MoneyGram has been quietly building on blockchain for over five years. Now, with its own stablecoin (MGUSD), a Kraken partnership, a validator seat on the Tempo network, and $2B+ in stablecoin settlements already running — the pace is accelerating.
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MoneyGram does not need an introduction. The company moves money across roughly 200 countries and territories, some 20,000 corridors, and about 500,000 retail locations, and it has done so for more than 80 years. What has changed is where the plumbing runs. Speaking on The Defiant’s Converge podcast, Chairman and CEO Anthony Soohoo described a company “going through a massive refounding,” one being rebuilt from the backend up on stablecoins and blockchain rails.
“We want our employees and our teams to think like founders,” Soohoo said, casting the first 18 months of his tenure as a deliberate rebuild of core infrastructure rather than a front-end facelift. That sequencing, he argued, is why the product cadence is now accelerating. In recent months MoneyGram has integrated with Kraken to give crypto users a cash off-ramp, taken a validator seat on the payments blockchain Tempo, and launched MGUSD, a proprietary US dollar stablecoin announced about two weeks before the interview.
Five Quiet Years
MoneyGram was among the first remittance companies to let people convert digital assets into physical cash, work that began around 2022 with self-custody wallets on Stellar. The Kraken partnership extends that idea: a Kraken user can request a cash pickup in roughly 100 countries and collect local currency at a MoneyGram location.
The throughline, Soohoo said, is treating crypto rails as a base layer rather than a product line. “We see it as a foundation to be able to unlock and build future services and products for our customers,” he said. The company has been working with stablecoins for more than five years.
The Settlement Case
Asked what stablecoins actually fix, Soohoo pointed to three benefits. The first is timing. Stablecoins “settle twenty four seven, including weekends,” he said, which traditional banking rails often cannot.
The second is inventory. MoneyGram holds, in Soohoo’s words, “billions of dollars that are floating around the world” through its network at any moment, and he frames that cash as working inventory. Real-time settlement lets the company turn that inventory faster and provision liquidity closer to demand, rather than pre-funding corridors against a forecast. “You just do it when you see demand,” he said, comparing it to just-in-time supply chains.
The third is cost, which he expects to fall as the rails mature alongside greater liquidity and full traceability. MoneyGram is already trading on a run rate of close to $2 billion, having started earlier this year, and wants to bring on more trading partners to move more of its back office onto stablecoins.
Where Cost Hides
The familiar crypto pitch is that remittances are expensive and stablecoins make them cheap. Soohoo complicated that. Moving value inside MoneyGram’s own network is “just a change on a digital ledger,” he said, and carries little cost. The expense sits at the edges, in conversion: paying a bank to put money in, or paying to handle cash on the way out.
Cash, he stressed, is the most expensive payout method of all. Armored transport, counting, and manual handling make it costly in a way that consumers and even many in the industry overlook. Yet for much of the world, cash remains what recipients want, which is why MoneyGram’s strategy keeps a foot in both worlds: cheap digital movement, with the customer choosing how and when to convert to local currency.
Why Build MGUSD
With dozens of stablecoins already on the market, the obvious question is why issue another. Soohoo reached for an Apple analogy. Just as Apple designs its own processors to tune them tightly to the iPhone, MoneyGram wanted a coin tuned to its own use cases. “We see MGUSD as our foundational, maybe we call it our own microprocessor, our own ASIC chip specifically for our use case,” he said.
Owning the coin gives the company more control, more of the underlying economics, and the ability to pass savings to customers, he said. MGUSD is a native US dollar stablecoin that lives strictly inside the MoneyGram network. It is “not built for traders or institutions,” Soohoo said, but for the company’s customers, who still pass standard KYC checks, as a base for future services spanning send, receive, stored value, rewards, and spending.
Under the hood, MoneyGram assembled a stack of specialists rather than building everything itself. Bridge serves as the regulated issuer, M0 provides the smart-contract infrastructure that manages flows, the coin is built on Stellar, and Fireblocks handles treasury and custody. Soohoo described running a build, buy, or partner analysis for each layer, keeping governance and design in-house while orchestrating outside partners for issuance and settlement.
A Seat on the Rails
MoneyGram’s validator role on Tempo, a blockchain purpose-built for payments with features such as memo fields, batched transactions, and native privacy, fits the same backend logic. Tempo was incubated with close involvement from Stripe, already a significant MoneyGram partner.
Becoming a validator lets MoneyGram learn from the infrastructure and contribute back to the network, Soohoo said, and reflects a broader conviction: “You can’t be a great global payments company if you don’t understand and are not part of the infrastructure.”
Products and the Unbanked
If MGUSD effectively hands a dollar-denominated account to millions of customers with cash-in and cash-out at hundreds of thousands of points, the natural next step is spending. Soohoo declined to confirm a card or any unannounced product, saying only that the goal is to “democratize” financial services for the billions of people with limited access. These are existing customers, he noted, and the aim is to deepen those relationships over time.
The Regulatory Patchwork
Yield and rewards on stablecoins are, in Soohoo’s words, “a hot topic.” MoneyGram’s approach is to follow the law and work closely with regulators, which is why it launched in the United States first, where the GENIUS Act and the pending Clarity Act provide clearer guardrails that let the company move faster. He expects different “flavors” of what is permitted by jurisdiction, with rewards a major selling point in some markets and off the table in others.
The global picture is uneven. Brazil recently moved to restrict stablecoin settlement for foreign-exchange businesses, a reminder that some destination regulators worry about capital controls and dollarization. Soohoo declined to comment on specific jurisdictions but argued the technology is early, likening the moment to how people discussed generative AI before ChatGPT arrived. MoneyGram, he said, will operate within whatever frameworks governments set, and sees local-currency stablecoins as a natural extension of the currency-pair trading it already does. “We’ve been doing it forever,” he said.
The Convergence Bet
Soohoo closed on why he thinks the timing is unusual. “I don’t think in the history of my career in tech have I ever seen a new platform shift happening at the same time,” he said, citing blockchain, AI, and agentic commerce converging at once, where prior eras turned on a single platform like the PC, the internet, or mobile.
The hardest problem in any platform shift, he added, is distribution, and that is where MoneyGram believes it holds an edge. “We already have distribution across the world,” he said, alongside decades of customer relationships. “Our MoneyGram brand stands for trust.” As for what comes next, he offered a two-word answer: “Stay tuned.”
