Kaupr Daily — Thursday 10 September, 2026
Good morning. Five companies spent this week building different parts of the same thing, and none of them built the money. Meanwhile a Danish central bank, eight Swedish parties and a Swedish court all had something to say about how fast this should go.
💎 Visa turns card settlement data into collateral for onchain loans
💎 Circle buys its way into a hundred payout markets
💎 U.S. Bank moves real money across borders on its own stablecoin
💎 Denmark's central bank sets out what wider stablecoin use could cost it
💎 Twenty-seven firms tell the EU its tokenisation ceiling is far too low
Blockathon Stockholm reaches Demo Day today, with the award ceremony tomorrow.
— Morten
Everyone is building a different piece
Visa turns card settlement data into collateral for onchain loans
Visa is combining VisaNet settlement records with onchain lending, so stablecoin-linked card programmes can borrow working capital. Lenders see how a programme is performing before extending credit. More than 160 such programmes run on Visa's network. One partner has financed $2.5 billion in settlement volume this way. (Source: press release)
Why it matters: Payment firms have always had receivables worth borrowing against, but no way to show a lender how they behave in real time.
Source: Visa Brings Onchain Lending into Everyday Payments — Visa
Circle buys its way into a hundred payout markets
Circle has agreed to acquire Tazapay, a Singapore-based cross-border payments company. Tazapay brings banking partners and local payout rails in more than 100 markets. Around 60 per cent of its volume already involves stablecoins. The deal is expected to close in 2027, pending Singaporean approval. (Source: press release)
Why it matters: Issuing the dollar was never the hard part. Getting it out at the other end, in the local currency someone can actually spend, is the part that needs banking relationships.
Source: Circle Expands Global Payments Infrastructure with Agreement to Acquire Tazapay — Business Wire
U.S. Bank moves real money on its own stablecoin
The bank moved money between its North American and European entities using USBDC, its own dollar-backed stablecoin, on the public Stellar blockchain. It also tested minting, redemption, freezing and clawbacks. The chain was connected to its existing finance, risk and compliance systems. No commercial launch date has been set.
Why it matters: A bank running its own stablecoin on a public chain, with its existing controls intact, is a different proposition from a bank buying someone else's.
Source: US Bank completes first live cross-border payment using USBDC stablecoin — CoinGape
Nine Swiss institutions start testing a franc stablecoin
UBS, PostFinance, Sygnum, Raiffeisen and two more banks are testing a Swiss franc stablecoin in a live sandbox. SIX and TWINT have now joined. The test runs to the end of 2026 with an open outcome. The group is explicit that this is not a decision to launch anything.
Why it matters: A national payments network and the country's dominant mobile payment app joining the same test moves this out of the banks and towards the people who actually pay for things.
Source: CHF stablecoin sandbox enters test phase, adds SIX and TWINT as new partners — FX News Group
Latitude raises $35 million on the last mile
The Texas company raised a Series A led by Oak HC/FT, with Coinbase among the investors. Its founders came from Stripe, Uber and Coinbase. They are solving what happens after the transfer: recipients want money in a bank account or mobile wallet, not a stablecoin and a seed phrase.
Why it matters: Stablecoin payouts have been available in most of the world for years, and adoption stayed low because the money arrived in a form people could not spend.
Source: Latitude raises $35 million to turn stablecoins into local payments — Fortune
The industry says faster. Everyone else says wait.
Denmark's central bank sets out what stablecoins could cost it
Danmarks Nationalbank published an analysis on Wednesday. Stablecoin use in Denmark remains limited, it finds, but close monitoring is warranted. Wider use could affect payments, the financial system and the transmission of monetary policy. Foreign stablecoins gaining traction is the case it singles out.
Why it matters: A small open economy with its currency pegged to the euro has more to lose than most if households start holding dollars that live on a phone.
Source: Stablecoins – global developments and implications for Denmark — Danmarks Nationalbank
Swedish parties back blockchain, then hesitate on the krona
All eight parliamentary parties answered Blockchain Sweden's election survey ahead of Sunday's vote. They broadly agree that blockchain belongs among Sweden's priority technologies. The question they agreed with least was whether Swedish firms should be able to offer stablecoins. Support for simpler crypto tax rules surprised the organisation.
Why it matters: Backing the technology while declining to back a domestic version of the money is a position that decides itself once foreign alternatives are the only ones available.
Source: Swedish parties back blockchain but are warier of stablecoins — Kaupr
Twenty-seven firms tell the EU its tokenisation ceiling is far too low
Nasdaq, Boerse Stuttgart, Securitize and 24 other signatories have written to the Council and Parliament. They want the volume cap in the DLT Pilot Regime scrapped. The Commission proposes lifting it to €100 billion. That is far too low, they argue, and some European projects already hold more than that.
Why it matters: The cap is measured on market value rather than turnover, so a number that sounds generous stops a venue from listing much of anything at scale.
Source: Industry push to speed up tokenisation in Europe — Kaupr
A Swedish court backs the regulator over the applicant
Förvaltningsrätten has rejected QB Europe's appeal against the refusal of its MiCA licence. The court agrees with Finansinspektionen that the company's money-laundering risk assessment was not sufficiently adapted to its own business. It declined to refer the case to the EU Court of Justice. Valuno has three weeks to appeal.
Why it matters: The judgment puts a court behind the strictest reading of what MiCA requires, at a point where firms are choosing which country to apply in.
Source: New setback for Valuno in its MiCA licence case — Kaupr
Borrowed money found the thin markets
Leverage has moved out of bitcoin and into the altcoins
Open interest in altcoin perpetual futures passed bitcoin's over the weekend, the first time since December 2024. Zcash alone accounts for a record $2.4 billion. Open interest measures positioning, not conviction, and these markets sit on thin order books. The last crossing was followed by sharp mid-cap corrections.
Why it matters: Borrowed money concentrated in the thinnest markets is the setup that turns an ordinary sell-off into a cascade.
📅 Blockathon Stockholm: Demo Day
Teams present today after two build days at Netlight, on problem statements from UNICEF, the Swedish Red Cross, the World Food Programme, Hundstallet and AI Institutet. The jury deliberates, and the week closes tomorrow with the AI x Blockchain Summit at KTH and the award ceremony, where the winning team takes USD 10,000 in AWS credits.
Kaupr is media partner, and three of the problem statements are up as interviews.
▶️ Arun Maharajan, UNICEF: proof from the field ▶️ Melanie Rideout, Red Cross: three problems, one hackathon ▶️ Madina Saleh: when a creator's face can be generated without asking
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Wishing you a great Thursday — and welcome back tomorrow morning for the next edition of Kaupr Daily.
Best regards Morten Myrstad Founder & Editor