Revolut Has Proof That Stablecoin Distribution Works. Its Users Proved It in Dollars

Revolut's users moved an estimated $10.5 billion through stablecoin rails in 2025, up 156% on the previous year, according to on-chain analysis by researcher Alex Obchakevich using Dune Analytics data.

On 3 June 2026, Cetin Duransoy, Revolut's newly appointed US CEO, told Reuters the company's planned US bank will include stablecoin services alongside FDIC-insured accounts when it opens in 2027. The same week, Revolut was inside the FCA's regulatory sandbox, trialling a GBP-denominated stablecoin with its 12 million UK users.

What the US bank announcement means, for the non-insider

Revolut filed for a national bank charter with the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) on 5 March 2026. Federal charter approval would let Revolut hold insured deposits under its own entity and connect directly to US payment infrastructure, rather than operating through partner banks as it currently does.

Duransoy told Reuters the bank will focus first on retail and business customers managing multiple currencies, with services covering more than 30 currencies, stock and crypto trading, and stablecoin access. The bank will be headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, with no physical branches.

Stablecoins inside a federally chartered bank carry a guarantee that stablecoins inside a fintech app do not. FDIC insurance signals that the money is real money, which matters to the much larger population that has heard of stablecoins but not yet used them. Revolut's 2025 volume came from users who had already moved past that hesitation. The US bank addresses the ones who have not.

The GBP sandbox trial, explained without the jargon

In February 2026, the FCA selected Revolut from 20 applicants for its regulatory sandbox stablecoins cohort, alongside Monee Financial Technologies, ReStabilise, and VVTX. Per the FCA sandbox cohort page, Revolut's proposal is a GBP stablecoin maintaining 1:1 value with sterling, backed by pound-denominated reserve assets, available for customers to buy, hold, sell, and transfer within the Revolut platform and across the crypto ecosystem. Testing began Q1 2026 and findings will inform the UK's final stablecoin rules, due later this year.

In October 2025, Revolut introduced fee-free 1:1 conversions between US dollars and USDC and USDT. Monthly stablecoin volumes grew from an estimated $600 million to $1.2 billion by December 2025, per Obchakevich's Dune Analytics analysis. That growth happened entirely in dollar-denominated assets, across a platform with millions of UK users who had no GBP stablecoin option available. The sandbox makes one available. The question it answers is whether the absence of a GBP option was what kept users on dollars, or whether the preference runs deeper than that.

What the volume data already told us

The sterling's stablecoin gap the House of Lords documented on 3 June — sterling's entire stablecoin market cap at $1.53 million against a $315 billion global market — did not form because distribution was unavailable. Revolut's platform offered UK and European users stablecoin rails throughout 2025. They chose dollar-denominated assets. The Lords correctly identified the Bank of England's proposed reserve and holding limit requirements as commercially unworkable for issuers. The volume data adds a layer the Lords report did not address: Revolut's users had stablecoin access and expressed a currency preference without being prompted to.

Dollar dominance in payments built up through years of cross-border use by remittance senders, gig workers paid across borders, and crypto-native traders who needed a stable unit of account. Stablecoins made those flows faster without redirecting them toward a different currency. Sterling was not part of those corridors, and the infrastructure that formed around dollar stablecoin use compounded that absence with each passing year.

The question the sandbox will actually answer

Revolut is the most credible vehicle for testing GBP stablecoin demand that exists, because it already carries the trust in digital banking that most stablecoin projects spend years trying to construct. Twelve million UK users, daily payment habits, fee-free conversion: if demand for a sterling stablecoin exists among people who use fintech for routine money tasks, it surfaces here. The sandbox will produce the most honest data point yet on whether the sterling stablecoin problem is a supply problem — solvable through better rules and willing issuers — or a demand problem, which requires a different answer entirely and which regulators have not yet begun to address.

Editor's note:

Every piece published on The Bright Minded goes through careful verification, but mistakes can happen. If you spot an error, have additional information, or want to flag anything, write to rosalia@thebrightminded.com.