Euro Stablecoin: Built by Europeans for Europe, with Jan-Oliver Sell, Qivalis

Why 99.8% of stablecoin transactions run in dollars, and what that means for Europe: #

Jan-Oliver Sell, CEO of Qivalis, opens with the gap his company exists to close: almost all stablecoin volume today settles in US dollars, despite roughly a quarter of global stablecoin activity originating inside Europe. His read is straightforward: the demand for a euro on chain already exists; the liquidity to serve it doesn’t yet.

Two different projects keep getting confused: the digital euro and a euro stablecoin: #

Jan-Oliver separates the ECB’s retail digital euro, a cash-like instrument that won’t run on a blockchain, from what Qivalis actually issues: an electronic money token backed 1:1 by euro reserves, purpose-built for blockchain-based financial activity that needs a euro settlement leg.

How MiCA turned bank interest into a 37-bank consortium: #

Before MiCA gave European regulators a clear definition of what a token legally is, banks had no comfortable path into this space. Qivalis launched in late 2025 with 12 founding member banks and has since grown to 37 across Europe, a scale Jan-Oliver attributes directly to that regulatory clarity.

Liquidity is the actual bottleneck, not the technology: #

Jan-Oliver is candid that issuing a token isn’t the hard problem. Depth is. A corporate trying to move meaningful volume through a thin market runs into slippage and can’t reliably access euros at scale, which is why Qivalis is focused as much on building the surrounding ecosystem, lending, trading, settlement, as on the token itself.

The risk Jan-Oliver is actually worried about - dollarization: #

Speaking with 37 banks about their own blockchain plans, Jan-Oliver’s biggest concern isn’t slow adoption; it’s European banks moving processes on-chain and settling everything in US dollar stablecoins by default. That path effectively converts European assets into US government treasuries and pulls capital out of Europe’s own financial system, which is exactly the gap a European-backed euro stablecoin is meant to close.

Why listen: #

For anyone tracking where stablecoin infrastructure is headed outside the US, this episode lays out a concrete case for why the euro’s near-total absence on chain is a solvable liquidity problem, not a demand problem, and why European banks are already betting on it.