U.S. Bank completes live pilot of its own dollar stablecoin on the Stellar blockchain

U.S. Bank has completed a live pilot transaction using its own dollar-backed stablecoin, USBDC, on the public Stellar blockchain, moving funds internally between the bank’s North American and European entities.

The transaction ran on the bank’s internally developed Digital Asset Platform, and was designed to validate a specific set of functions rather than to move production volume: minting new tokens, redeeming them back into dollars, freezing tokens if needed, and clawing back tokens already issued. Those last two controls — freeze and clawback — are the kind of override capability banks and regulators have generally treated as a precondition for taking a stablecoin seriously as bank-grade infrastructure, since they let the issuer intervene on funds already on-chain if something goes wrong.

U.S. Bank has been explicit that this remains an internal project focused on treasury operations — liquidity management and collateral mobility between its own entities — rather than a product being rolled out to clients. No date for a commercial or customer-facing launch has been announced.

The pilot lands amid a broader wave of bank-issued stablecoin activity following the 2025 GENIUS Act, which established a federal licensing framework for payment stablecoins in the United States. Several large banks have since disclosed their own stablecoin or tokenized-deposit pilots, largely framed the same way U.S. Bank frames this one: as internal treasury and settlement infrastructure first, with any customer-facing use case a separate and later decision.

Because the transaction was internal and the platform is not generally available, there are no independent transaction volumes, costs or settlement-time figures to verify beyond what the bank itself has disclosed about the pilot’s scope.