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.
Underneath MiCA, stablecoins that reference a single fiat forex sit within the “e-money token” bucket, whereas tokens tied to a basket fall below “asset-referenced tokens.” Which means if an issuer and an change need to preserve a euro stablecoin obtainable to EU customers, the compliance burden is now specific, and it reveals up in listings, disclosures, and what will get routed the place.
A yr and a half later, it is easy to search out the headline quantity. DECTA’s “Euro Stablecoin Developments 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 Might 2025, and that aggregated month-to-month transaction quantity jumped from $383 million to $3.832 billion, with EURC and EURCV logging the most important transaction-volume jumps within the dataset.
That is the very constructive and simple story of stablecoin rails within the EU. However the tougher query that wants answering, the one merchants really really feel of their P&L, is definitely of their orderbook.
The euro stablecoin increase was actual, however lots of it was compelled
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 2024 notice 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 file 67% market share. However Kaiko additionally famous that weekly buying and selling volumes for EUR-backed stablecoins stayed round $30 million, far beneath the ~$100 million ranges seen in March 2024. In different phrases, the pie did not all of a sudden get a lot greater. The slices simply received 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 file 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 develop into simpler or cheaper to commerce. A stablecoin might be plentiful and nonetheless fail to show into higher execution if it sits on the mistaken venues, lives in skinny swimming pools, or simply will get used as a settlement chip that in the end 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 worth and the most effective displayed promote worth, the toll you pay to cross the market. Market depth is the scale you may commerce with out pushing the worth round. Kaiko makes use of the “1% market depth” metric, which is an easy, trader-friendly proxy: how a lot measurement is sitting inside 1% of the mid-price on each side of the e-book.
Stablecoin rails assist most after they make it simpler for market makers and huge merchants to fund and rebalance positions throughout venues, particularly when fiat transfers are sluggish, minimize 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 up move.
If Europe’s BTC-EUR and ETH-EUR received higher, it was largely about focus
The cleanest “scoreboard” numbers in Kaiko’s Europe report are about BTC-EUR’s position in international bitcoin-fiat buying and selling, and they’re exhausting to disregard. Kaiko stories that BTC-EUR’s share of world BTC-fiat commerce quantity rose from 3.6% to almost 10% in 2024. That may be a massive leap in a world the place USD pairs normally dominate by default.
However the remainder of the report tells you ways Europe achieved that, and it wasn’t a broad-based, every-venue renaissance.
Kaiko reveals that euro buying and selling is clustered tightly: Bitvavo, Kraken, Coinbase, and Binance collectively accounted for over 85% of whole 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 could possibly really feel like liquidity in Europe received 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 prime 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 attempting to commerce measurement in a European time zone, that is the sort of metric that decides whether or not you execute calmly or find yourself slicing orders into mud.
So, did euro stablecoins really “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 appears like a venue story. One of the best 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 a number of books with severe maker participation, predictable routing, and sufficient move to maintain market makers engaged.
Third, stablecoin-euro exercise is uneven throughout exchanges. In Kaiko’s report, stablecoin-to-euro pairs had 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 observe, 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 might 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 scale back friction in funding and rebalancing, particularly throughout borders and outdoors banking hours. Additionally they give exchanges a compliant euro-adjacent product to record when sure legacy stablecoins develop into tougher to help within the EU. However when you’re searching for 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 move and makers.
The “bridge” story, in the meantime, remains 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 yr. And weekly fund-flow snapshots from CoinShares are a good public proxy for the way a lot institutional-style allocation is working by means of listed merchandise and the place it’s touchdown geographically.
Nonetheless, you may land a plain-English verdict with out pretending to have an ideal causal mannequin.
MiCA’s first yr 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 received tradable once more” story can also be actual, however it reads much less like a continent-wide improve and extra like liquidity concentrating into a number of venues with genuinely tight spreads and significant depth.
In case you’re a dealer, the sensible takeaway is nearly boring: euro stablecoins are the rails, however the ticket worth is about by the books: MiCA simply helped make the rails credible. The books received higher the place liquidity concentrated. And Europe’s actual take a look at in yr 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 reside on and the remainder are nonetheless costly to go to.
