Brale bets new protocol can solve stablecoin liquidity bottleneck

Today's bridge model won't scale as hundreds of companies issue their own stablecoins, fragmenting liquidity, Brale CEO Ben Milne said in an interview.

Brale bets new protocol can solve stablecoin liquidity bottleneck

Finance

Stablecoin firm Brale says new protocol can remove a major hurdle to scaling custom tokens

Today's bridge model won't scale as hundreds of companies issue their own stablecoins, fragmenting liquidity, Brale CEO Ben Milne said in an interview.

By

Krisztian Sandor

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Edited by

Sheldon Reback

Jul 29, 2026, 3:27 p.m.

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Brale CEO Ben Milne (Brale, modified by CoinDesk)

Summary

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Stablecoin infrastructure firm Brale introduced ION Protocol, an interoperability system that lets participating stablecoins move across blockchains by burning tokens on one chain and minting them on another.

The testnet debut comes amid rapid growth and fragmentation in the stablecoin market, with more than 350 tokens and over $300 billion in market capitalization.

Unlike traditional blockchain bridges that rely on pre-funded liquidity pools, ION aims to reduce capital requirements and address what Brale sees as a scaling bottleneck for custom stablecoins.

Stablecoin infrastructure firm 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 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 every supported chain.

While the $300 billion stablecoin market is dominated by Tether's USDT and Circle Internet's USDC, new participants are piling in. 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 of the coins, whose value is pegged to a real-world asset such as a fiat currency, underscoring the growing need for infrastructure to connect an increasingly fragmented ecosystem. Brale argues today's interoperability model won't scale as more issuers introduce their own versions.

Stablecoin scaling problem

The company supports over a hundred stablecoin programs across more than 30 blockchains, founder and CEO Ben Milne said in an interview with CoinDesk. Many of its customers process billions of dollars in monthly payment volume while maintaining relatively small stablecoin balances because their tokens are designed for transactions rather than investment.

Moving assets across blockchains typically depends on liquidity pools or wrapped tokens, requiring capital to be locked up across each supported network. As the number of stablecoins and blockchains grows, the capital requirement grows with it.

“The liquidity between stablecoin programs is the No. 1 barrier to scaling bespoke stablecoins,” said Milne. “There's not enough capital in the world to solve the problem,” he added.

With insufficient capital to build deep liquidity pools for every stablecoin on every blockchain, the current model becomes unsustainable as issuance accelerates. Instead, ION adopts a burn-and-mint approach similar to USDC issuer Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP), extending the model to any participating stablecoin issuer rather than a single token.

The protocol debuts with partners including Monad, Rain, Coinflow, Turnkey, Etherfuse, Spark and Canton, initially on testnet before a broader rollout.

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