There is still no prominent euro stablecoin, which is unlikely to change anytime soon.
There are several popular stablecoins in the crypto market that are pegged to the US dollar
Although there are also Crypto Cash linked to the euro, these are much less popular with crypto users, as Zahreddine Touag from the Parisian crypto company Woorton says.
„There is not one Euro stablecoin that has a high level of liquidity,“ as Touag stated on Thursday in a discussion at Blockchain Week in Paris. He gives several reasons for this, the main reason being that it is simply „very expensive to operate a Euro stablecoin“. He explains this as follows:
„The primary source of income for the operators of US dollar-based stablecoins is the interest rate, whereby the US dollar has a positive interest rate, while the interest rate in Europe is negative or has been negative for a long time.“
The thesis about the popularity of US dollar-based stablecoins can be confirmed by taking a look at the crypto market. For example, the market-leading stablecoin tether ( USDT ), about which controversy repeatedly arises for other reasons , is tied to the US dollar. Tether is now the fourth largest cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of almost $ 20 billion. Other large stablecoins linked to the US dollar are the USD Coin (USDC) and the TrueUSD (TUSD), which also have considerable market capitalizations.
The few stablecoins based on the euro are far less prominent
The crypto ranking portal CoinMarketCap has a euro stablecoin called Stasis Euro (EURS), but it only has a market value of just under 37 million US dollars.
„The second main reason is that Europe is still a very small player on the crypto market,“ as Touag further clarifies the difficult fate for European stablecoins. “Most of the innovations in this area do not come from Europe, but the big players are in the USA and Asia,” says the expert.
In addition, the stablecoin market has a kind of “winner-takes-all” constellation, because the high liquidity also prompts Touag and his company to prefer Tether to smaller dollar stablecoins such as the USDC: “That’s why we at Woorton also use Tether , even if we actually prefer the USDC, but cash flow, clients and counterparties are with Tether ”.