Qivalis, the Amsterdam company set up by European banks to issue a euro stablecoin, now holds an electronic money institution (EMI) licence from De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB), the Dutch central bank. The company announced the authorisation on 14 October and says it is backed by 37 banks in 15 countries, ING, BNP Paribas and UniCredit among them. The licence makes Qivalis eligible to issue euro-denominated electronic money tokens under MiCA. It does not put a single token in anyone’s wallet yet.
By the company’s own account, two steps still separate the licence from a live Qivalis stablecoin: a MiCA white paper, not yet published, and a first issuance that has no firm date. A third depends on other firms. Banks, exchanges and payment companies will have to distribute the token, and none of them has said when it will.
The timeline has also gone soft. On 5 October Qivalis said it planned to launch “before the end of 2026” and spoke of a launch “later in 2026”. Its 14 October release speaks of issuance “within the next months”, with no year attached.
What Qivalis announced on 14 October, and what it did not
The release is short. Qivalis says DNB has granted it authorisation as an EMI and that it is now under DNB’s ongoing supervision. As an authorised EMI, the company says, it is eligible to issue euro EMTs, the MiCA category for stablecoins pegged to a single official currency. It calls the licence “a decisive regulatory condition” for issuing its token.
Jan-Oliver Sell, the chief executive, put the political case in one line: “Europe’s currency deserves Europe’s rules – on-chain.” He added that Europe should have “a euro-denominated on-chain settlement asset issued under European law”.
The same day, the company’s website carried a disclosure that matters more to anyone hoping to buy the coin. Qivalis “does not currently issue electronic money or provide payment services to the public”, it says.
Several things are missing from the announcement. There is no token name or ticker. There is no blockchain named, in this release or in anything Coindaro found from earlier in the year. There is no date for the white paper, no list of the first distributing banks and no detail of redemption terms beyond the general MiCA rule. The release describes a “full reserve model”, and the 5 October release said reserves would sit 1:1 with regulated custodians, segregated from Qivalis’s own balance sheet. The reserve mix itself has not been published.
The exact day of DNB’s decision is not public. One secondary report put it on 13 October; Qivalis gives 14 October as the date of its announcement, and a Coindaro search of DNB’s public register on 19 October returned no entry for Qivalis that would settle it. Outlets including CoinDesk and Cointelegraph reported the licence on 14 October.
The Qivalis licence is one gate of three
MiCA lets only two kinds of firms offer an e-money token to the public in the EU: credit institutions and electronic money institutions. Qivalis is not a bank, so the EMI licence was the first requirement. It is not the only one. CryptoSlate, in a 15 October analysis of the rules, described the authorisation as meeting a licensing condition and as one part of the company’s route to market.
Gate two: the white paper
Before an EMT goes on offer, the issuer has to draw up a crypto-asset white paper, notify it to its national authority and publish it. Qivalis’s own release says issuance depends on meeting MiCA requirements and on that publication. MiCA’s Article 51(11), as published in ESMA’s interactive rulebook, says competent authorities “shall not require prior approval” of white papers before publication. It also requires an EMT issuer to notify its white paper to its authority at least 20 working days before publishing it. So the step is a notification, not a second licence, but it carries a waiting period of about four weeks. Qivalis has not said whether it has filed.
The technology side was settled earlier. On 21 April, when Qivalis still had 12 member banks, it named Fireblocks as its infrastructure partner; FOW reported the choice on 22 April, and CoinDesk repeated it in its 14 October story. The October release itself does not mention Fireblocks, and neither company has said which blockchain the token will use.
Gate three: issuance and distribution
Qivalis will not sell its token to the public directly. It describes a B2B2X model: Qivalis issues, and eligible counterparties (banks, crypto exchanges, payment service providers and market infrastructure firms) pass the token on to their own clients. That design turns the 37 shareholder banks into the main sales channel. It also means a retail saver in Milan or Lyon will only see the coin if their bank, or an exchange they use, decides to offer it.
None of the member banks has published a launch plan for its customers. No exchange has announced a listing. Those are the announcements to watch after the white paper.
Under MiCA, a holder of an EMT has a claim on the issuer and can redeem at par at any time, and the issuer may not pay interest on the token, as CoinDesk recalled in its 14 October report. For a bank-owned issuer, the interest ban has a practical side: a token that pays nothing is a settlement tool and does not compete with the deposit account. Our MiCA glossary entry sums up the regime.
From “second half of 2026” to “within the next months”
Qivalis has moved fast on paper. It was announced on 2 December 2025 as a joint venture of around ten banks, with a launch planned for the second half of 2026. The company itself says it was founded in September 2025.
| Date | Step | Timeline given |
|---|---|---|
| 2 Dec 2025 | Joint venture of around ten banks announced | Second half of 2026 |
| 13 Jan 2026 | DZ BANK joins | Not restated |
| 20 Jan 2026 | Supervisory board appointed at Davos, chaired by Sir Howard Davies | Not restated |
| 4 Feb 2026 | BBVA joins | Not restated |
| 21 Apr 2026 | Fireblocks chosen as technology partner | Not restated |
| 20 May 2026 | 25 banks join, 37 in total; DNB licence still being sought | Second half of 2026 |
| 5 Oct 2026 | Olga Elsenga named Chief Risk & Compliance Officer | “Before the end of 2026” |
| 14 Oct 2026 | DNB grants EMI authorisation (as announced) | “Within the next months” |
The 20 May release marked the big jump, when 25 banks joined the original 12. At that point Qivalis still described itself as pursuing the DNB licence and kept the second-half target.
The 5 October release on Olga Elsenga is the clearest marker of the old schedule. Elsenga, previously head of legal at ClearBank Europe, where she led its MiCA notification with the Dutch markets regulator AFM, joined the management board on 1 October. “A euro-pegged stablecoin is only as good as the controls behind it,” Sell said then. The release stated that Qivalis “plans to launch before the end of 2026”.
Nine days later the wording changed to “within the next months”. Qivalis has not withdrawn the 2026 target and has given no reason for the new phrasing. With about ten weeks left in the year, no published white paper and no distributor announced, a 2026 launch now needs the notification, the 20-working-day wait and the first bank or exchange deal to fall into place before Christmas.
The rest of the management team is in place: Sell as CEO, Floris Lugt as CFO and Marco Hinz as COO, under a supervisory board chaired by Sir Howard Davies, the former chairman of NatWest Group and of the UK Financial Services Authority.
The 37 banks behind the Qivalis stablecoin
The membership list comes from the May release. The 12 earlier members are Banca Sella, BBVA, BNP Paribas, CaixaBank, Danske Bank, DekaBank, DZ BANK, ING, KBC, Raiffeisen Bank International, SEB and UniCredit.
The 25 that joined on 20 May are ABANCA, ABN AMRO, AIB, Banco Sabadell, Bank of Ireland, Bank Pekao, Bankinter, Spuerkeess (Banque et Caisse d’Epargne de l’Etat), Banque Fédérative du Crédit Mutuel, BPER, Cecabank, Erste Group, Groupe BPCE, Handelsbanken, Helaba, Intesa Sanpaolo, Jyske Bank, Kutxabank, Landsbankinn, National Bank of Greece, Nordea, OP Pohjola, Piraeus, Rabobank and Swedbank.
France: three groups in, Société Générale outside
BNP Paribas was among the early members. Groupe BPCE, the parent of Banque Populaire and Caisse d’Epargne, and Banque Fédérative du Crédit Mutuel joined in May. Société Générale is not on the list. Its crypto arm SG-FORGE already issues a euro stablecoin, EURCV, which would compete directly with the Qivalis token. Coindaro found no statement explaining the bank’s absence. Crédit Agricole does not appear either.
Italy: four banks, two of them founders
UniCredit and Banca Sella were among the 12 earlier members. BPER and Intesa Sanpaolo joined in May, so Italy now has four banks in the consortium; reports from April that counted two predate the expansion. For Italian crypto platforms supervised by Consob and registered with OAM, the timing matters: ESMA has given EU platforms until January to stop new purchases of stablecoins that are not MiCA-compliant, as we reported in our piece on ESMA’s non-MiCA stablecoin deadline. A bank-issued euro EMT would sit on the compliant side of that line once it exists.
The Netherlands and the others
ING is an early member and ABN AMRO and Rabobank joined in May, so the three large Dutch banks are all in, with DNB as the supervisor. Deutsche Bank is absent: it backs a different euro coin, AllUnity’s EURAU, through its asset manager DWS. Santander is not on the list either.
Euro stablecoins today: a market of about €815 million
Qivalis would start from zero in a small corner of the stablecoin market. On DefiLlama’s stablecoin data, pulled by Coindaro at 10:57 UTC on 19 October, the nine largest euro-pegged tokens had a combined circulating supply of about €815 million.
| Euro stablecoin | Issuer | Circulating supply (19 Oct 2026, 10:57 UTC) |
|---|---|---|
| EURC | Circle | €491.6M |
| EURCV | SG-FORGE (Société Générale) | €187.8M |
| EURI | Eurite | €37.2M |
| EURE | Monerium | €31.7M |
| EUROP | Schuman | €18.6M |
| REUR | Royal Euro | €16.8M |
| EURR | StablR | €14.3M |
| EURQ | Quantoz | €9.3M |
| EURS | Stasis | €7.7M |
Counting every euro-pegged token DefiLlama lists, the total rises only to about €830 million. That includes AllUnity’s EURAU, launched in July 2025 under a BaFin EMI licence by DWS, Flow Traders and Galaxy Digital, with less than €0.5 million in circulation on the same data.
The dollar side is in another league. At the same time DefiLlama counted about $306 billion of dollar-pegged stablecoins, $183.4 billion of it in Tether’s USDT. At the roughly $1.12 that DefiLlama prices EURC, the nine euro tokens in the table are worth about $913 million, or 0.3% of the dollar total. Cointelegraph, citing DefiLlama on 14 October, gave a similar picture: a $303 billion market with USDT above 60%.
Circle’s EURC leads with more than half of the euro supply, and Circle’s position in Europe is under new scrutiny: from 12 November the European Banking Authority takes over supervision of USDC as a significant e-money token, as we explained in our report on the EBA and USDC. SG-FORGE’s EURCV is the closest bank-issued rival to Qivalis, with about €188 million in circulation at the time above.
Qivalis’s advantage over EURC and EURCV is on paper: 37 shareholder banks that could each offer the token to their clients. It has no live token yet, no named chain, no exchange liquidity and no first use case announced by a member. How many of those banks put it in front of corporate treasurers, payment firms or retail customers, and how fast, is the number to follow once it launches.
Qivalis and the digital euro are two different tracks
The Qivalis stablecoin is private money: a claim on an e-money institution owned by commercial banks, backed by reserves, running on a public or permissioned blockchain still to be named. The digital euro is the European Central Bank’s public-money project, and on 17 October Christine Lagarde set its pilot for 2027 while the law behind it is still being negotiated, as covered in our piece on the digital euro timeline.
Coindaro found no ECB or DNB statement on Qivalis itself, and no source comparing the two projects directly. Both projects respond to the weight of dollar tokens in on-chain payments, one with central bank money and one with commercial bank money. Sell called the rules for on-chain finance “a question of European autonomy” in the October release; Sir Howard Davies, in May, described efficiency in financial infrastructure as “a matter of sovereignty”.
What a euro e-money token is, for newcomers
A stablecoin is a crypto token designed to keep a steady value, usually against a currency. MiCA, the EU’s crypto rulebook, splits them in two: e-money tokens, pegged to one official currency, and asset-referenced tokens, tied to a basket or other assets. An EMT can only be issued by a bank or an EMI, must be redeemable at face value at any time and may not pay interest to holders. Our beginner’s guide to stablecoins covers how they work and where the risks sit.
Dates to watch
- The Qivalis white paper, to be notified to DNB and published on qivalis.eu; no date has been given.
- ESMA’s interim MiCA register, where EMT white papers appear once notified.
- Announcements from member banks or exchanges about offering the token to clients.
- 12 November 2026: the EBA takes over supervision of USDC.
- January 2027: ESMA’s deadline for EU platforms on non-MiCA stablecoins, and 18 January 2027, when the US GENIUS Act takes effect.
- 2027: the ECB’s digital euro pilot.
Until the white paper is out, the Qivalis euro stablecoin remains a licensed issuer with 37 shareholders and no token. The next filing on qivalis.eu will show whether “within the next months” still means 2026.