Also published as The AI Edge on LinkedIn. Subscribe here →
For a long time, the conversation about stablecoins in Europe sounded like a choice. Banks on one side, crypto on the other. Old money, new money. Pick a camp.
That framing has been fading for a while, but this month it finally started to look out of date. Europe's biggest banks moved closer to issuing their own euro token. Circle's USDC, the world's second largest stablecoin after Tether's USDT, became the first e-money token in the EU to be classified as "significant", which puts its reserves under the direct supervision of the European Banking Authority from November. Card networks started giving AI agents a way to pay in either currency or stablecoins. And the Central Bank of Ireland, fining Coinbase over how it safeguarded customer funds, reminded everyone that none of it matters if the basics of looking after customer money are wrong.
The question for a finance team in 2026 is no longer bank money or onchain money. It is how to use both, safely, without running two separate businesses to do it.
The euro goes onchain
On 14 October, the Dutch central bank granted Qivalis an electronic money licence. Qivalis is the Amsterdam-based company backed by a consortium of 37 European banks, including BBVA, BNP Paribas, ING and DZ Bank, set up to issue a euro stablecoin under MiCA. It still has to publish its white paper before it can launch, which it plans to do in the coming months, and it will distribute through banks, crypto exchanges and payment providers rather than directly to the public.
Its CEO put the ambition simply: Europe's currency deserves Europe's rules, onchain. I agree with the instinct. For years, almost all of the activity in stablecoins has been in dollars, and European businesses that wanted to move money onchain had to step into another currency to do it.
But I think the more important point is easy to miss. A bank-backed euro token does not replace the dollar stablecoins already used in cross-border trade, and it does not replace the bank account. It adds another rail. A European company paying suppliers in Asia, receiving from customers in the US and holding cash in Frankfurt will increasingly touch all three: traditional euro accounts, onchain euros and onchain dollars. The value moves to whoever can sit across those rails, convert between them cleanly, and keep the whole thing compliant.
Europe takes charge of the dollar token
The other big moment came the same day. On 14 October, the European Banking Authority classified Circle's USDC as a "significant" e-money token under MiCA, the first of the 45 tokens notified in the EU to cross that threshold. From 12 November, the EBA itself will supervise USDC's reserves, liquidity and redemption plans, while France's ACPR keeps responsibility for areas such as governance and outsourcing. The EBA has also signed an agreement with New York's financial regulator to share information on Circle's US operations.
This matters more than it might look. USDC is a dollar token with a supply of nearly $73 billion, and it is now supervised directly at European level. For a European finance team, that removes one of the biggest objections to holding or moving dollars onchain: who is actually watching the reserves. It also tells you how Europe intends to live with dollar stablecoins. Not by keeping them out, but by bringing them inside the rulebook.
Circle is clearly building for that world. It also issues EURC, the largest euro stablecoin today, and in September it launched Arc, its own blockchain for payments and onchain finance, with EURC among the supported currencies and Société Générale among the banks involved. One company now sits on both the euro and the dollar side of onchain money, under European supervision. That is a strong signal of where the market is heading.
The basics still decide who survives
MiCA's transition period ended on 1 July. Any firm providing crypto-asset services in the EU now needs to be authorised, and the grace period for firms that operated under old national regimes is over. That alone has cleared a lot of noise out of the market.
This week's reminder of what supervision looks like came from Dublin. On 22 October, the Central Bank of Ireland fined Coinbase Ireland €3.25 million over failures in safeguarding customer funds and in overseeing services outsourced to its US parent. Coinbase disclosed that coding errors had left a safeguarding account underfunded by an average of 0.54% over 2023 and the first half of 2024, and said no customer lost money.
It is a small fine by the standards of the industry. The lesson is bigger. Safeguarding, reconciliation and control over outsourced providers are not back-office details in this business. They are the product. Anyone holding other people's money, whether in an account, in custody or in tokens, is ultimately selling one thing: the certainty that it will be there, at full value, when the customer wants it back. MiCA builds that into e-money tokens directly. Holders can redeem them at face value at any time, and they cannot earn interest. That is not a limitation. It is the point.
Agents are getting wallets
On 20 October, Mastercard opened early access to Agent Pay for Machines, its system for letting AI agents pay for services on their own, within limits a human has approved. In a demonstration at Cloudflare's conference, an agent preparing a marketing campaign paid two providers for research and images, within a budget a human had approved. BVNK, the stablecoin infrastructure company Mastercard acquired in August, acted as the agent's wallet, and sellers could be paid in their preferred currency, token or rail.
It is still a pilot, not a commercial product. But it shows where this is going. Agents need to pay for data, computing power and services, often in very small amounts, at any hour, across borders. Card rails were not built for that. Stablecoins handle some of it well. The likely outcome is not one winner but a layer that routes each payment to whichever rail makes sense, with spending controls on top.
Corporates are moving too, more slowly. EY-Parthenon's 2026 blockchain payments survey found that 18% of corporates have now used stablecoins, roughly double the share a year earlier, with cross-border business payments the leading use. The same survey found that 74% of corporates want these payments built into the systems they already use, and more than half named poor integration with their ERP and treasury systems as a barrier. That tells you where adoption will really be won or lost.
The view from here
The lesson I took from years of working with payments customers is that they rarely want more payment options for their own sake. They want fewer decisions. They want one place where the money arrives, converts and leaves on the right rail, with the compliance done properly behind the scenes and a clear audit trail when someone asks.
Stablecoins are about to test that lesson at a larger scale. Malta, which built one of Europe's earliest frameworks for crypto and now operates under MiCA like everyone else, is well placed to be a home for the companies that get this right. The opportunity here is not in issuing yet another token. It is in being the trusted layer that lets a normal European business use the new rails without having to become a crypto company to do it.
Watch list
| 12 November 2026 | The EBA takes over direct supervision of USDC's reserves, liquidity and redemption plans. |
| 4 November 2026 | Circle reports third-quarter results. |
| Coming months | Qivalis publishes its white paper and launches its bank-backed euro token. |
| Pilot stage | Mastercard Agent Pay for Machines moves from early access towards commercial launch. |
| Ongoing | National supervisors enforce MiCA authorisation and safeguarding rules after the end of the transition period. |
| 2 December 2026 | EU AI Act grace period ends for marking AI-generated content from systems already on the market. |
My Take
Money is steadily becoming multi-rail. Bank accounts are not going away, euro stablecoins are arriving with the backing of the banks themselves, dollar stablecoins already move real value across borders, and AI agents are about to become customers of all three.
When that happens, the rail itself stops being the advantage. The advantage moves to the switch: the business that can hold, convert and move value across rails, instantly, with safeguarding that is beyond question and controls that a regulator, an auditor or an AI agent's owner can trust.
I am convinced the winners in European payments over the next five years won't be the ones with the cleverest token. They will be the ones that make two kinds of money feel like one.
George
Related reading: Crypto Payments in Regulated iGaming · SEPA Instant Payments · The Trust Problem in Agentic Commerce
The AI Edge is published weekly by George Kakouras for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or investment advice. Each edition covers enterprise AI deployment, strategy, and regulation for executives operating in EMEA.