US Banking Rule Reset Puts XRP, HBAR & XLM In The Spotlight

Fire Hustle centers on a striking development: in 2025, the federal agency that issues national bank charters granted federal trust bank licenses to five crypto-focused companies — Circle, Ripple, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets and Paxos — on the same day.

Similar charters were then sought or secured by Morgan Stanley, Crypto.com, Stripe’s stablecoin arm and others, bringing the total to 11 applicants or approvals in just 83 days.

This rush, Fire Hustle contends, only makes sense because the rules changed in concert. The FDIC dropped its requirement that banks seek special permission before engaging with digital assets. The Federal Reserve scrapped an earlier stance that effectively treated crypto activities as off-limits.

Congress passed a federal stablecoin framework — the “Genius Act” — setting standards for dollar-backed stablecoins, from reserve requirements to who may issue them and how banks must safeguard those reserves. Now, the Genius Act is awaiting the OCC to make their own rules before the Treasury Department can put the bill in action.

A critical feature of that law: all final rules must be in place by July 18, 2026. The seasoned analyst notes a fresh FDIC rule-making, approved April 7, that outlines how banks can custody stablecoins and digital assets for clients, with comments closing June 9 and finalization expected before the deadline.

Ripple, tied to XRP, is positioned most directly. Its newly chartered Ripple National Trust Bank is intended to hold reserves for the RLUSD stablecoin under federal and New York oversight.

Fire Hustle argues this gives institutions a counterpart “regulated by the same agency that oversees JPMorgan,” potentially lowering the barrier to using XRP as a bridge asset in cross-currency payments.

HBAR’s angle is institutional infrastructure. Hedera does not have its own bank charter, but its governing council includes major corporates such as Google, IBM, LG and Deutsche Telekom.

The network has hosted pilots for tokenized government bonds, state-backed stablecoins (including a Wyoming initiative), and stablecoin cross-border payments by banks like Shinhan and Standard Bank.

With U.S. banks now cleared to tokenize collateral and process stablecoin payments, those experiments have a clearer path to scale.

Stellar and XLM are presented as a pure stablecoin infrastructure play. USDC and PayPal’s PYUSD already run on Stellar, Visa has integrated the network for stablecoin settlement, Franklin Templeton has a U.S.-registered money market fund on-chain there, and MoneyGram uses Stellar at tens of thousands of locations for cash–crypto conversion.

Under the Genius Act, stablecoin issuers must either comply or leave the U.S. market; networks with low fees and existing compliant stablecoin traffic, the analyst says, are well placed to benefit.

She is careful to note that regulators have not named or endorsed any specific token. This shift is structural: banks are now permitted to do the things these networks were built for.

Whether real volume materializes depends on execution — Ripple converting its charter into institutional flows, Hedera council members pushing pilots into production, XDC capturing real-world trade documentation, and Stellar retaining its role as a stablecoin rail under stricter rules.

With final stablecoin and custody standards due by mid-July, the policy groundwork for institutional-scale use of XRP, HBAR, XDC and XLM appears to be largely in place, even if market adoption is still uncertain and uneven.

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