Stablecoins and Payments: Issuance, Rails and Regulation

About this course

Stablecoins are the settlement layer of blockchain payments and a growing share of traditional treasury and merchant flows. This course is for fintech engineers, product managers, and compliance officers who need to design, integrate, or audit those systems—not just describe them.

You will start with the three major design families. Fiat-backed coins such as USDC, USDT, and GBPT are claims on cash and short-duration reserves. Crypto-backed coins such as DAI and sUSD are over-collateralized on-chain. Synthetic and algorithmic models try to hold a peg with incentives and oracles rather than a redeemable reserve. Each model implies a different issuance path, a different failure mode, and a different regulatory treatment. The course treats those differences as engineering and legal facts, not marketing slogans.

Reserve quality is the first test of a fiat-backed coin. You will learn how issuers mint and burn, how attestations and audits differ, and how to read a reserve report for maturity, concentration, and redemption capacity. A worked example walks through issuing $1 million of USDC end to end. A hands-on exercise asks you to design an issuance and redemption flow, including custody, multi-signature controls, and operational limits.

Payments are the second test. On-chain settlement is fast and cheap at the base layer, but merchants still live on ACH, wires, and card networks. The course maps those rails, covers cross-border settlement and the role of CBDCs, and then moves to production APIs from Circle, Stripe, and Thirdweb. You will study a merchant checkout and complete a hands-on integration so the settlement path is something you can specify, not only diagram.

Regulation is the third test. The U.S. GENIUS Act and the EU’s MiCA regime set reserve, licensing, reporting, and conduct expectations that now bind public-market issuers and their partners. You will build a compliance roadmap and audit a named stablecoin for licensing, AML/KYC, and solvency risk, so the legal stack is as concrete as the technical one.

The final module is risk. You will study depeg mechanics and contagion, then three case studies: the March 2023 USDC depeg around Silicon Valley Bank, the May 2022 collapse of UST and Luna, and DAI’s behavior through Ethereum volatility. A risk framework covers liquidity, collateral, and governance. The capstone is a 2,000–3,000 word depeg analysis and mitigation design, graded on a published rubric (analysis 30, mitigation design 30, regulatory mapping 25, clarity 15). A shareable certificate is awarded when you complete the modules, pass the quizzes at 70 percent or better, and meet the capstone standard.

The course is organized into five modules and about seven hours of lessons (420 minutes of scheduled instruction), plus the capstone. Graduates leave able to explain reserve models, design issuance and redemption, evaluate attestations, integrate a payment API, map settlement paths, assess GENIUS Act and MiCA exposure, and analyze a depeg event with a documented mitigation plan.