A European company settling on-chain today does it in dollars, in an instrument whose reserves sit in US Treasuries, whose issuer answers to US sanctions law, and whose balances can be frozen at the issuer's discretion. And the risk is growing. Stablecoin payments in Europe reached $50bn a year by late 2025 (McKinsey/ Artemis) and 58% of global corporations surveyed by EY-Parthenon plan to adopt stablecoins within two years. 

Dollar stablecoin reserves sit in US government debt, so on-chain dollarisation funds someone else's deficit. Businesses that hold dollars only to transact pay the spread on the way in and again on the way out, and carry currency risk on their working capital in between. And the unit of account sets the defaults: while on-chain finance is priced and collateralized in dollars, euro-denominated products stay a bolt-on.

How did we get here?

We have run this experiment before. In 2014 BNP Paribas, a French bank, paid $8.9bn to American authorities over dollar payments involving Sudan, Iran, and Cuba, and parts of it were barred from clearing dollars for a year. The penalty was set under American law and the punishment that hurt most was losing access to the dollar.

Europe spent 30 years building market-leading fintech products on rails it doesn't own: Card networks, dollar clearing, and the cloud underneath it all. Blockchain and stablecoins have disruptive potential, and we’re in danger of missing the innovation window again. 

Part of the problem is that Europe regulated a mature market it does not have yet. It has been well ahead on regulatory clarity, but the clarity is geared at incumbents rather than innovators. The cost of authorization has built a moat against the smaller, experimental players, which is where adoption usually starts. The Draghi report made the same point in 2024. The open question is whether we can fix it.

Meanwhile, dollar stablecoins passed $300bn and the GENIUS Act’s rules still haven’t taken effect. America’s securities regulator, rather than licensing startups first, offered them an innovation exemption.

Clear rules matter, and so does the price of complying with them. But neither explains why euro stablecoins have stalled even where licensed issuers exist.

So what specifically is holding us back?

Euro stablecoins have so far failed to take off. About 99.5% of stablecoin supply is denominated in dollars, the euro and every other currency share the rest. MiCA licensed the asset class, but the dollar took the market: dollar liquidity, dollar market depth, dollar-denominated everything.

There's an asymmetry we have to acknowledge. Dollar stablecoins were pulled into existence by demand outside America. People in Buenos Aires and Lagos wanted dollars that their banks wouldn't give them, and the instrument followed. No equivalent queue is forming for euros. So the euro can't copy that path, and waiting for overseas innovators to build our demand for us isn't a viable strategy. The euro's case has to be made on utility inside the euro economy: settlement, collateral, treasury, and payments between businesses that already price in euros.

This has been even harder than it should be, because so far each chain and each platform has had to bootstrap its own euro liquidity. The liquidity ends up split across dozens of venues, few of them deep enough to matter.

Look at what a regulated euro token can actually do today. It can be redeemed at par at any time, straight to a bank account over SEPA. What it can't do is trade. There is no deep market to sell into, so every exit runs back through one issuer's onboarding. A dollar stablecoin can be sold to anyone, anywhere, by someone with no relationship to its issuer at all. That gap is the ceiling on adoption.

The Commission's own review of the DLT Pilot Regime named lack of composability between blockchains as a problem. Other blockers are being tackled via things like the market integration package that the Commission is working on, but interoperability is no one’s mandate, and every institutional DLT platform remains a permissioned silo that composes with nothing.

What makes a token useful to someone with no relationship to its issuer is self-custody, open composability and permissionless issuance. But all of this only matters where there is a deep market to trade into, and deep markets need liquidity in one place, not scattered across dozens of silos. The puzzle is how to pool liquidity without forcing every platform onto the same chain.

But solutions are emerging

Recent advances in zero-knowledge proving have made synchronous composability possible across chains that were never built alike. One chain no longer needs to re-run another’s transaction to trust them; it checks a proof, generated in seconds, within the same block. Tokens move without third-party bridges or wrapped copies, so a regulated euro stays a claim on its issuer wherever it goes. Liquidity can therefore be provisioned once and reached natively from every connected chain, instead of being rebuilt in each silo.

The same logic lets a permissioned rollup keep its compliance gating and its own attested proof system and still reach public liquidity. For a smaller licensed player, that removes the second hurdle: having paid for authorization, it no longer has to build a market as well.

The supply is arriving. Monerium's EURe is already live, and Qivalis will issue its regulated euro stablecoin on Ethereum's public blockchain.

That is what the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ) is being built for. Gnosis Chain will be the first chain to join. It already hosts EURe, an established DeFi ecosystem, and Gnosis Pay, whose card programs let euro stablecoins be spent in shops.

Europe does not have the scale to build ten euro markets. It has just enough to build one. If you would like to discuss, get in touch.