One in 20 euro area consumers holds a stablecoin, ECB survey finds, and most of them hold dollar tokens

About 5% of consumers in the euro area held stablecoins in August 2025, more than a third of everyone who owned any crypto, and most of what they held were dollar tokens, according to a box in Issue 7/2026 of the ECB’s Economic Bulletin published this week. Among consumers with crypto, 17% held Tether’s USDT, 12% Circle’s USDC and 10% Circle’s euro token EURC. The European Central Bank reads the numbers as a limited risk today, and lists three ways it could stop being one.

The box, titled “Who holds stablecoins? New evidence on euro area consumer holdings”, is research, not a rule. Eight authors ran questions on crypto through the bank’s Consumer Expectations Survey (CES) in two waves, August and November 2025, and published the results now. Nobody is being asked for new data, and no new obligation follows for holders, exchanges or issuers.

That matters because some coverage in France framed the box as the ECB “wanting to know” who holds stablecoins. The survey answers were already collected a year ago; what is new is that the central bank has put numbers on them for the first time.

ECB survey: one consumer in 20 holds a stablecoin

The CES is a consumer panel the ECB runs across the 11 largest euro area countries, with population weights. In the August 2025 wave, households were asked whether anyone in the home owned crypto-assets, then which kinds. The share owning any crypto rose from 9.8% in November 2024 to 13% in August 2025, which the ECB calls a slow increase “from low levels”.

Within that, 5% of consumers said they held stablecoins. The ECB’s chart of that wave splits the answers further: according to the chart, about 4% of consumers held stablecoins alongside other crypto, and only around half a percentage point held stablecoins alone. Nearly 2% owned crypto but did not know which kind.

So the typical European stablecoin holder is not a saver parking euros in a digital dollar. It is a crypto investor who keeps some stablecoins next to bitcoin or ether, mostly to trade. The ECB says as much: stablecoins “are mostly held alongside other crypto-assets”, consistent with their main use inside the crypto market.

Which coins: bitcoin first, then USDT, USDC and EURC

The August wave also asked crypto owners what exactly they held. The answers come from 1,286 respondents, and because people could tick several boxes the shares add up to more than 100%.

Source: ECB Economic Bulletin 7/2026, box 8, Chart C. Dollar tokens lead, the ECB writes, because consumers tend to hold the assets with the biggest market capitalisation. EURC’s 10% is still notable: it is the only euro stablecoin that shows up on its own in the answers.

For readers who want the difference between the two dollar tokens, our guide to USDT vs USDC covers issuers, reserves and where each is used.

How much: mostly small sums, with a long tail

The November 2025 wave asked crypto owners how their crypto was split between stablecoins and other tokens, on a five-point scale from “fully invested in crypto-assets other than stablecoins” to “fully invested in stablecoins”. The ECB combined those answers with the amounts people reported to estimate how much each holder had in stablecoins.

Most holdings are small. According to the ECB’s chart, about one stablecoin owner in five held less than €100, and roughly half held under €600. The tail is real, though: the ECB says close to 10% of stablecoin owners held €10,000 or more.

Measured against everything people own, stablecoins barely register. The ECB’s chart puts them at about 4% of financial assets (bank accounts, shares, funds) for consumers who hold stablecoins, and around 0.2% for all respondents.

One more finding points beyond trading. Respondents born in another EU country or outside the EU were 2.1 percentage points more likely to hold stablecoins than people born in their country of residence, after the ECB controlled for other characteristics. The survey does not ask what the coins are used for, but the authors call the pattern consistent with cross-border payments or remittances. They cite a July 2026 Banca d’Italia study of stablecoin remittances among the evidence on that use, which they describe as mixed.

Euro stablecoins grew more than tenfold since 2024 and are still tiny

The box opens with the market itself. Its first chart shows dollar stablecoins, led by USDT and then USDC, at roughly $290 billion in September 2026, after strong growth since 2020 that the ECB says has “recently plateaued”. Their share of the whole crypto market sat near 9% at the last observation; the ECB notes that swings in that share come mainly from the prices of other crypto-assets.

Euro stablecoins authorised under MiCAR, the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, are a rounding error next to that. The ECB’s text gives no figure and says only that the market “has grown” but “remains relatively small”. Its chart, which covers EURC, EURCV, EURAU, EURØP, EURR, EURI, EURe and EURQ, ends at about €645 million in September 2026. Circle’s EURC makes up about €395 million of that and Société Générale-Forge’s EURCV about €160 million, with Banking Circle’s EURI and the others sharing the rest.

Earlier ECB publications give the same path in round numbers:

The November 2025 Financial Stability Review also estimated that dollar tokens make up around 99% of all stablecoins in circulation. Nothing in the new box changes that picture.

The three risks the ECB names, and what MiCAR covers

The ECB’s message is two-sided. Today, low use of stablecoins in the euro area “limits immediate risks to bank funding”. If use grew a lot, it sees three weak spots:

The first is runs and de-pegs, when a coin trades well below its $1 or €1 par because holders doubt they can redeem it. The second is spillover from the reserves: an issuer facing mass redemptions would have to sell the Treasury bills and deposits behind its token, and that fire sale reaches traditional markets. The third, and the one most specific to a central bank, is what the ECB calls “a possible currency substitution channel”.

That third risk is about the euro itself. If euro area consumers started using dollar stablecoins for more than crypto trades, the ECB writes, their holdings of non-euro tokens could grow, and depending on scale that could affect bank deposit funding, how its interest-rate decisions reach the economy, and the role of euro payment tools.

The authors also describe how a shock would travel. Because most stablecoin holders also own other crypto, a de-peg would hit portfolios that are already exposed to bitcoin and ether. The reverse works too: a crypto crash could set off a stablecoin sell-off. They call stablecoin use “a two-way channel between crypto-assets and investor wealth”.

On regulation, the box says MiCAR “reduces many of the risks discussed”, while spillovers from cross-border regulatory arbitrage may persist. In a footnote the authors add that stablecoins not authorised under MiCAR may still carry those risks, citing the European Systemic Risk Board. Our explainer on the MiCA regulation sets out what authorisation requires of an issuer.

The conclusion is cautious rather than alarmed. Current holdings pose limited risks to euro area financial stability, the ECB says, but that could change if adoption broadened, especially as “younger, more crypto-inclined cohorts” enter the market. Its closing line: monitoring consumer exposures and contagion channels “remains essential”.

What it means for European stablecoin holders

Nothing changes in your account because of this box. It creates no reporting duty and no new limit. What it does show is how the ECB thinks about the coins in your wallet, and that thinking tends to end up in rules and supervision.

Start with currency. The coin most often held in the survey, USDT, is a dollar token and is not one of the MiCAR-authorised euro tokens on the ECB’s list; EU platforms have been moving clients away from stablecoins that lack MiCA authorisation, as our page on ESMA’s deadline for non-MiCA stablecoins explains. A holder exposed to the market’s largest tokens therefore carries a currency risk against the euro on top of the issuer risk.

Then there is concentration. The ECB’s worry is less the size of holdings than the fact that the same people hold stablecoins and volatile crypto together, so one shock reaches both. That is a portfolio question each holder can check for themselves: how much of the stablecoin balance is there to buy crypto, and how much is meant to stay stable.

Finally, the survey is a snapshot of 2025. Trading habits have moved since: data from Kaiko showed that USDC had taken 56% of euro stablecoin trading by late October, a different measure (trading volume, not holders) from the ECB’s. And on-chain data from Chainalysis showed French self-custody stablecoin balances up 192% in a year, another method pointing the same way as the survey: stablecoin holding in Europe is growing from a small base.

Limits of the data and what the ECB does not say

The authors are open about the weaknesses. The data are labelled experimental and are sensitive to how the questions were worded. Samples are small because few people own crypto, and respondents may misreport what they hold, or how much, because they see the subject as sensitive. The November wave’s sample size is not given.

The box also leaves out things readers may look for. It gives no country breakdown, even though France, Italy and Germany are among the 11 countries surveyed. It gives no age split in numbers, no total of euros held, no average holding and no data on what the coins are used for. It contains no 2026 survey figures and makes no policy proposal.

The next ECB readings on the subject are likely to come through its regular Financial Stability Review and from further CES waves, if the bank repeats the crypto questions. Until then, these 2025 answers are the first consumer-level figures the ECB has published on who in the euro area holds stablecoins.