The private-public settlement flow: tokenised deposits and stablecoins on Rayls

Stablecoins have quietly become the onchain settlement instrument that institutions actually use. What began as a way for crypto traders to hold dollars onchain is now a working layer for payments, treasury operations, and client products inside regulated financial institutions. The total stablecoin market has grown past $320 billion, and Citi's revised forecast puts it between $1.9 trillion in its base case and $4 trillion in its bull case by 2030. For a bank or an asset manager, the question is no longer whether stablecoins matter, but where they sit in the business and how to issue and settle them without rebuilding the institution around a public blockchain.

This post walks through how stablecoin settlement works on Rayls, across both the private layer where institutions issue and settle between themselves, and the public layer where those assets reach a wider international market. The thread running through it is commercial rather than technical. Stablecoin settlement is the clearest near-term revenue opportunity in institutional digital assets, and the institutions moving first are the ones treating it as a product line rather than an experiment.

Three instruments for three settlement scopes

Most institutional settlement is not a single instrument moving from end to end. It is three different instruments, each suited to a different settlement scope, exchanged at the points where value crosses a boundary. Matching the instrument to the scope is what lets an institution keep privacy and control where they matter while still reaching a global market.

There are three scopes, and a different token serves each.

1. Tokenised deposits - for settlement inside a single institution. When value moves between accounts within one institution, for its own clients and internal workflows, it stays inside that institution's Rayls Privacy Node and settles in tokenised deposits, an onchain representation of money held at the institution. Nothing leaves the institution's own chain, so the activity remains entirely private to it.
2. Private stablecoins - for settlement between institutions within the same jurisdiction. When two or more institutions settle with each other in their shared local currency, the payment moves as a private stablecoin across a Rayls Private Network, denominated in that local currency. The Private Network connects their Privacy Nodes and keeps the transaction confidential between the counterparties, while still giving regulators the selective disclosure they are entitled to.
3. Public stablecoins - for settlement between institutions and their clients across jurisdictions. When value needs to cross a border or reach clients and counterparties on the open market, it moves as a public stablecoin, typically dollar-denominated, across the Rayls Public Chain, where reach and interoperability matter most and the compliance perimeter is held by onchain identity.

The same Rayls architecture carries all three. The two private instruments live on the private leg, across Privacy Nodes and the Private Network, and the public instrument lives on the public leg, on the Public Chain. The sections below take each leg in turn, and then show how the three instruments are exchanged at the boundaries between them.

The private leg: issuance and interbank settlement

On Rayls, an institution issues and settles privately inside its own Rayls Privacy Node, a dedicated chain it runs and controls, integrated with its existing custody and authentication systems. Settlement inside the institution, between its own client accounts and across its internal workflows, runs in tokenised deposits and never leaves that ledger. When settlement needs to happen between institutions in the same market, their Privacy Nodes can connect through a Rayls Private Network, and the payment moves as a private stablecoin in the local currency, settled directly between the counterparties rather than through a chain of intermediaries.

This is where Rayls Enygma ensures privacy. Enygma provides confidential settlement between institutions, including atomic delivery versus payment, so that the payment and the asset move together or not at all. Settlement is final in a single confirmed block, which removes the settlement risk and the capital tied up waiting for confirmation that institutions carry today. Confidentiality is preserved between counterparties, while an Auditor View gives regulators the selective disclosure they require. Enygma is already live in production within Rayls Private Networks, including implementations with the Central Bank of Brazil and major commercial banks.

The commercial point for a decision maker is straightforward. Private settlement on Rayls gives an institution the speed and finality of a digital instrument without giving up the privacy and control that made the existing business defensible in the first place.

The public leg: distribution and reach

When value needs to reach a wider market or cross a border, the Rayls Public Chain is the distribution layer, and the instrument is a public stablecoin, usually dollar-denominated. It is an EVM-compatible Layer 1, so it works with the standard tooling institutions and their partners already use, and transaction (gas) fees are dollar-denominated and predictable rather than exposed to the fee volatility that makes public chains hard to budget against.

Reach without a compliance perimeter is a liability for a regulated issuer, so the Public Chain pairs open distribution with onchain identity, where accounts can be verified by regulated institutions and issuers can set the credential rules a counterparty must meet before they can hold or trade an asset. An institution can therefore distribute to its own verified retail clients and to suitable external participants without losing the controls it is accountable for. The same value that settled privately between institutions can move out to this wider market as a public stablecoin without the institution losing its grip on who holds it. Conversely, the institution can exchange into a third-party issued public stablecoin (such as USDT/USDC) to reach the broadest set of international counterparties.

Exchanging between the instruments

The three instruments are not isolated, and the commercial value comes from converting between them cleanly at the points where value changes hands, which is also where foreign exchange happens.

Take the boundary between a tokenised deposit and a public stablecoin. A local-currency tokenised deposit can be paid into the account of a liquidity provider inside the institution's Privacy Node, and that deposit triggers the issuance of a dollar-denominated public stablecoin into the institution's account on the Public Chain. In a single step the institution has converted a private, local-currency tokenised deposit into a public, dollar-denominated stablecoin and performed the FX between the two currencies, all within one composable onchain workflow.

The same exchange runs in reverse on the receiving side. An incoming public stablecoin can be converted back into a local-currency private stablecoin for interbank settlement, or into a tokenised deposit for delivery into a client's account, with the FX taken at that boundary. Because each conversion is explicit and happens at a defined point, the institution can see exactly where value changed form and where the FX was applied, which is the transparency the correspondent model never offered.

What this looks like in production: XP

The clearest proof of this is XP. XP is Brazil's largest investment platform, with more than R$2 trillion, around $400 billion, in total client assets. Through its digital brokerage subsidiary Clear Corretora, XP issues USDXP, a fully USD-backed stablecoin, on Rayls infrastructure. It is fully backed one to one by US dollars, integrated directly into the Clear platform, and gives clients simple dollar exposure with round-the-clock trading and instant execution.

This is not a proof of concept. USDXP is a production product inside a regulated platform, with tens of millions of dollars issued in the first week following launch and issuance growing from there. Put plainly, a $400 billion asset manager is using Rayls to turn dollar access into a live product for its clients, in production, in days rather than quarters, and is now looking at extending the same model into other currencies such as the euro and the pound.

That is the commercial case for stablecoin settlement in one example. The infrastructure exists, the regulatory standards can be met, and the institution that moves first captures the client relationship and the revenue that comes with it.

Cross-border settlement and the stablecoin sandwich

Cross-border payments are the clearest near-term case, and the most useful way to see where this is heading is as a progression the industry has started to call the stablecoin sandwich. Local currency, increasingly held as a tokenised deposit, is converted into a public stablecoin at one end, the stablecoin settles onchain in the middle, and it is converted back into local currency at the other. The conversion at each end is exactly the tokenised-deposit to public-stablecoin exchange described above. What changes over time is how many intermediaries sit in that sandwich, because the layers fall away as institutions take more of the workflow onto their own infrastructure as regulation opens up.

The adoption roadmap will move through four stages.

1. Stage 0 is the correspondent banking model in use today, where a payment from a business in the UK to a business in Brazil hops through a chain of correspondent institutions over SWIFT. It works and it is fully regulated, but it is slow, expensive, and opaque on both fees and timing.
2. Stage 1 keeps the banks at each end and replaces the correspondent chain with a small number of institutions providing a stablecoin settlement layer, one to many per market. Local fiat is on-ramped into a public stablecoin, settled cross-border onchain, and off-ramped into local fiat. It is faster, with near-instant settlement onto local payment rails, and somewhat cheaper, though it still depends on intermediaries and on orchestration to route between them.
3. Stage 2 removes those intermediaries. Banks perform their own on and off-ramp, using the liquidity-provider exchange inside their own Privacy Nodes, and settle directly with each other onchain, many to many, so the payment moves from the sender's bank to the recipient's bank with nobody in between. This is cheaper again and far more transparent on fees for the end customer.
4. Stage 3 is the end state, where a stablecoin payment moves directly between onchain custodial wallets with no fiat conversion at all. It is instant, it is the cheapest of the four, and it opens a regulated gateway for end customers to reach tokenised assets and DeFi innovation through an institution they already trust.

This is where Rayls fits, because stages two and three are the model the Rayls private-public architecture was built for. The sender converts a tokenised deposit into a public stablecoin through its liquidity provider client account, the public stablecoin settles across the Public Chain to the receiving institution, and that institution converts it back into a local-currency private stablecoin or a tokenised deposit for its own market. The step-change across these stages is not only speed and cost. It is programmability, composability with tokenised financial assets, and the connection of traditional payment rails to onchain distribution and liquidity, which is the same convergence that makes the issuance case above work.

The regulatory tailwind

The rules are arriving in the issuer's favour. In the United States the GENIUS Act has established a federal framework for payment stablecoins and is now being implemented, while the market structure layer above it, the CLARITY Act, was placed on the Senate legislative calendar in June 2026 and is awaiting a floor vote and reconciliation before it can be signed into law. In the European Union, MiCA has been in force since December 2024, the UAE's VARA regime is operational, and Singapore's MAS framework is live. The frameworks are not all finished, but the direction is clear enough that the institutions building now will have live products and real settlement volume by the time the rules fully settle, rather than starting from a standing position.

Why this matters now

Stablecoin settlement has moved from the margins to the centre of institutional digital assets, and the institutions winning are the ones treating it as a product with a profit and loss line rather than an innovation pilot. The constraint has never really been ambition. It has been infrastructure that could hold tokenised deposits, a private stablecoin, and a public stablecoin in one place and let an institution move cleanly between them, under the controls it has to answer for. Rayls provides exactly that, which is why a $400 billion asset manager could go from intent to a live stablecoin product in a matter of days. The opportunity for everyone else is to do the same before their competitors do.

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