SoFi Technologies, the $30 billion publicly traded online bank best known for student loan refinancing and stock trading, is getting ready to roll out its own stablecoin, alongside other crypto services.
During Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia + Technology Conference 2025 earlier this month, SoFi CEO Anthony Noto revealed that the company sees crypto as touching “every part of our business, payment capabilities, lending capabilities, investing capabilities, tech platform capabilities,” according to Seeking Alpha’s transcript of Noto’s speech.
The San Francisco-based neobank previously offered crypto trading, but paused the service in 2023 due to regulatory uncertainty, redirecting its crypto customers to Blockchain.com. Now, the company is reentering the space, saying it will roll out buy, sell, and hold functionality for popular tokens before the end of the year, and eventually expand into payments and launch its own stablecoin, per the transcript.
Describing the upcoming stablecoin, Noto referenced its primary use as a medium of exchange between SoFi and its future crypto-native partners, stating that the SoFi stablecoin would “be the means of economic value transfer, which is faster, cheaper and more secure than the systems they have today in the traditional investing world.”
Noto said the stablecoin will also be used for customers to make international fiat transfers, via SoFi Pay. As Noto referenced, the company recently enabled international fiat transfers via the Bitcoin Lightning Network, in partnership with Lightspark.
In light of the crypto-friendly direction from U.S. regulators recently, Noto also noted that SoFi is well-positioned to make its crypto push, given that the firm already holds a banking license from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) — something that multiple crypto firms have scrambled to obtain in recent months.
Stablecoin Yield
While the technical details and launch timeframe for the SoFi stablecoin remain unclear, Noto revealed that the fintech plans to “motivate merchants to accept SoFi stablecoin because they don’t have to pay interchange,” continuing that the firm “may even be able to give them [merchants] an economic incentive to accept SoFi stablecoin.”
He added that the incentive would come in the form of yield sharing with stablecoin “participants”:
“When we bring in and we develop SoFi stablecoin, and we have a dollar for dollar back stablecoin, we could deposit that in our Fed banking account, earn 4% that we can give away to all the participants to take our product versus someone else.”
It remains unclear whether yield would be used only to incentivize merchants to accept the stablecoin for payments, or if all SoFi stablecoin holders would benefit.
Noto also stated that SoFi sees opportunities in extending its crypto services via corporate banking, offering large e-commerce firms both fiat and crypto banking services.
Tokenized Loans
Noto also said the stablecoin would support the firm’s longer-term plan to tokenize assets, starting with its own loans.
“We want to use our technology platform to tokenize any asset, but the first asset that they should tokenize is our loans. Why is that the case? Our loans provide a great ROA […] So how do we take those loans and make them available in other loans at $1 at a time or $2 at a time?” he explained, noting that tokenization could open access to assets previously unavailable to retail investors, similar to private equity, private credit, and other alternative asset classes.
A spokesperson for SoFi declined to elaborate on the firm’s crypto plans, saying in commentary to The Defiant: “We don’t have anything more to share other than what has already been published,” and redirecting The Defiant to the company’s Q2 earnings release.
In the transcripted version of SoFi’s Q2 earnings call from July, SoFi confirmed that it sees crypto opportunities across its entire platform, including “providing members the ability to borrow against their crypto assets, expanding payment options, and introducing new staking features, as well as blockchain and digital asset infrastructure capabilities […].”
SOFI shares are up over 4.4% over the past month, currently changing hands around $26. The stock price reached an all-time high of $29.81 on Sept. 22.
