Fortune 500 Giant Fiserv Bets Big: Solana-Powered Stablecoin Launch Shakes Up Crypto
Wall Street meets Web3 as Fiserv—the $90B financial services behemoth—throws its weight behind stablecoins. Their Solana play could finally bring institutional liquidity to crypto's wild west.
Why Solana? Speed and scalability. While legacy finance still struggles with T+2 settlements, Fiserv's move could demonstrate real-time value transfer at scale. The ultimate test? Getting boomer CFOs to care about blockchain.
This isn't just another stablecoin—it's a Trojan horse. Fiserv processes over 12B annual transactions for banks that still think 'DeFi' is a typo. Their entry validates crypto infrastructure while exposing its biggest irony: TradFi giants will likely dominate the very industry that wanted to replace them.
One question remains: Will they call customer support when their stablecoin gets arbitraged by a 19-year-old DeFi degenerate?
FIUSD to integrate Fiserv’s banking system
Fiserv plans to integrate the new stablecoin with the firm’s existing banking and payments system, with the infrastructure allowing customers easier and more efficient access to digital services via their banking and payment flows.
“With our scale, reach, and technology leadership, Fiserv is uniquely positioned to advance stablecoin-powered payments and help democratize access to blockchain financial services. Together with our other cloud-native banking and merchant platforms, we believe FIUSD will provide our clients with the efficiency and optionality they need to thrive in the evolving banking and payments ecosystem,” said Takis Georgakopoulos, chief operating officer of Fiserv.
Fiserv’s platform is also designed to leverage the firm’s Finxact Core processing system as the underlying ledger. The platform will also connect to Fiserv’s various systems, including cloud-native orchestration, payments, and banking.
According to the team, FIUSD’s launch will expand Fiserv’s global reach, bringing more users from across 10,000 financial institutions into the network. The company also boasts six million merchant locations, with approximately 90 billion transactions processed annually.
Partnership with PayPal
Apart from Paxos and Circle Internet Group, Fiserv says it is talking to other companies about potential partnerships. The goal is to tap into these collaborations to expand access to and use of stablecoins and tokenized deposits.
The company said in a separate press release that it was partnering with PayPal Holdings to enable interoperability between Fiserv’s stablecoin FIUSD and PayPal USD (PYUSD). PayPal launched PYUSD in 2023 and is one of the USD-backed stablecoins competing with Circle’s USDC and Tether (USDT).
Efforts to tap into the fast-paced adoption of stablecoins amid regulatory milestones in the U.S. has made other projects such as Ripple’s RLUSD attract attention.
Several major banks and financial institutions are also keen on the sector, particularly as the U.S. moves closer to the GENIUS Act becoming law.
