Cross-border payments infrastructure company Thunes has taken a meaningful step toward dismantling one of the most persistent friction points in global treasury management: the constraint of banking hours. The Singapore-headquartered firm has announced that eligible members of its Direct Global Network can now use EURC — a euro-backed stablecoin issued by a regulated affiliate of Circle — to fund transactions at any hour of the day, on any day of the week, including weekends and public holidays. The move places Thunes among a growing cohort of payments infrastructure providers that are treating regulated stablecoins not as speculative instruments but as practical, always-on liquidity tools.
The Banking Hours Problem
For treasury teams operating across multiple time zones, the closure of correspondent banking rails on evenings, weekends, and holidays has long represented a structural inefficiency. When a payment corridor goes quiet because a clearing house in Frankfurt or New York is closed, funds become stranded and counterparties wait. The cost of that latency is not merely inconvenience — it manifests as idle capital, missed settlement windows, and the kind of operational risk that compliance officers spend considerable energy documenting. Thunes's integration of EURC directly addresses this gap by anchoring funding capability to blockchain networks that operate on a continuous, permissionless basis rather than to the schedules of legacy interbank systems.
Multi-Chain Architecture as a Deliberate Choice
The EURC funding service has been deployed across four distinct blockchain networks: Ethereum, Solana, Base, and Stellar. This multi-chain posture is not incidental. Each network carries distinct characteristics in terms of transaction throughput, finality speed, and fee structure, and each attracts a different segment of institutional and fintech users. By supporting all four simultaneously, Thunes avoids forcing network members to adopt a single blockchain standard, effectively meeting counterparties where they already operate. Ethereum offers deep liquidity and institutional familiarity; Solana brings high-throughput, low-latency settlement; Base, developed by Coinbase, provides an Ethereum-compatible layer with lower transaction costs; and Stellar has a well-established track record in cross-border remittance corridors, particularly in emerging markets. Together, they give eligible Direct Global Network members genuine optionality rather than a nominal blockchain integration.
EURC's Regulatory Standing Matters
The choice of EURC as the instrument is as significant as the operational capability it enables. EURC is issued by a regulated Circle affiliate, a detail that carries considerable weight in the current regulatory climate. As jurisdictions from the European Union — through the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework — to Singapore and beyond tighten the conditions under which stablecoin issuers may operate, the regulatory pedigree of the underlying instrument becomes a core procurement criterion for institutions managing compliance obligations. A stablecoin issued outside a supervised entity is, for most regulated payment firms, simply not viable as a treasury tool. EURC's lineage as a product of a Circle-affiliated regulated entity provides the compliance foundation that treasury and legal teams require before signing off on operational adoption.
What This Signals for the Broader Payments Industry
Thunes's move is best understood not as an isolated product update but as a signal of where institutional-grade cross-border payments infrastructure is heading. The payments industry has debated for years whether stablecoins would remain the domain of crypto-native actors or whether regulated, euro- and dollar-denominated stablecoins would find genuine utility in mainstream financial operations. The Thunes-EURC integration represents a data point on the side of mainstream utility. When an established payments network — one that connects fintechs, mobile money operators, banks, and businesses across multiple continents — embeds a regulated stablecoin as a core funding rail rather than a marketing feature, it normalises the technology for the institutions that sit on its network. Those institutions, in turn, carry that normalisation into their own client relationships and product roadmaps.
The competitive implications are also worth considering. Networks that cannot offer continuous funding capability increasingly face questions from treasury-sophisticated clients who have already modelled the cost of weekend settlement gaps. As stablecoin infrastructure matures and regulatory clarity improves across key jurisdictions, the burden of proof shifts: it will no longer be sufficient for payment networks to explain why they are exploring stablecoins, but rather why they have not yet deployed them operationally.
What This Means for Network Members
For eligible members of the Thunes Direct Global Network, the practical implication is a materially broader window for managing treasury flows without the need to pre-fund positions in anticipation of banking closures. The ability to move euro-denominated value across Ethereum, Solana, Base, or Stellar on a Sunday afternoon or a public holiday in a key corridor country removes a friction point that has historically required either excess liquidity buffers or operational workarounds. Whether this capability becomes a competitive differentiator for Thunes's network members in their own end-markets will depend on how quickly they elect to integrate it — but the infrastructure is now in place, and the direction of travel is clear.
Written by the editorial team — independent journalism powered by Codego Press.
