On November 11, people familiar with the matter revealed that global financial institutions including Goldman Sachs (GS), Citigroup (C), Banco Santander and Deutsche Bank have pledged approximately $270 million to a joint stablecoin project, funding its operations for the first five years after launch.

The initiative, internally codenamed "Project Faro," plans to establish a stablecoin issuance entity in the United States and officially roll out its product in the first half of 2027. First announced in September of this year, the project now involves 21 international financial institutions and is currently searching for a chief executive.

Under the plan, the project will initially issue a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar, then gradually expand to other Group of Seven currencies, with a euro stablecoin to be prioritized. The related products will target wholesale financial, institutional and retail markets, mainly for cross-border payments and digital asset settlement, while complying with regulatory frameworks such as the U.S. GENIUS Act and the European Union's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA).

The collaboration aims to integrate the liquidity, payment infrastructure and client resources of traditional financial institutions to compete with existing stablecoin issuers such as Tether and Circle. Currently, the global stablecoin market is worth about $290 billion, with Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC together accounting for roughly 85% of the market share.

The project can be traced back to late 2025, when 10 financial institutions took the lead in studying the issuance of reserve-backed digital currencies on public distributed ledgers. Since then, cooperation has gradually expanded to North America, Europe, East Asia, the Middle East and Africa, with participating institutions also including Bank of America, UBS, Fidelity Investments and Wells Fargo.