Stablecoins are already defining 2025. Last year, all the rage was on meme coins, but things quickly changed when President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania launched their meme coins.
TRUMP and MELANIA, which are undoubtedly some of the top Solana meme coins, unfortunately marked the cyclical tops for meme coins before the GENIUS Act came into play.
As of early December, the total stablecoin market cap is above $310 billion. Tether, the OG, is still the largest by market cap, so far minting over $184Bn of USDT tokens. Others include USDC by Circle, USDS by Sky, and USDe by Ethena.
(Source: Coingecko)
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Sony To Launch A Stablecoin In Q1 2026
Besides USDT, which is the largest but unaudited, others, mainly, USDC, comply with existing laws, especially defined by the GENIUS Act in the US.
The GENIUS Act was passed in the Senate in June and later, the House endorsed it, before the president signed it to law on July 18. Through the GENIUS Act, there are clear laws outlining what private companies must comply with when looking to mint USD-backed tokens.
For example, as part of the GENIUS Act’s reserve requirements, all issuers must back their USD-tracking tokens with low-risk, highly liquid assets, such as cash deposits and treasury bills. They must also act transparently by issuing monthly public disclosures of reserve compositions.
As a result of these clear laws, Sony Bank, the financial arm of Sony Group, plans to issue a USD-pegged stablecoin in the US as early as Q2 2026.
Ahead of this move, they applied for a US national trust bank charter via Connectia Trust in October. If approved by the OCC, they become a federally qualified nonbank issuer, paving the way for the issuance of the USD-pegged stablecoin, enabling low-fee payments in Sony’s ecosystem, including in PlayStation games and more.
The stablecoin will likely be issued on Sony’s Soneium Ethereum layer-2 that launched in January 2025 for content creators.
Soneium relies on Optimism technology, and as of December 1, it managed over $83 million of assets.
(Source: L2Beat)
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Stablecoins Are Well-Suited For Deployment on Layer-2s Like Bitcoin Hyper
That Sony will likely deploy their stablecoin on Soneium, the layer-2, makes sense technically, strategically, and economically. It will be a trend adopted by other players, including Circle and Tether, that not only launch on some mainnets but also on layer-2s.
On Layer 2s, transactions are near-instant and inexpensive. Due to near Visa-like processing speeds, the user experience is significantly improved, allowing more users to experiment and even fully adopt.
Additionally, on these platforms, they rival or even exceed centralized alternatives. For this reason, they can process millions of transactions every day without strain or compromising transparency.
Given these benefits, it is easy to see why Bitcoin Hyper is gaining massive traction.
Unlike Soneium, Bitcoin Hyper integrates the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) to scale Bitcoin via a roll-up platform. Leveraging the SVM, transactions can be processed at a low fee in a highly scalable environment with direct interoperability with Solana, the host of some of the next 100X cryptos.
Moreover, Bitcoin Hyper uses zero-knowledge proofs in its Canonical bridge. In this way, transactions to and from the Bitcoin mainnet are fast, secure, and private.
In the ongoing Bitcoin Hyper presale, over $28.8M has been raised with less than seven hours to go.
Presently, each HYPER is trading for $0.013355. Those who buy HYPER now can also stake for a +40% APY.
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Sony Stablecoin Is Best Built on New L2 Bitcoin Hyper
- Stablecoin boom; over $310Bn of tokens minted
- The GENIUS Act provided clarity
- Sony Bank to deploy a stablecoin in the US
- Bitcoin Hyper is built for stablecoin deployment
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