Stablecoin infrastructure company Brale is rolling out an interoperability protocol designed to end what it says is a bottleneck in the industry’s growth: moving a rapidly expanding number of custom stablecoins across blockchains.
Dubbed the ION Protocol, it allows participating stablecoins to move between blockchains by burning tokens on one network and minting an equivalent amount on another. Unlike most blockchain bridges, the model does not require liquidity pools to be pre-funded on each supported chain.
While the $300 billion stablecoin market is dominated by Tether’s USDT and Circle Internet’s USDC, new entrants are accumulating. Banks, fintechs, crypto firms and asset managers are increasingly issuing their own branded tokens for payments, settlements and tokenized assets.
Data provider CoinGecko already tracks more than 350 coins, whose value is tied to a real-world asset such as a fiat currency, underscoring the growing need for infrastructure to connect an increasingly fragmented ecosystem. Brale maintains that the current interoperability model will not grow as more issuers introduce their own versions.
Stablecoin scaling issue
The company supports more than a hundred stablecoin programs on more than 30 blockchains, founder and CEO Ben Milne said in an interview with CoinDesk. Many of its clients process billions of dollars in monthly payment volume while maintaining relatively small stablecoin balances because their tokens are designed for transactions rather than investments.
