The Wells Fargo WFUSD trademark filing isn't about competing with USDC or Tether—it's about capturing the custody layer beneath stablecoin infrastructure. Traditional banks see the settlement rails getting rebuilt and want to position themselves as the backstop for digital dollar issuance, not the issuers themselves. This maps to the broader institutional strategy: let crypto natives build the protocols, then control the compliance and custody chokepoints. The ECB's tokenized finance announcement follows the same playbook—acknowledge the infrastructure shift while ensuring legacy financial institutions remain the critical dependencies. The real test comes when these bank-backed digital dollars start requiring different regulatory treatment than algorithmic stablecoins. Suddenly "decentralized" becomes a liability, not a feature.