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27 Apr 2026, 23:17
Western Union launches USDPT stablecoin for faster transfers
🚀 Western Union announces USDPT, a US dollar-backed stablecoin, launching next month in its network. USDPT will operate on the Solana blockchain, serving as an alternative to SWIFT for instant settlements. 🌎 Critical data: Western Union also plans a Stable Card rollout to help customers store and spend in $USDT-pegged value, with a focus on inflation-prone markets. Continue Reading: Western Union launches USDPT stablecoin for faster transfers The post Western Union launches USDPT stablecoin for faster transfers appeared first on COINTURK NEWS .
27 Apr 2026, 23:00
Ripple Scores New Korea Banking Deal With K Bank Partnership
South Korea’s internet-only lender K bank has signed a strategic partnership with Ripple to test blockchain-based overseas remittances, marking another bank-facing expansion for Ripple’s payments infrastructure in Asia. The agreement, announced Monday by K bank and first reported by The Korea Herald, was signed at the lender’s headquarters in Seoul. K bank CEO Choi Woo-hyung and Ripple Asia-Pacific Managing Director Fiona Murray attended the ceremony alongside officials from both companies. K Bank Taps Ripple For Blockchain Remittance Tests The partnership centers on whether Ripple’s global network and blockchain infrastructure can improve the speed, cost efficiency and transparency of K bank’s overseas remittance system. For Ripple, the deal extends its long-running institutional payments strategy into South Korea’s digital banking market. For K bank, it gives the lender a live testing track for blockchain-based cross-border settlement at a time when stablecoins and tokenized payment rails are becoming a more serious part of bank-level infrastructure discussions. “We are pleased to partner with K bank, which has helped set the standard for digital banking in Korea and continues to drive innovation,” Murray said. “This partnership will help strengthen K bank’s competitiveness in blockchain-based overseas remittance technology,” Choi said. K bank is already conducting a proof of concept with Ripple for overseas remittances . According to the bank, the first phase tested transfers through a separate application, while the second phase is now assessing transaction stability by virtually linking customer accounts with internal systems. That detail is notable because it suggests the project is moving beyond a standalone test environment and toward a model that examines how blockchain-based remittance infrastructure could interact with bank-side account architecture. The second phase will also test on-chain transfers with partners in the United Arab Emirates and Thailand. K bank has signed memorandums of understanding in both markets for stablecoin-based transactions , according to the report. That gives the Ripple partnership a broader regional angle: the work is not only about improving a domestic Korean bank’s remittance stack, but also about testing how blockchain rails may function across specific cross-border corridors. The wallet component is also part of the experiment. K bank used an in-house wallet in the first phase of the proof of concept, but plans to use Ripple’s SaaS-based digital wallet, Palisade, in the second phase. The goal is to test a faster and more scalable model for compliance and deployment, according to the bank. Notably, Ripple has expanded deeper into stablecoin infrastructure after launching RLUSD in 2024. It has applied for a US trust bank charter, with the approval process still underway . At press time, XRP traded at $1.41.
27 Apr 2026, 22:40
Israeli regulators approve shekel-pegged stablecoin
The approval of the BILS stablecoin issued by Israeli exchange Bits of Gold came after a two-year pilot program on the Solana blockchain.
27 Apr 2026, 22:30
Western Union to launch Solana-based USDPT in MAy
Western Union will roll out its dollar-backed stablecoin, USDPT (U.S. Dollar Payment Token), next month on the Solana blockchain, initially as a settlement tool for agent partners rather than a fully-fledged retail consumer product. The launch had already been planned for the first half of 2026 since last year, and it brings Western Union closer to its goal of contributing further to restructuring cross-border settlement architecture globally. The company also aims to release two other innovative products, namely The Digital Asset Network (DAN), and the USD Stable Card. Plans to launch the USDPT stablecoin were revealed in October 2025, as reported by Cryptopolitan . CEO Devin McGranahan confirmed the timeline during the company’s first-quarter 2026 earnings call on April 24. “At the foundation of our strategy is USDPT, our U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin,” McGranahan told analysts, “It is no longer a question of if Western Union will be active in digital assets; it is now how fast we can scale.” NEWS: During its Q1 earnings call, @WesternUnion said its @Solana -based U.S. dollar stablecoin $USDPT is in final-stage preparation and expected to launch next month as an alternate to SWIFT for cross-border settlements. pic.twitter.com/vR9VgTUtuV — SolanaFloor (@SolanaFloor) April 27, 2026 Western Union’s USDPT focuses on settlements first USDPT will not launch as a retail product. McGranahan said the token will serve as an alternative to SWIFT for settling transactions between Western Union and its agent network in select countries. On-chain settlement would allow transfers to process 24/7, including on weekends and banking holidays when traditional banks go offline. The USDPT token will be issued by the Anchorage Digital Bank, a federally chartered crypto custodian. Western Union first disclosed the partnership with Anchorage and Solana in October 2025, along with the stablecoin reveal, and has since filed a trademark for “WUUSD,” per the Crypto Times report. The company has claimed that USDPT will allow it to capture revenue that would have otherwise flowed to third-party stablecoin issuers, including income from issuance, exchange spreads, transaction fees, and float on reserves. The Digital Asset Network and USD Stable Card companion products The Digital Asset Network (DAN) will connect crypto wallets to Western Union’s retail and agent footprint through a single API. The company said the first DAN partner would go live the week of April 27, with seven or more partners expected to activate throughout the rest of 2026. “Through DAN, millions of wallet users will be able to move from digital assets into local currency using Western Union’s retail network,” McGranahan said. Western Union operates in more than 200 countries with hundreds of thousands of agent locations, giving the network a distribution advantage that most crypto-native stablecoin projects lack. The second product is the USD Stable Card, a payment card that lets consumers hold stablecoins and spend them globally. The card is planned for launch later in 2026 across dozens of markets. The Stable Card is expected to act as an easy-to-assess method to spend stablecoins, particularly in inflation-sensitive markets. Western Union has not disclosed the specific launch markets or its card network partner for the Stable Card. Western Union enters competitive field Dollar-pegged stablecoins now exceed $300 billion in total market capitalization, and the GENIUS Act, signed into law in 2025, has given U.S.-issued tokens a clearer regulatory footing. Western Union is not the only legacy payments company building on Solana. PayPal’s PYUSD, issued by Paxos, has grown into the multi-billion dollar range. Fiserv is rolling out its own Solana-based stablecoin, FIUSD. MoneyGram has also integrated Circle’s USDC on the Stellar blockchain for its mobile app, and Visa has expanded stablecoin settlement support to Solana. Solana processed $650 billion in adjusted stablecoin volume in a single month earlier this year, making it one of the fastest-growing settlement networks by transaction volume. The pilot rollout during the launch in multiple select countries will be the first test of whether USDPT can significantly reduce settlement costs and processing times enough to justify the infrastructure shift and make an impact on the competition. The identities of the initial agent partners and DAN’s first wallet integration, along with The Stable Card’s launch markets and network partner, remain undisclosed. Those details will determine whether Western Union’s stablecoin strategy reaches meaningful scale and achieves the impact intended by the company since the launch announcement. Still letting the bank keep the best part? Watch our free video on being your own bank .
27 Apr 2026, 21:30
Why Does Ripple Keep Unlocking And Selling Millions Of XRP Every Month?
The mechanics behind XRP’s supply have always been public. A breakdown on X from crypto commentator Crypto Tony looks at the process of XRP unlocks in particular, with the theory that the payments technology company is, in fact, diluting every holder of XRP. The Escrow Machine and How It Works In a detailed post on X, a crypto commentator known as Crypto Tony laid out an interesting theory as to why Ripple keeps unlocking and selling millions of XRP every month to his hundreds of thousands of followers. Related Reading: 4-Figure XRP: How High Will The Price Be If Ripple Captures 50% Of SWIFT? To understand the controversy, it starts with how XRP was created and distributed. When XRP launched in 2012, all 100 billion tokens were minted at once. Ripple’s founders took 20 billion for themselves and handed the remaining 80 billion to the company. For the first five years, nothing legally prevented Ripple from selling as much of that supply as it wanted. In late 2017, the company placed 55 billion XRP into escrow accounts on the XRP Ledger. These escrows release up to 1 billion XRP every month, automatically, on a fixed schedule. This was probably meant to address concerns that Ripple could flood the market at any time. Based on that framework, Ripple releases one billion XRP each month but relocks between 60% and 80% of the tokens, and they keep the rest, which is roughly 200 to 300 million XRP. According to Crypto Tony, the remainder is kept by Ripple and used to fund the entire company. Ripple Is Diluting XRP Holders A major part of the analyst’s discussion is how Ripple has been diluting the value of traders holding XRP, citing major examples as to how this is happening. Related Reading: Is XRP The Solution To Everything? Ripple President Drops Bombshell That Changes Everything That funding model has been acknowledged publicly. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has previously indicated in interviews that XRP sales play a role in sustaining the company. The more uncomfortable chapter noted by Crypto Tony concerns how Ripple has, at various points, used its commercial partnerships to move XRP into the market through a secondary layer of sellers. An example is when Ripple paid MoneyGram more than $61 million in market development fees to use XRP. MoneyGram subsequently told reporters it sold XRP as soon as it received it, holding no inventory of the token. The SEC addressed this arrangement in its complaint against Ripple, writing that MoneyGram had become a conduit for Ripple’s unregistered XRP sales. According to Crypto Tony, every holder of XRP is being slowly diluted by the company itself, by design, on a monthly schedule that’s written into the blockchain. This is a major reason as to why XRP is now down six consecutive months. Crypto Tony also mentioned Jed McCaleb, co-founder of Ripple, as another conduit through which the holdings of XRP holders were diluted. McCaleb left the company with 9 billion XRP and spent 8 years dumping about $3.2 billion worth of his holdings. At the time of writing, Ripple still has about 33.355 billion XRP in its escrow wallets, according to data from XRPScan. Featured image from Pxfuel, chart from Tradingview.com
27 Apr 2026, 21:10
Spark reported strong Q1 growth and gained momentum after Aave’s recent exploit crisis
Spark has announced that it closed the first quarter of 2026 in profit, reporting gross protocol returns of $31.5 million and a treasury of $46.1 million. The protocol shared the numbers from its Q1 2026 financial report , and so far, the second quarter has been going well for Spark after it emerged as the unlikely beneficiary of the worst crisis to hit its largest competitor in years. Aave, the dominant force in decentralized lending, suffered a severe blow on April 18 when attackers exploited a vulnerability in Kelp DAO’s LayerZero V2 cross-chain bridge. The attackers minted approximately 116,500 unbacked rsETH tokens worth around $293 million and used them as collateral to drain real wrapped Ether from Aave’s pools. The attack led to a loss that is estimated to be between $124 million and $230 million in bad debt and set off a flight of more than $15 billion in deposits from the protocol in the days that followed. So far, the DeFi ecosystem has rallied to Aave’s aid with a multi-party recovery initiative dubbed DeFi United. The initiative has since drawn contributions from across the ecosystem and raised over $304 million toward restoring rsETH’s backing. Aave has raised $304 million in ETH commitments toward its recovery. Source: DeFiUnited.eth How did Spark turn a rival’s crisis into a moment of validation? Spark made a governance decision on January 29 to halt all new rsETH supply, citing low and heavily concentrated utilization. This was about the same period that Aave launched its rsETH E-Mode with a loan-to-value ratio of 93%. Spark was criticized at that time for that decision, with users of ETH circular leverage strategies accusing the protocol of being overly conservative and abandoning growth. However, when Aave suffered an exploit three months later, Spark recorded zero direct losses. Its SparkLend TVL went up from $1.88 billion to over $3.4 billion as capital moved away from Aave to its platform from users seeking a safer harbor. Spark’s SPK token has gone up by 33% since April 18, trading around $0.036. The protocol announced on April 23 on X that its USDT Savings Vault had crossed $1 billion in total value locked (TVL) in just roughly seven months after launch. Can Aave engineer the kind of comeback that Bybit managed last year? The DeFi United initiative has drawn comparisons to Bybit’s recovery from a $1.4 billion theft by North Korea’s Lazarus Group in February 2025. Bybit restored its reserves within 72 hours through partner support and processed over 350,000 withdrawal requests in the first 12 hours. However, Aave’s situation is a bit different and more complex. DeFi United is not a bilateral backstop arrangement between a platform and its partners. It is a decentralized, multi-DAO coalition attempting to coordinate collateral restoration across multiple networks, pending governance votes and third-party technical actions by the likes of KelpDAO and the Arbitrum Security Council. Key commitments include 25,000 ETH from the Aave DAO, 30,000 ETH from Mantle, and 30,765 ETH released by the Arbitrum DAO. Stani Kulechov, Aave’s founder, personally pledged 5,000 ETH. The Solana Foundation’s president, Lily Liu, said her organization is lending USDT to Aave for the first time, citing cross-network DeFi stability as the motivation. Circle also announced that it was purchasing AAVE tokens, framing the investment as a backing of the ecosystem and the community built around it. Consensys and Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin joined DeFi United with up to 30,000 ETH in financial support. The smartest crypto minds already read our newsletter. Want in? Join them .
