The euro lastly has a considerable stablecoin market, and for as soon as, it is not only a area of interest nook of DeFi. When MiCA’s stablecoin guidelines kicked in June 2024, they turned euro-pegged stablecoins right into a regulated product class with paperwork, reserve guidelines, and an precise licensing lane.
Beneath MiCA, stablecoins that reference a single fiat foreign money sit within the “e-money token” bucketwhereas tokens tied to a basket fall beneath “asset-referenced tokens.” Which means if an issuer and an change need to preserve a euro stablecoin accessible to EU customers, the compliance burden is now specific, and it exhibits up in listings, disclosures, and what will get routed the place.
A 12 months and a half later, it is easy to seek out the headline quantity. DECTA’s “Euro Stablecoin Traits Report 2025” places the post-MiCA arithmetic plainly: throughout its monitored set of main euro-pegged stablecoins, market cap within the 12 months after MiCA’s rollout elevated by 102%, reversing a 48% decline within the 12 months main into MiCA.
It additionally says the mixed market cap reached $500 million in Could 2025, and that aggregated month-to-month transaction quantity jumped from $383 million to $3.832 billion, with EURC and EURCV logging the largest transaction-volume jumps within the dataset.
That is the very optimistic and simple story of stablecoin rails within the EU. However the tougher query that wants answering, the one merchants truly really feel of their P&L, is definitely of their orderbook.
The euro stablecoin increase was actual, however lots of it was pressured
If you wish to perceive why euro stablecoin market share snapped into place so shortly, we have to begin with an uncomfortable reality: early MiCA “adoption” was not a sudden wave of recent demand.
Kaiko’s October observe put a quantity on the shelf reset. Roughly three months after MiCA’s late-June begin, Kaiko discovered that MiCA-compliant euro stablecoins (together with EURC and Société Générale’s EURCV) hit a report 67% market share. However Kaiko additionally famous that weekly buying and selling volumes for EUR-backed stablecoins stayed round $30 million, far under the ~$100 million ranges seen in March 2024. In different phrases, the pie did not immediately get a lot larger. The slices simply obtained rearranged as a result of exchanges wanted to align listings with the brand new rule set.
By November 2024, that rearrangement had largely completed. In Kaiko’s “State of the European Crypto Market” report, MiCA-compliant EUR stablecoins (EURC, EURCV, and Banking Circle’s EURI) reached a report 91% market share.
That is the primary helpful lesson for the liquidity take a look at: stablecoin provide and stablecoin market share can transfer quick when the rulebook forces venue habits. However that does not mechanically imply BTC-EUR and ETH-EUR grow to be simpler or cheaper to commerce. A stablecoin could be plentiful and nonetheless fail to show into higher execution if it sits on the incorrect venues, lives in skinny swimming pools, or simply will get used as a settlement chip that finally routes into the identical few deep books.
So what would higher liquidity appear to be?
First, you’d need tighter spreads and deeper books. The bid-ask unfold is the hole between the most effective displayed purchase value and the most effective displayed promote value, the toll you pay to cross the market. Market depth is the scale you possibly can commerce with out pushing the value round. Kaiko makes use of the “1% market depth” metric, which is a straightforward, trader-friendly proxy: how a lot dimension is sitting inside 1% of the mid-price on either side of the e book.
Stablecoin rails assist most after they make it simpler for market makers and enormous merchants to fund and rebalance positions throughout venues, particularly when fiat transfers are sluggish, reduce off by weekends, or loaded with banking friction. However the rails solely matter in the event that they hook up with books that may take in movement.
If Europe’s BTC-EUR and ETH-EUR obtained higher, it was largely about focus
The cleanest “scoreboard” numbers in Kaiko’s Europe report are about BTC-EUR’s function in world bitcoin-fiat buying and selling, and they’re arduous to disregard. Kaiko stories that BTC-EUR’s share of worldwide BTC-fiat commerce quantity rose from 3.6% to almost 10% in 2024. That could be a massive soar in a world the place USD pairs normally dominate by default.
However the remainder of the report tells you the way Europe achieved that, and it wasn’t a broad-based, every-venue renaissance.
Kaiko exhibits that euro buying and selling is clustered tightly: Bitvavo, Kraken, Coinbase, and Binance collectively accounted for over 85% of complete euro-denominated buying and selling quantity in November 2024, and for euro-denominated volumes excluding stablecoins-to-fiat pairs, Bitvavo sat round 50% share with Kraken second.
That focus issues as a result of it challenges the notion that liquidity in Europe improved. If liquidity will get pulled right into a small set of venues, spreads can compress and books can deepen on these venues even when the lengthy tail stays costly and patchy. For a retail dealer, it will possibly really feel like liquidity in Europe obtained higher so long as they occur to commerce on the winners. For a classy dealer, it means routing alternative issues greater than slogans about regulation.
Kaiko’s unfold knowledge makes the purpose in a single line: the 30-day common bid-ask spreads for high tokens ranged from over 20 bps on One Buying and selling to 2.6 bps on Bitvavo and three bps on Kraken.
Depth tells the identical story. Kaiko stories that BTC-EUR ranked because the second-deepest BTC-fiat market in its pattern, averaging each day depth of 758 BTC, greater than double BTC-GBP at 350 BTC. In case you’re making an attempt to commerce dimension in a European time zone, that is the form of metric that decides whether or not you execute calmly or find yourself slicing orders into mud.
So, did euro stablecoins truly “trigger” this enchancment? The trustworthy reply is that the proof factors to euro stablecoins as a crucial rail, not a standalone proof.
First, lots of the early euro stablecoin story was compliance-driven reshuffling. Kaiko explicitly frames the post-MiCA euro stablecoin market-share transfer as pushed by delistings and venue coverage updates greater than a sudden wave of demand.
Second, the euro market’s execution high quality seems like a venue story. The most effective spreads in Kaiko’s dataset sit on Bitvavo and Kraken, and the worst sit elsewhere.
That sample is strictly what you’d anticipate from liquidity concentrating in just a few books with critical maker participation, predictable routing, and sufficient movement to maintain market makers engaged.
Third, stablecoin-euro exercise is uneven throughout exchanges. In Kaiko’s report, stablecoin-to-euro pairs have been about half of euro quantity on Kraken and about 30% on Coinbase, however solely about 4% on Binance and a pair of% on Bitvavo.
In follow, meaning the venues with the tightest euro spreads usually are not essentially the venues the place euro stablecoin buying and selling dominates. The stablecoin rail could be thriving on one platform whereas the most effective BTC-EUR execution sits on one other.
That does not make stablecoins irrelevant. It simply pins down their actual job: they cut back friction in funding and rebalancing, particularly throughout borders and out of doors banking hours. Additionally they give exchanges a compliant euro-adjacent product to checklist when sure legacy stablecoins grow to be tougher to assist within the EU. However in the event you’re in search of a straight line from “EURC market cap up” to “ETH-EUR slippage down,” the higher lens is microstructure: the place liquidity concentrates, how routing behaves, and whether or not the most effective venues preserve attracting each movement and makers.
The “bridge” story, in the meantime, continues to be forming. Europe already had loads of crypto ETP plumbing earlier than MiCA, and it has continued to increase. BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin ETP, for instance, launched in March final 12 months. And weekly fund-flow snapshots from CoinShares are a good public proxy for the way a lot institutional-style allocation is operating by means of listed merchandise and the place it’s touchdown geographically.
Nonetheless, you possibly can land a plain-English verdict with out pretending to have an ideal causal mannequin.
MiCA’s first 12 months delivered what regulation is greatest at delivering: clearer classes, cleaner cabinets, and a compliant euro stablecoin lineup that issuers and venues can scale. The “doubled market cap” story is actual within the knowledge DECTA publishes. (decta.com) The “euro obtained tradable once more” story can be actual, nevertheless it reads much less like a continent-wide improve and extra like liquidity concentrating into just a few venues with genuinely tight spreads and significant depth.
In case you’re a dealer, the sensible takeaway is sort of boring: euro stablecoins are the rails, however the ticket value is ready by the books: MiCA simply helped make the rails credible. The books obtained higher the place liquidity concentrated. And Europe’s actual take a look at in 12 months two is whether or not that high quality spreads past the winners, or whether or not the euro’s crypto market retains behaving like an archipelago the place one or two islands are simple to dwell on and the remaining are nonetheless costly to go to.
