While the bank has yet to confirm its plans, the move could mark a first step toward launching its own USD stablecoin.
Wells Fargo has quietly filed a trademark application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for the ticker “WFUSD,” per a filing dated March 10.
The trademark covers cryptocurrency exchange services, blockchain-based payment verification, crypto hardware wallets, and software for accessing NFTs on-chain, among a slew of other goods and services.
While Wells Fargo has yet to publicly confirm its plans for the trademark, the ticker closely mirrors established naming conventions for stablecoins tickers, strongly suggesting the $1.9 trillion-asset bank is laying the groundwork for its own dollar-pegged digital currency.
The WFUSD filing arrives in the wake of broader Wall Street stablecoin ambitions. As The Defiant reported, last May, companies co-owned by Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and other large banks — including Zelle operator Early Warning Services and real-time payment network The Clearing House — were considering launching a joint stablecoin, reportedly “intended to fend off escalating competition from the cryptocurrency industry.”
As far back as 2022, Wells Fargo was also part of a group of big U.S. banks exploring integrating blockchain tech for connecting deposits, as The Defiant reported at the time.
Since then, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser publicly confirmed the bank is evaluating its own proprietary token, telling analysts on a Q2 2025 earnings call that “we are looking at the issuance of a Citi stablecoin,” per The Defiant.
The pressure to act is only mounting. In December, U.S. neobank SoFi unveiled SoFiUSD, making SoFi the first U.S. national bank to release an “open access” stablecoin on a public blockchain — Ethereum — backed 1:1 by cash reserves held in its Federal bank account.
SoFi has since inked a partnership with Mastercard to use SoFiUSD across its global payments network.
Whether WFUSD represents Wells Fargo going it alone or hedging its bets ahead of the consortium effort remains unclear.
The stablecoin sector grew by over $100 billion in 2025 alone. Acording to data from DefiLlama, total stablecoin circulating supply currently stands at $314.7 billion. As The Defiant reported, that figure was near $310 billion as of just mid-December 2025 — up more than 50% from roughly $205 billion at the start of the year.
This article was generated with the assistance of AI workflows.
Source: https://thedefiant.io/news/tradfi-and-fintech/wells-fargo-files-trademark-for-wfusd
