Tassat is developing a new marketplace aimed at giving regional and midsize US banks access to the fast‐growing stablecoin sector, in a bid to stop a handful of Wall Street giants dominating the business of holding reserves behind the digital tokens.
The New York-based firm, which previously helped build the Signet payments system, has launched what it calls Project NENYA – a stablecoin reserve management platform designed to connect regulated stablecoin issuers with a broad range of smaller lenders and tokenised high-quality liquid assets.
Pilot activity for the platform is expected to begin in early 2027, with Tassat positioning the service as a way for banks outside the largest tier to compete for deposits that are currently clustered at a limited number of specialist institutions.
Under the model being proposed, stablecoin issuers that are subject to regulation would be able to allocate their reserves across participating banks and into tokenised instruments judged to be high-quality and liquid, while monitoring in real time how those allocations affect pricing, liquidity conditions and counterparty exposure.
Tassat argues that this shared marketplace could give issuers more flexibility in how and where they hold the assets backing their tokens, while offering regional and midsize banks a route into a business line that has largely bypassed them so far.
According to the company, the stablecoin market is on course to grow toward a multi‐trillion‐dollar scale, intensifying debate over how the cash and liquid securities that support these tokens should be distributed through the banking system.
Tassat’s leadership contends that concentrating those reserves at a small group of major banks increases both liquidity and deposit‐concentration risks and could ultimately shut smaller lenders out of a key emerging source of funding.
By contrast, they say, spreading reserves more widely across a diversified group of institutions, including regional and midsize banks, could reduce systemic vulnerabilities while broadening participation in the stablecoin economy.
The platform is intended to allow issuers to assess counterparties and manage risk more dynamically, with visibility over the relative cost of placing reserves at different banks and in different tokenised assets, as well as the impact on overall liquidity.
For banks, Tassat is pitching Project NENYA as a tool to attract and manage stablecoin‐related deposits in a way that meets regulatory expectations, at a time when many smaller institutions are looking for new sources of funding and fee income.
The move comes as stablecoins continue to draw attention from regulators, policymakers and traditional financial firms, who are grappling with how to integrate these dollar‐pegged digital tokens into the broader financial system without amplifying risks.
While a small cadre of specialist institutions currently dominates the business of holding stablecoin reserves, Tassat is betting that issuers and regulators alike will welcome a more distributed model as the market scales up.
The company’s approach reflects a wider trend toward tokenisation of conventional financial instruments, with high‐quality liquid assets increasingly being recreated on blockchain-based platforms to enable faster settlement and more flexible collateral management.
Tassat’s Project NENYA is still at the pilot stage, and its ultimate impact will depend on whether enough regulated stablecoin issuers and regional banks choose to participate once the platform opens for testing in early 2027.
