Tech giant Sony’s online banking unit said it has received conditional approval to establish a national trust banking subsidiary in the United States to support the issuance and management of dollar-denominated stablecoins.
The planned unit, Connectia Trust, National Association, will be based in New York and capitalized at $40 million, according to an announcement from Sony Financial Group. Sony Bank will own 100% of the subsidiary.
The move comes as stablecoin usage increases. Transaction volume hit a record $1.79 trillion last month, 63% higher than May and more than double the year-ago level, according to Visa’s on-chain dashboard.
With dollar-pegged tokens accounting for more than 99% of the total market capitalization of $311 billion, according to DeFiLlama data, this could be a difficult market to break into.
Not only do market leaders USDT and USDC alone account for around $250 billion of the total, but competition is intensifying. A wave of potential rivals also won conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) for stablecoin-related federal trust bank structures, including Stripe-owned Bridge, Paxos and Circle Internet.
