Earlier this month, Tether froze $182 million worth of USDT on the TRON network without any who/what/why explanation. Given political events and fresh reports that USDT played a crucial role in helping Venezuela’s government evade U.S. economic sanctions, suspicions are that the U.S. government targeted Venezuela for freezing at its request.
Around the same time, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) announced charges of money laundering conspiracy against Jorge Figueira, a Venezuelan national accused of laundering “approximately a billion dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency” on behalf of criminals based in China, Colombia, Mexico, and Panama.
The illicit funds were funneled “into and out of the United States” via “a series of convoluted transactions and quick swaps between financial accounts.” Utilizing a mix of crypto exchanges, private digital wallets, liquidity providers, and traditional bank accounts, Figueira leaned heavily on Tron-based USDT (up to $100 million in a single transaction, according to his own boasting).
USDT on Tron has long been considered the criminal world’s most popular token/network tandem, in part due to its reputation for transaction speed and low fees (even crooks and terrorists are cost-conscious, apparently).
Figueira appeared to agree, as the DoJ’s files contain recordings of phone calls in which he’s quoted telling an associate: “Let me be clear with you. [USDT] is used a lot for laundering money … It is used to transfer money in a quick way, even to make it get to jurisdictions that have some type of issues, etcetera.”
Figueira is scheduled to make his first court appearance on January 27. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison. Unlike USDT on Tron, the time won’t pass quickly.
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Source: https://coingeek.com/bermuda-taking-economy-onchain-thanks-to-coinbase-circle-usdc/
