U.S. Bank, the fifth largest commercial bank in the U.S., announced the successful completion of a pilot for real-time cross-border transfers between entities in North America and Europe using its proprietary USD stablecoin USBDC on the Stellar blockchain.

This transaction was an internal transfer, not a customer payment. The bank describes USBDC as a proprietary stablecoin backed by USD reserves, marking one of the early cases of a bank's own stablecoin being operational on a public blockchain, integrated with core finance, risk, compliance, and operational systems. The pilot covers minting, payment redemption, freezing, and recovery, aimed at validating whether the internal Digital Asset Platform can issue, manage, and move tokenized assets.

Chairman and CEO Gunjan Kedia stated that the pilot demonstrates the bank's ability to accelerate global cash management and fund allocation. Future assessment scenarios include cross-border treasury, liquidity management, and collateral migration. The bank did not disclose the transfer amount or a timeline for customer access. Minneapolis-based U.S. Bancorp is the parent company of U.S. Bank National Association.

The initiative traces back to the establishment of a digital asset team around October 2025, with testing of custom issuance in November alongside Stellar Development Foundation and PwC; the bank previously provided custody for stablecoin reserves for Anchorage Digital Bank. Reasons for choosing Stellar include second-level settlement, fees below one cent, and protocol-level support for freezing and revoking. The pilot issuance address has been made public.

USBDC is positioned differently from trading stablecoins like USDT and USDC, and also differs from the retail remittance currency planned by Zelle. U.S. Bank is a partial shareholder of Zelle, which has an in-app remittance arrangement aimed at India this year. USBDC follows a bank-owned treasury path: public blockchain settlement, but the issuer retains the ability to freeze and recover.

In market mechanics, the buyer is the bank's own cross-border liquidity and collateral positions, selling an internal USD track that is settleable and revocable 24/7, replacing correspondent banks and time zone-separated wire transfers. The event is driven by the bank moving the pilot from a sandbox to the core system, with funds not flooding into public stablecoin trading. Beneficiaries include the Stellar payment network and the bank's digital asset platform providers; traditional correspondent banks face pressure from fees and T+ settlement delays. Corporate clients not connected to this track currently see no new tradable currencies.

The issuance address is visible on-chain, but circulation and public trading pairs have not yet formed; XLM, as the network's native asset, has shown price fluctuations, while USBDC itself is not aimed at retail trading.

Source: Public information