MoonPay executive discusses loyalty rewards for branded stablecoins

Caroline Pham sees branded stablecoins functioning like loyalty programs, letting users earn and exchange rewards across merchants onchain

Sat 7 Nov 2026 · 10:20 EST · 3 min read

In Stablecoins

Caroline Pham has a vision for stablecoins that sounds less like a monetary policy debate and more like your credit card points finally becoming useful. The former acting chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, now serving as Chief Legal Officer and Chief Administrative Officer at MoonPay, laid out that vision in a January 13, 2026 podcast interview, predicting that branded stablecoins will function as loyalty and rewards vehicles for onchain commerce.

The core idea: brands issue their own stablecoins, customers earn them through purchases, and those tokens flow across merchant networks the way airline miles theoretically do, except without the blackout dates and the soul-crushing redemption experience.

Loyalty programs, but actually interoperable

Pham’s framing draws a direct comparison to existing rewards ecosystems. The difference she envisions is that branded stablecoins would live onchain, making them programmable, transferable, and usable across different merchant platforms without a central clearinghouse deciding what counts as a valid redemption.

MoonPay has been building the infrastructure to support exactly that. In November 2025, the company integrated with M0 to enable the issuance and management of customized, interoperable stablecoins, effectively launching enterprise stablecoin services designed for both issuance and transaction use cases. The goal is to let businesses issue stablecoins without having to navigate compliance and operational complexity on their own.

The market MoonPay is betting on

The stablecoin market that MoonPay is positioning itself within has grown substantially. The company cited a stablecoin market cap of approximately $320 billion by early 2026, alongside annual transaction volumes of about $33 trillion for 2025 and over $28 trillion for the first quarter of 2026 alone.

MoonPay’s enterprise network spans more than 30 million users and over 500 enterprise partners, giving it the distribution to make branded stablecoin programs viable at launch rather than speculative.

Pham brought regulatory credibility to the company’s enterprise push when she joined in December 2025, arriving directly from her role as acting CFTC chair, a position she held from January through December of that year.

The company has since announced a partnership with Deel aimed at facilitating cross-border payroll through stablecoins, which was announced around February 2026. A subsequent collaboration with XO Cash, focused on athlete bonuses, followed in approximately March 2026.

What branded stablecoins actually change

MoonPay also announced a PYUSDx launchpad designed to support programmable rewards, an initiative that operationalizes Pham’s thesis around branded tokens serving as the substrate for loyalty mechanics.

Programmable stablecoins can carry conditions: a token that earns double rewards on specific product categories, expires if unused within a quarter, or unlocks additional perks when a spending threshold is crossed. That kind of logic is built into the asset itself rather than maintained in a loyalty platform’s database somewhere, which reduces overhead and opens the door to more creative reward structures.

Pham’s hire was itself a statement of intent. Bringing in a former federal regulator as CLO at a moment when stablecoin legislation in the US is actively moving through Congress positions MoonPay to participate in regulatory shaping rather than scramble for compliance after rules land.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Kaye Quema. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.