Points of Focus

• MoneyGram launched MGUSD on Stellar on June 2, with Bridge as the GENIUS Act-ready issuer, M0 for minting, and Fireblocks for custody.
• MGUSD is MoneyGram’s own stablecoin, one of the first proprietary dollar stablecoins issued by a global payment network.
• The launch completes a four-month buildout spanning partnerships with Stellar, Stripe, and Tempo.

MoneyGram launched MGUSD on June 2, a native US dollar stablecoin issued on the Stellar network and designed to serve as the settlement layer across its global payments network.

Read how: https://t.co/gLsIk6nPwb

— MoneyGram (@MoneyGram) June 2, 2026

The launch brings together three infrastructure partners:

• Bridge, a Stripe company, as the regulated GENIUS Act-ready issuer
• M0, providing the smart contract infrastructure for minting and burning MGUSD 
• Fireblocks, handling custody. 

MoneyGram describes MGUSD as “the connective tissue” powering a growing suite of financial services for families sending money across borders and billions of people underserved by traditional finance.

The significance of MGUSD is structural. MoneyGram operates in more than 200 countries and territories, serves over 50 million customers annually through nearly 500,000 retail locations, and has run one of the world’s largest physical payment networks for 85 years. MGUSD is not an integration of a third-party stablecoin.

It is MoneyGram’s own instrument, purpose-built to settle transactions across that existing distribution footprint without the friction, cost, and intermediary exposure of correspondent banking.

The infrastructure stack

The three-partner stack is designed to separate the compliance, issuance, and custody functions required by stablecoin infrastructure.

Bridge, acquired by Stripe in 2024, handles regulatory compliance and issuance. As a GENIUS Act-ready issuer, Bridge has already satisfied the reserve, redemption, and Anti-Money Laundering standards the US stablecoin framework requires. That designates MGUSD as compliant from day one, without MoneyGram having to build its own money transmitter infrastructure for digital asset issuance.

M0 provides the smart contract infrastructure: the mint and burn mechanisms that keep MGUSD supply in sync with reserves. M0 has positioned itself as a neutral infrastructure layer for institutional stablecoin issuance, enabling multiple issuers to deploy tokens on shared infrastructure without sharing reserves or governance. Fireblocks handles custody, providing the institutional-grade key management that regulated payment operators require before touching digital assets at scale.

Stellar is MoneyGram’s blockchain of choice for the launch. The two organizations have partnered since 2021, and the relationship has produced five years of live deployments: a cash-in/cash-out network for digital assets, a stablecoin balance within the MoneyGram app, and the April 2026 expansion of that balance to El Salvador and across Latin America.

The buildout that preceded MGUSD

The June 2 launch is the capstone of a four-month MoneyGram infrastructure program that has moved faster than any prior phase of its blockchain strategy.

• In September 2025, MoneyGram launched its next-generation app in Colombia, giving consumers access to a USD-backed stored-value account powered by stablecoins on the Stellar network.
• In April 2026, MoneyGram and the Stellar Development Foundation extended their multi-year partnership, announcing the expansion of stablecoin balances to El Salvador and a broader rollout across Latin America.
• Also in April, MoneyGram modernized its global retail infrastructure on Stripe, announced at Stripe Sessions in San Francisco, upgrading nearly 500,000 locations with modern point-of-sale technology.
• In May 2026, MoneyGram became Tempo’s anchor remittance validator, adding the Stripe and Paradigm-incubated layer-1 blockchain to its settlement infrastructure alongside Stellar.

Today, @MoneyGram joined as Tempo's first remittance validator with plans to bring stablecoin settlement into live payment flows. pic.twitter.com/C2tQrpvuLB

— Tempo (@tempo) May 20, 2026

MGUSD closes the loop: MoneyGram now has its own stablecoin, its own validator presence on Tempo, a modernized retail network on Stripe, and a five-year distribution partnership with Stellar. Each piece was built independently. Together, they form a stablecoin-native payment network that reaches consumers in markets where the conventional dollar banking system does not.

What this means for the ecosystem

MGUSD is the third major proprietary stablecoin to launch in the past week. SoFiUSD went live for 13.7 million retail banking members on May 27, issued by an Office of the Comptroller of the Currency-chartered national bank backed by Federal Reserve cash. Georgia’s GELT completed its Ethereum mainnet lifecycle test on May 21.

The pattern is consistent: Institutions are no longer integrating third-party stablecoins. They are issuing their own, purpose-built for their specific distribution, compliance, and settlement requirements. MoneyGram’s decision to issue MGUSD rather than settle in USDC (USDC) reflects the view that a proprietary instrument, with its own reserve management, issuance controls, and brand identity, better serves its 200-country network than a shared dollar stablecoin where MoneyGram is one of thousands of users.

The GENIUS Act’s reserve and compliance framework, enacted in June 2025 and now being implemented through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) and sanctions rule, provides the regulatory floor that makes proprietary stablecoin issuance commercially viable for institutions at MoneyGram’s scale.

Bridge’s GENIUS Act-ready status means MGUSD enters a defined legal framework rather than a regulatory grey zone. Deloitte’s 2026 FSI Predictions forecast $200 billion in stablecoin-enabled US retail payments by 2030 but did not anticipate that the issuers would be MoneyGram, SoFi, and Georgia, alongside Circle and Tether. June 2026 is the month that the forecast started looking conservative.