Operating through fragmentation: the state of digital money 2026

Stablecoin regulation is taking shape across the U.S., EU, UK, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Each market is working toward similar goals, but each is writing its own rules to get there. For companies moving money across borders, that means meeting different requirements for the same activity, often by running separate versions of the same compliance controls.

In this report, Mesh Chief Legal Officer Beth Haddock and Chief Compliance Officer Adam Israel map where stablecoin rules diverge and how to build one compliance program that works across them.

What’s inside

• A five-jurisdiction comparison of issuer licensing, service-provider rules, reserves, redemption, and cross-border recognition.
• The four types of fragmentation (licensing, prudential, product definition, and supervisory) and where each creates risk.
• Three principles for building a compliance program that holds up across regimes.
• A governance framework for agentic payments covering agent identity, mandate, ongoing validation, and accountability.
• Findings from Mesh’s 2026 fragmentation survey on what’s slowing cross-border expansion and where accountability is hardest to assign.