“Banks are no longer wondering whether they will use stablecoins from now on. They are deciding how they will use them,” Andrew MacKenzie, founder and CEO of Scotland-based stablecoin issuer Agant, said in an interview.
The discussion intensified this week after Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire responded to the introduction of OpenUSD, a rival stablecoin backed by companies including Coinbase (COIN), payments company Stripe and asset manager BlackRock (BLK). Allaire said $USDC‘s position is built on nearly a decade of strengthening liquidity, banking relationships and regulatory approvals.
Adrian Cachinero Vasiljevic, co-founder and partner at Steakhouse Financial, which advises institutions on decentralized finance, agrees that the surrounding ecosystem is essential.
“The network is what creates value,” he said in an interview. “The stablecoin itself becomes almost secondary.
Read more: The Circle $USDC Tether Surpasses USDT in Onchain Business as Regulation Drives Change: JPMorgan
Despite this, new stablecoins continue to emerge, particularly in Europe where the network is less established and there are concerns about the preponderance of dollar-pegged tokens, which represent more than 99% of the total stablecoin market capitalization.
Jan-Oliver Sell, CEO of Qivalis, a group of 37 European financial institutions developing the Euro On-Chain (EUOC) stablecoin, noted that Europe already has regulatory oversight under the Markets in Crypto-Asset (MiCA) framework. What it lacks is enough euro-denominated liquidity to prevent settlement activity from migrating to dollar-backed stablecoins.