Wells Fargo Files Plan for WFUSD Digital Assets Effort

WFUSD would provide services “featuring software for tokenization of assets” and “cryptocurrency payments processing” and would “execute trades of digital assets,” the banking giant said in a filing Tuesday (March 10) with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

The filing was flagged in a report by Coindesk, which says Wells Fargo’s move is similar to JPMorgan’s digital asset-related trademark filing last year for “JPMD,” ahead of its debut of a USD deposit token with the same name.

The report posits that the “WFUSD” trademark may signal that this offering will be a tokenized deposit or stablecoin.

PYMNTS has contacted Wells Fargo for comment but has not yet gotten a reply. If the bank is indeed launching a stablecoin, it will be in the company of a host of other financial institutions entering the digital asset space.

“The idea of a bank-issued digital asset was once an oxymoron. Today, it’s one that’s gaining momentum,” PYMNTS wrote last month.

At the time, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) had just clarified that national trust banks were permitted to issue payment stablecoins, with other financial institutions making moves into the digital asset space.

These included a European banking consortium which expanded a shared euro-denominated stablecoin initiative, and Fidelity Investments’ launch of its FIDD stablecoin on Ethereum. At the same time, VersaBank revealed plans for stablecoin custody and interest-bearing deposit tokens, while Goldman Sachs continued to promote stablecoin use cases in emerging markets.

“The early wave of stablecoins was dominated by nonbank issuers, filling a gap created by slow cross-border payments and limited access to dollar liquidity in crypto markets,” PYMNTS added.

“Banks largely stayed on the sidelines, constrained by regulation and reputational risk. That caution is now beginning to erode as distributed ledger technology matures and regulators clarify expectations around custody, reserves and consumer protection.”

However, that report added, it is becoming clear that there won’t be a one-size-fits-all bank stablecoin. The market is breaking along functional lines, with tokens for interbank settlement, others for asset servicing, and still others for cross-border trade.

“We don’t start with the asset,” Biswarup Chatterjee, global head of partnerships and innovation, Citi Services at Citi, said in an interview with PYMNTS. “We typically start with our client need, and then we look at the pros and cons of each type of asset or financing instrument.”