Onigiri Weekend Digest: Institutional Lens #3

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Happy weekend! 

The Token2049 week in Singapore has just wrapped up, and we hope everyone had a productive and inspiring time. From packed panels on real-world assets to side-events buzzing with stablecoin debates, this year’s edition reinforced one clear theme: stablecoins and digital money are no longer fringe topics—they are becoming the backbone of institutional finance. 

Recap this Week's Headliners

SS #35 - Shanghai Center Signals China's Global Payments Challenge
SS #36 - Stripe Lets Every Business Launch Its Own Stablecoin

As the dust settled, two headlines stood out that perfectly captured this shift. In Shanghai, China doubled down on the e-CNY with an international operations hub designed to challenge dollar rails in trade settlement. Meanwhile in the U.S., Stripe unveiled a product that could let every business mint and manage its own stablecoin, complete with institutional-grade custody and compliance.

Together, these stories highlight the two poles of digital money’s future: top-down state-led infrastructure versus bottom-up corporate-led tokenization. Both are accelerating adoption, but in very different ways.

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🍙Onigiri Take

China’s move with the Shanghai e-CNY International Center is a clear geopolitical signal: the yuan’s digital infrastructure is being positioned as a global settlement rail, one that directly challenges dollar hegemony. Yet despite its scale, the adoption curve will likely be narrow—focused on trade partners where political alignment is stronger than market preference.

By contrast, Stripe’s Open Issuance reflects a very different model: modular, enterprise-driven adoption. By reducing issuance to a SaaS function with regulated custodians, Stripe is democratizing the ability for businesses to tokenize liabilities at scale. This could create a proliferation of corporate-branded coins that live comfortably within the U.S. regulatory perimeter.

Our Read: The future is being contested between sovereign rails (CBDCs) and corporate rails (stablecoins). Sovereign rails bring scale and geopolitical clout, but corporate rails bring speed, modularity, and developer energy. The eventual outcome may not be either/or, but a fragmented dual-system where corporates ride stablecoins globally, while CBDCs remain state-aligned instruments.

Winners & Losers: Institutional Outlook

🍙Under the Hood: Institutional Signals Behind the Headlines

While the headlines highlight China and Stripe, the deeper story is about how institutional money rails are fragmenting:

• China’s Strategy: The e-CNY international hub in Shanghai is less about consumer adoption and more about embedding yuan-denominated settlement into trade and commodities flows. This echoes historical attempts to internationalize the yuan via offshore clearing banks, but CBDCs give China new control levers—programmability, surveillance, and direct bilateral settlement outside SWIFT.

• Stripe’s Playbook: Open Issuance essentially “AWS-ifies” stablecoin issuance. Just as cloud services abstracted away hardware, Stripe abstracts away compliance, custody, and liquidity management. For corporates, the barrier to launch branded coins falls dramatically—loyalty points, settlement tokens, or balance-sheet backed coins now become plug-and-play.

Other Market Signals This Week:

• CFTC Tokenized Collateral Initiative: The CFTC formally launched a program to explore tokenized collateral and stablecoin use in derivatives markets — a clear move to integrate stablecoins into core financial plumbing. 

• Tether’s Potential $15–$20B Raise: Reuters reports SoftBank and ARK are in early talks to participate in Tether’s planned raise for ~3% equity, potentially valuing the company at ~$500B. While preliminary, this underscores investor belief in private stablecoins’ structural role.

• China Pressures Hong Kong RWAs: Regulators reportedly asked domestic brokerages to pause RWA tokenization pilots in Hong Kong, revealing a stark divergence: CBDCs fast-tracked, RWAs slowed.

Speculative / Interpretive Signals:

• Token2049 sentiment suggested banks and brokers now view stablecoins primarily as settlement assets, not just retail payment tools — but this is anecdotal unless formal session notes confirm.

• The idea that private stablecoins remain “structurally essential” is a forward-looking interpretation rather than a confirmed fact.

Why it matters: Institutions are no longer debating if stablecoins and CBDCs will dominate rails. The real question is whose architecture—state-controlled, corporate SaaS, or private issuers—will carry the bulk of future settlement.

🍙Stablecoin ≠ Crypto — Two Adoption Pathways

Stablecoins are no longer “crypto products”—they are dollar infrastructure in disguise. This week’s news demonstrates two adoption vectors:

1. CBDC Adoption (e-CNY): Driven by policy necessity and geopolitical strategy, but with adoption frictions outside of aligned trade networks.

2. Corporate Stablecoin Adoption (Stripe): Driven by efficiency and control, where corporates tokenize liabilities to streamline payments, loyalty, and balance sheet management.

Key insight: CBDCs weaponize money as state infrastructure. Corporate stablecoins commoditize it as enterprise software. Both accelerate adoption, but in fundamentally different directions.

🍙Institutional Risks & Unknowns

1. Regulatory Fragmentation: Will Stripe’s coins be treated as e-money, bank liabilities, or securities across jurisdictions?

2. Geopolitical Splits: e-CNY adoption may harden payment blocs, forcing corporates to choose rails based on political alignment.

3. Liquidity Fragmentation: With corporates launching bespoke stablecoins, liquidity could become siloed, undermining network effects unless aggregation layers emerge.

4. Privacy & Surveillance: e-CNY raises user sovereignty concerns; corporate coins may embed programmability tied to business rules.

5. Interoperability Risk: Lack of cross-standards between CBDCs and stablecoins may slow institutional adoption until neutral bridges mature.

Onigiri Capital, a blockchain-focused investment fund with an initial target size of US$50 million, is launched by Saison Capital, the venture arm of Japan’s Credit Saison. Onigiri Capital is on a mission to chart the next chapter of finance and invest in seed and Series A blockchain startups in stablecoins, payments, RWAs, DeFi and financial infrastructure. The fund’s strategy emphasizes connecting startups in the US with Asia’s growing digital asset markets.

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