Fintech giant Robinhood is eyeing the possibility of launching its own stablecoin in order to benefit from a growing $170 billion market, according to Bloomberg. The company gained worldwide attention during the 2021 GameStop short squeeze and has recently waded into cryptocurrency, but has stopped short of publicly announcing a stablecoin plan – even telling media outlets that it holds “no imminent plans to launch this offering.”

Earlier this year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a notice to Robinhood that it might be sued for the crypto arm of its business due to alleged securities laws violations. Robinhood, which holds approximately $100 billion of assets under custody, said it made several attempts to follow the SEC's rules, only to be strung around.

“After years of good-faith attempts to work with the SEC for regulatory clarity including our well-known attempt to ‘come in and register,’ we are disappointed that the agency has decided to issue a Wells Notice related to our U.S. crypto business," explained Dan Gallagher, Robinhood's chief legal, compliance and corporate affairs officer.

“When Chair [Gary] Gensler at the SEC in 2021 said, ‘Come in and register,’ we did," Gallagher added. “We went through a 16-month process with the SEC staff trying to register a special purpose broker dealer. And then we were pretty summarily told in March that that process was over and we would not see any fruits of that effort."

While other fintech giants like PayPal have entered the stablecoin space, releasing the PYUSD stablecoin, results have been middling: Recently, on the Solana blockchain network, PayPal’s stablecoin has seen a 42% plunge. And although PayPal’s stablecoin topped $1 billion by market capitalization this summer, it has been declining ever since.

The U.S. is currently exploring a regulatory framework for stablecoins. This past April, pro-crypto senators Cynthia Lummis and Kirsten Gillibrand introduced a bipartisan stablecoin bill known as the Lummis-Gillibrand Payment Stablecoin Act. It has not passed yet.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the region's much-anticipated Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) legislation have seen stablecoin regulations already implemented across the 27-country European bloc. It states that companies like Tether and Circle must carry electronic money licenses in Europe and use independent financial institutions for storing as much as two-thirds of their reserve assets.