This year’s Money 20/20 event brought industry leaders together to discuss the latest in payments and fintech. Many conversations at the event underscored certain key trends that are rapidly shaping the payments landscape. The shift in the types of conversations around stablecoins happening today is undeniable – the question has moved beyond “Why stablecoins?” to “How do we do this today?” Here are three major takeaways from this year’s event.

This January, the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) will come into force, along with a number of other EU crypto regulations, and it is poised to usher in a new era for technology providers – in both the traditional and digital asset markets. Fireblocks is ready for this transition, and we’ve been helping our clients prepare for the new digital asset regulations in recent months as the deadlines approach.

SCB 10X, the disruptive technology investment and innovation arm of SCBX Group, has launched Rubie Wallet, a digital wallet application designed to facilitate seamless QR payments using USDC and THBX (Thai Baht Stablecoin). Its key activation will be for foreign visitors attending DevCon 2024 in Bangkok. The stablecoin was developed in collaboration with Elliptic, Circle, Base, SCB, and InnovestX, with Fireblocks providing Wallets-as-Service infrastructure for the platform.

Fireblocks, an easy-to-use platform to manage all digital asset operations and build innovative businesses on the blockchain, is working with payments solution Borderless.xyz to create the next generation of fiat-to-crypto rails.

We’re excited to announce that Trident, a leading, institutional-grade service provider in the digital asset space, has chosen Fireblocks as a key technology partner to power its diverse range of services.

When we first announced our plans to build Fireblocks Automation in April 2024, we set out to tackle a seemingly mundane yet crucial challenge for our customers. Our goal was to mitigate the manual, repetitive, time-consuming, and error-prone blockchain payment and crypto trading operations that were hindering businesses from easily scaling their operations as they expanded across geographies and add new product offerings.

Crypto adoption is remarkably high in Africa. According to the Chainalysis Crypto Adoption Report, several of the world’s leading countries for crypto adoption are African, with Nigeria taking the highest rank overall. This is largely due to social and economic drivers across the continent, with digital assets offering a variety of benefits for African investors – such as protection against inflation, affordable cross-border transactions, and overall stronger financial access and inclusion.

In recent years, the digital asset market has experienced both explosive growth and sobering setbacks. The collapse of FTX in November 2022 highlighted a significant vulnerability within the crypto ecosystem – the inherent counterparty risk that emerges when exchanges serve as both trading venues and custodians, roles traditionally held separately to protect market participants.

Tokenization projects are making significant strides in financial markets, and beyond, by making financial and real world assets more accessible. As the market evolves, institutions require a secure and scalable solution that they can easily build and deploy. In September 2023, Fireblocks bolstered its tokenization capabilities with the acquisition of BlockFold, to provide a complete service layer of advisory, token customization, orchestration, and distribution.

Fireblocks now enables customers to use Hashnote’s regulated tokenized money market fund, US Yield Coin (USYC), as a collateral asset on Deribit through Fireblocks Off Exchange. This significant milestone marks the first time a major crypto derivatives exchange is supporting a regulated tokenized money market fund, and the first time this type of token is being used as collateral. USYC is a cross-collateral currency on Deribit.