Thirty-Seven Banks and a Single Coin: Europe’s Stablecoin Bet Takes Shape

The Qivalis consortium has tripled its membership in a day, marshalling half a continent’s banking sector behind a MiCA-regulated euro stablecoin it intends to launch before the year is out.

On a Wednesday morning in Amsterdam, a quiet announcement reshaped the geography of digital money. Qivalis — the bank-backed consortium building Europe’s answer to dollar-denominated stablecoins — disclosed that 25 more lenders had joined its ranks, pushing total membership to 37 financial institutions spanning 15 European countries. The new arrivals include ABN AMRO, Rabobank, Intesa Sanpaolo, Nordea, Erste Group and the National Bank of Greece. What began in September 2025 as a twelve-bank working group has, in a single morning, become the most broadly backed euro stablecoin project on the continent — and a pointed statement about where European finance believes digital money is heading.

The Dollar’s Digital Grip

To understand why 37 banks would coordinate around a single token, you need to understand the current state of the stablecoin market — and it’s not a flattering picture for the euro. Dollar-denominated tokens account for roughly 99% of the approximately $305 billion global stablecoin market, with euro-pegged assets representing just €770 million — less than one-third of one per cent of outstanding supply. The only sizable euro stablecoin in existence today is Société Générale’s SG-FORGE product, which carries around €64 million in circulation.

That imbalance isn’t merely a curiosity for crypto traders. As financial institutions accelerate their move into tokenised settlement — bonds, real estate, trade finance — the rails on which those transactions run will increasingly require a stable, on-chain currency. If Europe doesn’t supply one, the dollar fills the gap by default. Jan-Oliver Sell, Qivalis’s chief executive, has a phrase for the scenario he’s trying to prevent: digital dollarisation. “At the moment, if you want to operate onchain, you’re effectively forced into the dollar,” he said in March. The consortium’s expansion, announced today, is the most concrete step yet toward making that a historical footnote rather than a permanent condition.

What Qivalis Is — and What It’s Building

The euro stablecoin banks backing Qivalis aren’t assembling a speculative blockchain experiment. The Amsterdam-headquartered venture is building regulated payment infrastructure, and the membership list reads like a roll call of mainstream European finance. Founding members include BNP Paribas, BBVA, CaixaBank, ING, UniCredit and Danske Bank. The 25 institutions that joined today add geographic depth: Irish lenders AIB and Bank of Ireland, Spain’s Banco Sabadell and Bankinter, Poland’s Bank Pekao, Luxembourg’s state-owned Spuerkeess, Sweden’s Handelsbanken and Nordea, Finland’s OP Pohjola, and several others spread across the euro area’s periphery and core alike.

The token itself will be backed one-to-one with euro-denominated assets. At least 40% of reserves will be held in bank deposits, with the remainder allocated to high-quality, short-term eurozone sovereign bonds diversified across EU member states. Holders will be able to redeem around the clock, seven days a week. The technology layer is being provided by Fireblocks, which will supply tokenisation infrastructure, custody services and compliance tooling — including AML and sanctions screening baked into transaction workflows rather than bolted on afterward.

Qivalis is seeking authorisation as an electronic money institution (EMI) from De Nederlandsche Bank, the Dutch central bank, under the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework. That licence, once granted, would allow the consortium to passport operations across the entire European Economic Area — a significant structural advantage over any single-bank competitor trying to build the same thing in isolation. The commercial launch is targeted for the second half of 2026, with the Amsterdam team in advanced discussions with regulated crypto exchanges and liquidity providers to ensure deep markets from day one.

Howard Davies, chairman of Qivalis’s supervisory board, framed the stakes plainly on Wednesday: “This infrastructure is essential if Europe is to compete in the global digital economy whilst preserving its strategic autonomy.”

Why Bank Coordination Matters — and What MiCA Makes Possible

How does a euro stablecoin work under MiCA?

Under the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, a euro stablecoin must be issued by a licensed electronic money institution, maintain a one-to-one reserve backing with euro-denominated assets, provide holders with continuous redemption rights, and submit to ongoing prudential supervision. Qivalis is structured to satisfy each of these requirements through its Amsterdam EMI entity, with reserves held across multiple rated credit institutions and sovereign bonds of eurozone member states.

That regulatory architecture matters for a reason beyond compliance theatre. Previous attempts at European stablecoin issuance — including small-scale efforts by individual banks — foundered on a structural problem: fragmentation. A coin issued by one bank has limited distribution and shallow liquidity. It doesn’t become a default settlement layer for the broader market; it becomes a proprietary instrument that clients of competing banks won’t readily use. Sell identified this early. “A couple of banks trying to issue their own coins just fragments the space further,” he said. “Bringing institutions together creates the distribution and liquidity needed to make it usable.”

The consortium model solves that problem by making Qivalis’s token a shared issuance — no individual bank owns the token supply, and all 37 members distribute it to their own corporate and institutional clients. The network effect is immediate: on day one of launch, the stablecoin has reach across much of the European banking system. S&P Global Ratings has projected that the euro stablecoin market could grow from roughly €770 million today to as much as €1.1 trillion by 2030, driven primarily by tokenised finance and institutional adoption. That trajectory depends on exactly the kind of unified, regulated issuance Qivalis is attempting to provide.

“We want to be the main issuer of euro stablecoins globally.” — Jan-Oliver Sell, CEO, Qivalis

Second-Order Effects: Settlement, Sovereignty, and the Race Against Washington

The Qivalis announcement arrives inside a broader contest for dominance in digital payment infrastructure — one in which the United States has moved quickly and with legislative backing. US financial institutions, bolstered by recent federal stablecoin legislation, are accelerating the rollout of dollar-backed tokens. Euro-denominated stablecoins currently remain in circulation of less than €1 billion, compared to roughly $300 billion in dollar-linked tokens, according to the Bank of Italy. That asymmetry, if left uncorrected as on-chain finance scales, will compound — not merely persist.

For European corporates, the practical implications are more immediate than they might appear. A business settling a cross-border invoice, clearing a tokenised bond trade, or managing treasury liquidity on blockchain rails today faces an uncomfortable choice: use a dollar-denominated token and accept currency exposure, or use the euro banking system’s traditional settlement infrastructure, which doesn’t operate on-chain at all. Qivalis is explicitly designed to close that gap — allowing a Spanish manufacturer to pay a Polish supplier in real time, using a euro-native token, without touching correspondent banking intermediaries.

The geopolitical dimension is harder to quantify but increasingly discussed in policy circles. If settlement infrastructure for European financial markets defaults to tokens issued by US companies — Tether or Circle being the most prominent — then a portion of European monetary sovereignty effectively sits on American corporate balance sheets. The ECB has flagged this concern repeatedly. Qivalis’s expansion, with its explicit framing around “strategic autonomy,” lands squarely in that debate.

Sell has also signalled that the 37-bank consortium may not be the final count. He told the Financial Times this week that he’s in discussions with non-European banks that operate in countries with significant remittance flows from Europe — a move that would extend Qivalis’s reach into corridors where dollar stablecoins currently dominate peer-to-peer transfers.

The Case for Scepticism

It’s worth pausing on the ECB’s own position, because it isn’t a straightforward endorsement. European Central Bank officials have consistently expressed concern that private stablecoins — even well-designed, MiCA-compliant ones — could drain bank deposits if they scale significantly. The argument runs roughly as follows: if retail customers shift savings into stablecoin wallets, they’re effectively converting insured bank deposits into electronic money claims, reducing the funding base banks use to extend credit. At scale, that changes monetary transmission in ways central banks find difficult to model.

The ECB has warned that private stablecoins could weaken monetary policy if they grow without guardrails — a warning that applies even to bank-led issuances like Qivalis. The consortium’s response is to pitch its design as inherently different: because reserves are held within the regulated banking system rather than in money-market funds, and because the issuer is supervised by a eurozone central bank, the systemic risk profile is fundamentally lower than an offshore issuer. That argument has more credibility than a typical crypto project could muster — but it hasn’t fully resolved the ECB’s institutional wariness.

The Bank for International Settlements has also cautioned that some dollar stablecoins may function more like investment vehicles than money, given their reliance on short-term securities — a concern Qivalis’s reserve design attempts to pre-empt. Still, the gap between a consortium announcement and an operating, liquid, widely adopted token is wide. Licensing delays, exchange integration friction and the simple fact that dollar stablecoins have a multi-year head start in institutional familiarity all represent genuine headwinds.

Then there is the digital euro itself. The ECB’s own CBDC initiative is unlikely to arrive before 2029, which Sell argues creates the window Qivalis needs. Yet if the ECB’s project eventually displaces or restricts private euro stablecoins, the consortium’s business model faces an existential question it hasn’t fully answered.

The history of monetary infrastructure is largely a history of coordination problems solved too late. Europe spent a decade watching dollar-denominated messaging and payment rails embed themselves so deeply into global finance that alternatives became structurally difficult to build. The stablecoin era presents a second chance — and the fact that 37 banks across 15 countries chose a single May morning to make that case together is itself a form of signal worth attending to.

The question Qivalis has not yet answered — and won’t until its token is live, liquid, and in daily use — is whether the coordination it’s assembled on paper can survive contact with the actual market. Thirty-seven signatures is a beginning, not a conclusion.