Stablecoin Settlement in Minutes, With the Yield Still Running
Two digital-asset infrastructure firms say they have moved institutional money between counterparties in minutes using a stablecoin, without the collateral giving up the interest it earns while in motion. Lynq, the broker-dealer-operated settlement network for digital asset markets, and The Better Money Company (TBMC), a stablecoin clearinghouse, completed a live proof of concept on 13 October 2026 that converted a client's assets held on Lynq into Ripple's RLUSD and settled the transaction in a few minutes. The test ran on live production accounts between real institutional counterparties, and it is the first phase of a wider collaboration.
What did Lynq and TBMC actually prove?
The demonstration was narrow by design. TBMC took a client's assets sitting on Lynq, converted them into RLUSD at face value, and completed settlement in minutes, bypassing the fixed cut-off windows that govern traditional bank settlement. The workflow was pre-funded, meaning no credit facility stood in for speed and no counterparty extended short-term credit to bridge the gap while the transfer cleared.
The detail that separates this from a routine fast-settlement claim is what happened to the money in transit. According to the two firms, interest on the client's assets continued to accrue throughout the settlement, calculated using Tassat's Yield in Transit functionality, which works out accrued interest based on how long an asset is held. In conventional settlement, capital in motion is idle capital: it stops earning the moment it leaves one account and starts clearing. The claim here is that the collateral never stopped working.
Jerald David, chief executive of Lynq, framed the test as a deliberately small answer to a specific question: whether a digital dollar can settle between institutions in minutes without a credit line substituting for genuine speed. Sam Broner, founder and chief executive of TBMC, argued that stablecoins only become serious institutional infrastructure once firms use them inside real settlement workflows rather than as a standalone asset, and that fragmentation across competing tokens can be resolved by moving collateral on-chain and settling in whichever stablecoin a counterparty needs, at par.
Why does interest in transit matter for institutions?
For a firm running large balances across multiple venues, the cost of moving money is not only the fee. It is the yield forgone every time collateral sits in a settlement queue instead of in an interest-bearing position. Shrinking settlement from days to minutes already reduces that drag. Removing it altogether, if the mechanism holds at scale, changes the arithmetic of how often and how freely institutions are willing to reposition capital.
The underlying method is not new to Lynq alone. Yield in Transit is Tassat's technology, and Tassat secured a United States patent covering block-by-block interest accrual during round-the-clock settlement. It is worth noting the corporate relationship: Tassat is one of the three firms that built Lynq, alongside Arca Labs and tZERO Group, with Lynq operated by broker-dealer tZERO Securities. The yield capability is in-house to the network's own founders rather than a capability licensed in from an unrelated vendor, a point the announcement understates when it describes Lynq as leveraging Tassat's functionality.
How does this fit the wider stablecoin settlement race?
The settlement layer has become the most contested part of institutional digital-asset infrastructure, and this test enters a crowded field. The global stablecoin market was worth more than 300 billion dollars by late September 2026. RLUSD, issued by Ripple's Standard Custody and Trust subsidiary and launched in December 2024, had grown to roughly 2.5 billion dollars by the same point, placing it among the larger dollar tokens while still holding a small share of the whole. It circulates on both Ethereum and the XRP Ledger.
Lynq launched in July 2025 and runs on a dedicated Avalanche layer-one network, with U.S. Bank serving as its qualified cash custodian. TBMC is the newer entrant, founded in 2026 by Broner, previously a stablecoin investor at a16z crypto, and co-founder Adam Zuckerman. The company raised a 10 million dollar seed round led by a16z crypto and runs a clearinghouse that swaps and redeems stablecoins at par, connecting issuers such as Paxos with payment and treasury builders. Where many settlement efforts compete on raw speed or on operating inside a regulated perimeter, the distinguishing pitch of this partnership is the preservation of yield across the settlement itself.
What happens next?
This proof of concept is phase one. Native stablecoin support on the Lynq platform is targeted for the end of 2026, and the firms position the work as part of a broader plan to connect creation, redemption, settlement and capital movement into more integrated institutional workflows. For now, the result is a single pre-funded transaction rather than production volume. The questions that follow are whether the yield-in-transit claim survives at scale, whether more stablecoins beyond RLUSD are supported, and whether live institutional flow materialises once native support arrives.
Why This Matters to FinanceX Readers
For treasurers, OTC desks and custodians, the relevant question about stablecoin settlement has moved on. It is no longer whether a digital dollar can settle fast, which is by now well established, but whether it can settle fast without forcing capital to sit idle while it clears. If interest genuinely survives settlement, the opportunity cost of moving collateral falls, and that matters most for the firms carrying the largest balances across the most venues.
The caveat is scale: this is one small, pre-funded test between known counterparties, so it is best read as a signal of direction rather than evidence of production readiness. The firms to watch are the ones that can turn a controlled demonstration into repeatable institutional flow.
