Illustrative image | Cryptocurrencies. (Photo: Freepik) | Western Union logo. (Photo: Wikipedia) 
Western Union, the 173-year-old money transfer titan, has just announced plans to launch its own stablecoin, the US Dollar Payment Token (USDPT), a blockchain-based digital dollar built on Solana and issued by Anchorage Digital Bank.
If you don’t understand what that means, it’s basically Western Union hedging against the inevitable switch from money transfer to the cryptoverse.
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And here’s the thing about the timing of the announcement: days before unveiling USDPT, Western Union’s third-quarter 2025 results landed. Revenue was flat at $1.03-billion, while its core consumer money transfer business – which makes up 85% of the pie – shrank by 6%.
Branded digital revenue grew 7%, a modest uptick that can’t quite cover the structural decline in its cash-based remittance empire.
A feature, not a bug
Western Union president and CEO Devin McGranahan spun it as adaptation. “Our ability to adapt and execute in dynamic conditions reflects the durability of our business model,” he said.
But Western Union’s move into stablecoins reads less like an adaptation and more like a pre-emptive strike, a recognition that it must become the thing disrupting it before someone else does further damage.
The USDPT launch is part of a larger digital asset network meant to bridge the fiat and crypto worlds; giving users the ability to send, receive, spend and hold stablecoins in the same way they once did with paper money orders.
It’s the logical next step for a company that’s watched fintechs and crypto startups eat into its margins for a decade. Or as McGranahan put it: “USDPT will allow us to own the economics linked to stablecoins.”
The African survival economy
For Western Union, the pivot isn’t about the US market. It’s about Africa, where stablecoins have already leapfrogged traditional banks.
As Larry Cooke, head of legal Binance Africa, puts it: “Stablecoins offer something rare in many parts of the continent: predictability.”
Freelancers in Lagos, Nairobi and Cape Town now prefer being paid in USDC over bank wires that take days. “Traders send USDT across borders without losing money to hidden foreign exchange fees,” Cooke wrote in a recent op-ed. “Informal businesses protect income from local currency swings by holding earnings in digital dollars.”
Between July 2023 and June 2024, sub-Saharan Africa processed more than $54-billion in stablecoin transactions, accounting for 43% of all crypto activity in the region. People are using stablecoins “to survive, to save, and to grow,” Cooke explains, not to speculate.
What this means for you
The stablecoin race is now a three-lane sprint: Big Tech (with PayPal’s PYUSD), Big Banks (like JPMorgan’s JPM Coin) and now Big Remittance (Western Union’s USDPT). And in the background, the BRICS bloc is quietly building a parallel gold-backed system that could shift the tectonic plates of global finance.
If that sounds like the start of a new Bretton Woods moment – it probably is.
The real question is who gets to define what “stable” means: Silicon Valley, BRICS or the fintech fossils like Western Union trying to reinvent themselves before it’s too late.
It’s a reminder that stablecoins are already infrastructure in markets that legacy financial systems have failed to serve.
For Western Union, this is existential. It has the trust, the compliance frameworks and the reach – but not the speed or cost efficiency.
Stablecoins solve that. If Western Union can use its digital asset network to plug into this activity, it reclaims relevance in a world where crypto wallets are becoming the new bank branches.
In gold we trust, not green
Zooming out, Western Union’s announcement lands alongside another landslide: the BRICS nations’ plan to launch a gold- and resource-backed stablecoin. Unlike consumer-facing USDPT, the BRICS token would be a wholesale settlement currency for central banks, backed by gold, oil and rare earth minerals.
It’s also a political independence play. After the US froze $300-billion in Russia’s reserves in 2022, many nations realised that the dollar could be weaponised. Since then, the share of global reserves held in dollars has fallen below 60%, down from more than 70% two decades ago. Central banks have quietly been swapping US Treasury bonds for gold.
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A gold-backed BRICS stablecoin, part of the so-called “BRICS Pay” system, would bypass SWIFT (a secure, global messaging network used by banks and other financial institutions to exchange standardised payment instructions and compliance info) and allow trade settlement outside the dollar sphere. It’s a direct challenge to the dollar’s privilege and, by extension, to the entire post-1971 fiat system.
So why gold? Because in a world of algorithmic trust, nothing beats the weight of a metal bar. Gold offers intrinsic value, a hedge against inflation and political neutrality; all qualities that fiat currencies and algorithmic stablecoins lack. As one academic said, “history suggests that fiat-based reserve currencies last 40 to 60 years and are invariably reset with a gold-backed standard”.
Walking the arbitrage tightrope
Western Union’s challenge is to navigate both worlds: the permissionless innovation of blockchain, and the permission-heavy world of regulation. It’s betting that its global compliance apparatus, agent network and brand trust can give it an edge where crypto-native players struggle.
But it’s also acknowledging a hard truth: the world no longer waits for Western Union to move money. Stablecoins already do that in seconds, not days. What Western Union brings is the last mile, converting digital tokens back into cash for the billions still outside formal banking.
The irony is poetic. Western Union is becoming the bridge it once resisted. DM