Banks are coming on chain, and regulators are drawing the lines around it
Serguey Asael Shinder2 min readThree stories from this week sit on the same infrastructure and point in different directions: regulated money moving onto public blockchains, the tools that make that acceptable to issuers, and the enforcement aimed at the same rails when they carry sanctioned money.
The bank coin. Fiserv, whose software runs the core systems of many US banks, says its digital-asset platform is live, with Bank of North Dakota's dollar-backed Roughrider Coin as the first use, issued by VersaBank and processed on Solana. The point is the distribution: stablecoin settlement offered by the vendor a bank already uses. Source: https://www.newsbtc.com/business/fiserv-roughrider-coin-stablecoin-bank-platform
The issuer controls. Base's Cobalt upgrade, live since 30 September, adds new policy types and simplified transfer blocking to its B20 token standard, the controls an issuer of a regulated asset uses to decide who may hold and move it, alongside transactions that execute only when onchain conditions hold. Source: https://docs.base.org/upgrades/cobalt/overview
The cut-off. The US Treasury designated Russia's A7 network a transnational criminal organisation, and FinCEN proposed barring US institutions, crypto exchanges included, from transfers involving its front companies. FinCEN says at least $179.1 billion moved in A7's ruble-backed token, A7A5, between February 2025 and June 2026, much of it as a bridge into USDT. Source: https://decrypt.co/379921/us-designates-russias-a7-network-as-transnational-criminal-organization
What connects them. A token on a public chain is a neutral instrument; what makes it acceptable to a bank is control over who holds it and who the counterparties are, and what makes it a target for a regulator is the absence of that control. Fiserv's coin brings the bank's existing compliance with it, Base builds issuer controls into the token standard itself, and the A7 action shows the other side: a stablecoin designed to sit outside correspondent banking, answered with a rule that follows the money onto exchanges. The rails are converging. The question each case answers is who gets to say no.