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 beneath “asset-referenced tokens.” Which means that 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 Tendencies 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 largest transaction-volume jumps within the dataset.
That is the very constructive and easy 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 numerous 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 2024 be aware 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 out of the blue get a lot larger. The slices simply acquired 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 check: stablecoin provide and stablecoin market share can transfer quick when the rulebook forces venue habits. However that does not robotically imply BTC-EUR and ETH-EUR change into simpler or cheaper to commerce. A stablecoin might 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 in the end routes into the identical few deep books.
So what would higher liquidity seem like?
First, you’d need tighter spreads and deeper books. The bid-ask unfold is the hole between one of the best displayed purchase value and one of the best displayed promote value, the toll you pay to cross the market. Market depth is the scale you possibly can commerce with out pushing the worth 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 each side of the e-book.
Stablecoin rails assist most once they make it simpler for market makers and enormous merchants to fund and rebalance positions throughout venues, particularly when fiat transfers are gradual, lower off by weekends, or loaded with banking friction. However the rails solely matter in the event that they connect with books that may take up circulate.
If Europe’s BTC-EUR and ETH-EUR acquired higher, it was principally about focus
The cleanest “scoreboard” numbers in Kaiko’s Europe report are about BTC-EUR’s position in world bitcoin-fiat buying and selling, and they’re arduous to disregard. Kaiko studies that BTC-EUR’s share of worldwide BTC-fiat commerce quantity rose from 3.6% to just about 10% in 2024. That may be a large bounce 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 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 might really feel like liquidity in Europe acquired 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 studies that BTC-EUR ranked because the second-deepest BTC-fiat market in its pattern, averaging every day depth of 758 BTC, greater than double BTC-GBP at 350 BTC. Should you’re making an attempt to commerce dimension 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 sincere reply is that the proof factors to euro stablecoins as a essential rail, not a standalone proof.
First, numerous 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 to be 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 precisely what you’ll anticipate from liquidity concentrating in a number of books with critical maker participation, predictable routing, and sufficient circulate 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 follow, meaning the venues with the tightest euro spreads should not essentially the venues the place euro stablecoin buying and selling dominates. The stablecoin rail might be thriving on one platform whereas one of the best 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 out of doors banking hours. Additionally they give exchanges a compliant euro-adjacent product to record when sure legacy stablecoins change into tougher to help within the EU. However in case you’re on the lookout 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 one of the best venues preserve attracting each circulate 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 develop. 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 a way a lot institutional-style allocation is operating by 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 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 acquired tradable once more” story can also be actual, but it surely 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.
Should you’re a dealer, the sensible takeaway is sort of boring: euro stablecoins are the rails, however the ticket value is about by the books: MiCA simply helped make the rails credible. The books acquired higher the place liquidity concentrated. And Europe’s actual check 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 dwell on and the remainder are nonetheless costly to go to.