Twenty-One Banks and Asset Managers Plan a Joint Dollar Stablecoin for 2027

Twenty-one banks and asset managers have agreed to develop a common United States dollar stablecoin, with Bank of America, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs among the participants and a launch targeted for the first half of 2027. crypto.news reported the membership and timing, and CoinDesk reported that the group will focus first on payments and digital-asset settlement, with a euro token treated as the priority for expansion.

The commercial logic is the reserve. A dollar stablecoin is a claim on a pool of short-term dollar assets, and whoever holds that pool earns the interest on it. Banks that watch deposits leave for tokenized dollars issued by someone else lose both the funding and the interest income. Issuing the token themselves keeps both inside the regulated banking system.

That is also the incumbents' weak point. Coin Metrics found that reserve income supplied 95.2% of Circle's second-quarter revenue even though the network processed $32 trillion in USDC transfers, according to CryptoSlate. A business whose earnings come almost entirely from the policy rate, and whose transfer volume is dominated by market plumbing rather than end-user payments, is vulnerable to competitors who can subsidize issuance with deposit and settlement franchises.

The scale the newcomers are attacking is already concentrated. Stablecoins in circulation total $310.24 billion, of which Tether accounts for $183.29 billion and USD Coin $73.73 billion, per DeFiLlama. Two issuers hold roughly 83% of the float. A bank consortium arriving in 2027 will not displace that quickly, but it changes who the natural custodian of stablecoin reserves is expected to be, and it gives regulators an issuer set they already supervise.

The open question is distribution. Tether's supply grew on exchanges and in emerging-market payment corridors where users choose it without a bank relationship. A consortium token starts with balance sheets and compliance approval, not with users, and a stablecoin that cannot reach the venues where trading collateral lives earns nothing beyond the reserve income it never attracts.