That, in effect, leaves stablecoins as the presumptive standalone regulated U.S. digital asset. And it makes this week’s developments more significant than another collection of crypto announcements.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is experimenting with tokenized securities. Ripple is chasing the trillions of dollars flowing through corporate treasury, while Mastercard is building stablecoin capabilities into the same infrastructure that already connects banks, merchants and consumers. Circle is launching blockchain infrastructure for machines, and developers building machine-payment protocols are…