Nu Holdings Enters the U.S. With a Stablecoin-Backed Multi-Currency Account

SÃO PAULO — Nu Holdings, the parent company of Brazilian digital bank Nubank, officially launched U.S. operations Thursday with Nu Global, a multi-currency account that automatically converts customer deposits into Circle’s USDC and EURC stablecoins. The company is advertising daily yield of 3.50% APY on USDC balances and 2.20% APY on EURC balances, along with fee-free transfers across more than 35 countries and a virtual Mastercard for international spending.

The structure is notable for how directly it routes retail deposits into stablecoins rather than treating crypto as an adjacent feature. A Nu Global customer’s balance is not held as dollars sitting in a traditional deposit account and separately offered a crypto option — the deposit itself becomes USDC or EURC, with the yield paid on that stablecoin balance rather than through a conventional interest-bearing account structure.

Nu is not a U.S. chartered bank. The company said it is operating in the U.S. through a partnership with Lead Bank, an FDIC-insured institution, while separately pursuing its own national bank charter — an application process that, if history with other fintechs is a guide, can take considerably longer than a company’s public timeline suggests and is not guaranteed to succeed. Until and unless that charter is granted, Nu Global’s regulatory footing in the U.S. rests on Lead Bank’s charter and the specific terms of that partnership, not on Nu Holdings’ own banking license.

For a company best known for its roughly 100 million-customer Brazilian franchise, a U.S. launch built around stablecoin yield rather than a conventional checking-and-savings product is a distinct strategy from how Nubank grew at home, where its core product was a no-fee credit card and account aimed at Brazilians the traditional banking sector underserved. Whether U.S. consumers — who already have a deep bench of yield-bearing savings and money-market options inside the traditional banking system — see enough advantage in a stablecoin-denominated account to switch is the open question the launch does not answer on its own.

The advertised yields also carry the caveats common to any stablecoin-linked return: they are not FDIC-insured in the way a bank savings account’s interest is, and they depend on Nu’s own arrangement with Circle and its underlying business model rather than being guaranteed by a government backstop. Nu Holdings did not disclose in its announcement how the yield is funded or how long the advertised rates are expected to hold.