Last year, I had my first conversation with Tony McLaughlin—shortly after he’d left Citigroup to found Ubyx. What struck me most was this: a man who’d spent 20 years at one of the world’s top banks spoke about public blockchains with the conviction of a crypto-native—yet every argument he made was grounded in the real-world mechanics of check clearing and correspondent banking.

As a payments industry veteran, McLaughlin genuinely believes the infrastructure he spent his career building is about to be replaced. He’s not the stereotypical startup founder we imagine—he’s a seasoned executive from one of the world’s largest banks, and his approach to building a company reflects that: propose an idea, bring it to market, and let the market tell you whether you’re right or wrong.

So how, exactly, can stablecoins truly become ordinary money—the kind that appears in your bank account and is equivalent to cash? His answer involves an infrastructure so utterly mundane that most people in crypto have never even considered it—and traditional bankers haven’t yet realized they need it.

First, a quick overview of McLaughlin’s professional trajectory—his background is essential to this story. He spent nearly 20 years at Citigroup, rising to Managing Director of Treasury & Trade Solutions, with a focus on emerging payments. During that time, he became the principal architect of the Regulated Liability Network (RLN)—perhaps the most influential institutional-grade blockchain concept of the past five years.

RLN proposed a shared, permissioned ledger where central banks, commercial banks, and e-money institutions could all issue tokenized liabilities on the same platform—a regulated sector’s response to public cryptocurrencies. McLaughlin completed proof-of-concepts with the Federal Reserve and the UK Finance Association; the concept also influenced the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) acknowledged RLN as inspiration for its “Unified Ledger” initiative.

Yet McLaughlin resigned—and walked away entirely from the project. For years, he’d championed permissioned private chains as the future of regulated money—but ultimately concluded no one could solve the cold-start problem: asking every major global bank and central bank to join a network that didn’t yet exist, when no one wanted to move first. Public blockchains had already solved that problem—they had users, liquidity, and developers.

The moment that crystallized everything for him came during the 2024 U.S. presidential election. After observing the political trajectory, he concluded that stablecoin regulation was inevitable—which meant banks would eventually be permitted to operate on public blockchains. The GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025, proved him right. He decided he would not spend another second of his life promoting permissioned private chains—and founded Ubyx in March 2025.

On March 3, 2026, President Trump publicly accused U.S. banks of “undermining” the GENIUS Act—the crux of the conflict being yield. Banks had lobbied vigorously against interest-bearing stablecoins, arguing they would siphon deposits out of the traditional banking system. But McLaughlin believes the question is framed backward: stablecoins aren’t a threat to deposits—they’re a massive revenue gift.

He said: “If regulators define stablecoins as ‘crypto assets pegged to fiat currency,’ I think they’re making a fundamental error.” In his view, regulators are defining tools by technology—not by function. Stablecoins aren’t novel crypto-native inventions; they’re among the oldest instruments in commercial law: negotiable instruments. He draws a direct analogy to American Express traveler’s checks issued in 1891—identical in every key attribute: dollar-denominated, non-bank issued, pre-funded, fully collateralized, non-interest-bearing, transferable to bearer, and redeemable at par.

Once you adopt that lens, the question ceases to be, “How do we protect deposits from stablecoins?” and becomes, “How do we treat stablecoins the same way we’ve treated all other negotiable instruments for the past 200 years?” Traveler’s checks are accepted globally at par because of an underlying clearing network. Stablecoins now sit in precisely the same position: they can cross borders in seconds on public blockchains—but there’s no universal mechanism enabling regulated financial institutions to redeem them at par.

Ubyx aims to fill that gap. Its mechanism is deliberately simple: it uses a collection model—not a buy/sell model—with the explicit goal of par redemption. A customer deposits stablecoins into a bank’s custody wallet; the bank submits the request to Ubyx; Ubyx forwards it to the issuer; and the issuer releases fiat from its pre-funded reserve held at the settlement bank. If the issuer fails to pay, the bank returns the tokens to the customer—and the bank bears no balance sheet risk during the clearing process.

McLaughlin estimates roughly that, assuming a $1 trillion stablecoin market with ~$1.8 trillion in annual redemptions, banks charging 100 basis points in fees—plus another 100 bps in cross-border FX spread—would generate $36 billion in annual revenue. For non-U.S. banks, every dollar stablecoin entering the European or Asian banking system and converted into local currency represents pure foreign exchange revenue.

Ubyx’s shareholder roster includes Galaxy Ventures, Founders Fund, Coinbase Ventures, VanEck, and LayerZero—a deliberately designed “investor-as-network-user” structure. In January 2026, Barclays made a strategic investment—the first time in its history it has invested in a stablecoin company—signaling endorsement of stablecoin clearing logic by a European systemically important bank.

Of course, challenges remain. Circle is also advancing its own settlement network, and it remains unclear whether the market will converge on a single-issuer network or a multi-issuer clearing system. Additionally, the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s (OCC) stance on stablecoin yield mechanisms will directly shape both market scale and Ubyx’s growth velocity.

In sum, McLaughlin believes the entire transition hinges on one sentence: “Banks can process stablecoins just like checks.” If an authoritative voice says that, every bank and fintech company worldwide will instantly know what to do. Ubyx is betting that voice will speak up—very soon.

[Foresight News]