Qivalis Euro Stablecoin: 37 Banks and the Dollar Problem That Required All of Them

Every major financial rail built over the past 80 years has settled around the dollar, and stablecoins follow the same pattern. Dollar-denominated tokens account for roughly 99% of the global stablecoin market, according to the European Central Bank. The euro is the world's second reserve currency, used by 350 million people across 20 countries, and its share of that market sits at 0.24%. On May 20, 2026, 37 European banks decided that the only credible response to that number was to build together.

Qivalis, the European banking consortium developing a regulated euro stablecoin, announced that 25 new lenders had joined the project, bringing its total membership to 37 financial institutions across 15 countries, including ABN AMRO, Rabobank, Intesa Sanpaolo, Nordea, and the National Bank of Greece. The scale of the consortium is a direct response to a structural problem that smaller numbers cannot address.

What Qivalis is

Qivalis was founded in September 2025 by nine European banks, including ING, UniCredit, CaixaBank, Danske Bank, and Raiffeisen Bank International, before being formally incorporated and named in December of the same year when BNP Paribas joined. The consortium is based in Amsterdam, where it is seeking authorisation from De Nederlandsche Bank to operate as an electronic money institution. Its CEO is Jan-Oliver Sell, former head of Coinbase in Germany.

Each token will represent one euro, held in reserve through high-quality liquid assets under regulated custody, in full compliance with the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation. Fireblocks, which provides tokenisation technology and wallet infrastructure, is handling the technical architecture. The consortium plans to launch in the second half of 2026, immediately upon receiving its licence. The stated use cases are real-time cross-border business-to-business payments and digital asset settlement within the regulated European banking system.

Why the dollar owns 99% of the market

Non-dollar stablecoins have grown from $261 million in May 2021 to $771 million in April 2026, and their share of the global stablecoin market declined over the same period.

The structural advantage of dollar stablecoins is reserves. Dollar issuers back their tokens with US Treasury assets, the world's most liquid sovereign debt, and tokenised US government bonds on-chain total roughly $15.4 billion against just $1.4 billion for non-US equivalents. That yield advantage generates the capital that funds exchange listings, distribution partnerships, and the liquidity incentives that make USDT and USDC the default unit of account across DeFi, cross-border settlement, and crypto trading globally. A euro stablecoin issuer backing with European government bonds starts with lower yields, less distributable capital, and a ten-year network effects gap to close.

MiCA adds a compliance cost that shaped the market before Qivalis entered it. The regulation requires significant stablecoin issuers to hold 60% of reserves with credit institutions, in low-risk liquid assets. Tether built its global position before rules of this kind applied to it.

Stablecoins carry whatever monetary weight their backing currency already holds in the world. The dollar became the reserve currency because the United States emerged from the Second World War as the dominant economic and military power, and the post-war financial architecture was built around that fact. Any institution already operating in dollars, whether invoicing, trading, or holding reserves, reaches for a dollar stablecoin because it matches the unit already in use. Blockchain introduced new infrastructure without changing that underlying logic.

What 37 banks makes possible

S&P Global Ratings projects the euro stablecoin market could reach €1.1 trillion by 2030, up from roughly €770 million today, which raises the question of what drives adoption from a 0.24% starting share of global supply.

The answer Qivalis is building toward is distribution. A single bank issuing a euro stablecoin has limited reach. Thirty-seven banks across 15 countries, each distributing the token through their own customer channels, represent a fundamentally different proposition. Spain contributed the largest share of new entrants in May, with five institutions joining, including Banco Sabadell, Bankinter, and Cecabank.

A stablecoin's utility scales with where it is accepted, and acceptance scales with how many institutions are distributing it. That is what the number 37 is actually measuring.

Qivalis is not building in isolation. The first full MiCA licence for stablecoin infrastructure in Europe was secured by Zerohash on May 18, positioning it as the compliance layer the same market needs. Standard Chartered moved to absorb Zodia Custody this month, making the same calculation from the banking side. The US crypto order signed on May 19 opened Federal Reserve payment rails to fintech and crypto firms, accelerating the dollar's institutional embedding on blockchain at precisely the moment European banks are establishing their position.

The Qivalis expansion confirms what its structure always implied: no individual European institution can manufacture the network effects that dollar stablecoins accumulated over a decade, so 37 of them are building that base together. Euro stablecoins have existed before, and none built the distribution reach that made them competitive at scale. The consortium is a direct and specific answer to that problem.

Thirty-seven European banks are giving the euro a regulated, scalable, blockchain-native token at the moment tokenised finance becomes the infrastructure layer of institutional markets. The euro stablecoin market will grow regardless of who leads it. Qivalis is positioning to be the institution that does.

Editor's note

Every piece published on The Bright Minded goes through careful verification, but mistakes can happen. If you spot an error, have additional information, or want to flag anything, write to rosalia@thebrightminded.com.