Euro Stablecoins: What Works, What Sucks, What’s Next

Transcript

Yeah, sure. Sure, yeah. >> Hey everyone. Can you hear me? For you need? Okay. Is Is it clear? Okay. Good morning everyone. Welcome to Dap Con 2026 day one. Super nice to have everyone. So, today we have our first speaker, TechRax from Euro XYZ. He's going to talk about Euro stable coins.

What's next? And he's going to also talk about a bunch of stuff like how Euro works with the USD inflation and bunch of things. So, TechRax, there you go. >> All right. Thank you very much. So, yeah, we will warm up this stage, it looks like. Uh All right. >> [laughter] >> Thank you. It's not about the amount of people in the audience, it's about enthusiasm in the from the people. So, yeah, welcome everybody. Um so, yeah, my name is TechRax. Uh I've been building in Web3 for a few years now, uh but lately mostly I've been involved with Arbitrum DAO and lately mostly about Euro stable coins because I strongly believe that this is part of

our industry that is well underserved and hopefully these talks and these kind of events will encourage more companies, projects, institutions built with Euro stable coins. So, I'm going to start my presentation with a little story. This is a group dinner of six people that happened in Rome in Italy a month ago. Um as you can see from our PFPs, all of those people, we are crypto people, Web3 people, right? And yeah, we met for a dinner. This is one of the best carbonara I had my in my life.

But and it was a very very pleasant evening. And of course, at the end we decided, yeah, we're going to split the bill, right? So, I went to the cashier. I paid for for the for the for the dinner. And then I said, yeah, it's like 20 euros each. And then how will you pay me that money? And this happened. Imagine that these are all we're all web three crypto people and we still use and we use, you know, this kind of ways to pay. Boo, yeah. I'm not saying anything bad about the companies, but still we and blockchain is still the best and most efficient way to send money, but we still use Revolut, the N26.

One guy also also paid in cash and one guy paid in PayPal, but it just shows, you know, where we are at the industry if even us people the let's say the people who work in crypto are not using those rails to pay pay pay for for for dinner. Um which means that something is broken, right? So, what we try to do now here is to maybe bring more awareness to this to this field. And a lot of similar situations in the past made me build something more about Euro uh and I started with this. It's euroxyz.hub where I started to write different blog posts. I started to write different stats, different news about what is how going on in the Euro stablecoin field and just keeping up uh

keeping people up in the in the loop about what's happening and what's coming. And also the complicated stuff, you know, the MiCA's. We all heard of MiCA, but do we really know what it is, how companies acquire those licenses and so on and so on. So, the idea is to have a very simple way to get all of this knowledge base in one place. Another thing, euroxyz.yields is a simple dashboard that compares different protocols and show you how much yield can you get on your Euro stable coin. Because in my example, I have a company, it's a Web3 studio, our treasury was in USD. Because it was in you but all of the employees and the team is in Europe, so we have our salaries in Euro, we have our savings in Euro. Because we hold

treasury in USD, you know, we lost money due to some exchange rates, but I don't want to be speculative. I think still it's better if your company has a runway, a savings in a currency that you actually use for your salary, for your I don't know, loans or whatever, right? So, the idea the idea here is to build this product just to compare how a company or a individual can get some yield on their stable coin. And this is a data that is pulled from DeFi Llama and it just uses directly the protocols that are listed here. Another thing that we are doing, and this is the we did a one this was done only once now, but uh we wanted to bring more awareness and uh through IRL events, and this was a Euro stable coin

meetup that we did in Cannes uh this year in April. Um we had a little over 100 people. It was five time over subscribed. Um and we had some great conversation and networking for people and companies who are building in Euro stable coins. Uh what definitely helps, as you can see from the pictures, the event itself was held in an Irish pub and we had an open bar. So, actually the conversations were getting better and better by by the minute. So, it was a very very pleasant pleasant evening. Um so, now I would like to take stay say a few words about state of Euro stable coins and where we are now.

Um so, currently the supply of Euro stable coins is uh 630 million. Um the biggest Euro stable coin is uh Circle. You you probably know USDC. So, EURC is actually 67% of all TVL of Euro stable coins. The stable coins are uh there are 19 different providers according to D 5 Lama of Euro stable coin issuers and those stable coins are held on 24 different blockchains. Um but what is very surprising and this is a screenshot from Gizly from Monerium.

He held a talk in in Khan. The whole TVL of stable coins at the moment is a little over 300 billion dollars. You remember the number 630 million is euros. All stable coins is 300 more than 300 billion, right? It actually represent only 0.35% of the whole stable coin market which definitely doesn't resonate with how things are in the real world or where the global economy is. So we definitely believe that this is the part of our industry that is very underserved and we believe that it will grow and grow in the in the future.

>> [clears throat] >> So here's the list of some of the stable coins, the top 10 Euro stable coins. As I mentioned the circle is the top the most the biggest stable coin. The second one is a institutional Euro stable coin that was issued by Societe Generale Forge. Um some few others that is worth to mention here is EURt and Monerium that is also part of the Gnosis ecosystem. Um and yeah, this is the let's say current landscape of things. Uh we have definitely seen some failed Euro stable coin attempts. Some companies went under or or they just left the project. Uh definitely Mika.

Mika is quite expensive for stable coin issuers. So some companies also decided to pull out. Uh but nevertheless we still have new companies and new projects entering this field. Maybe one of the most known or talked about lately is Kuvalis. Uh it's actually institutional Euro stable coin that is supported by 37 different banks. Uh and I think it's very very exciting for them to to to enter this this part of our industry. Uh some other stats that maybe we can skip for now, but what is very maybe also interesting at this point is this one. So, where do these Euro stable coins live? So, big majority of them, of course, is on Ethereum. Solana is second. And base is at 8.4%. I think from the consumer side

of things, where I'm going to talk a bit more in the in the next few minutes, um base is definitely one of the very interesting parts where we see that adoption might increase quite a lot in the future. And of course, Gnosis. You know, Gnosis Pay is doing amazing stuff with Monerium, uh EUR E, um and other Circle, app Gnosis, the ecosystem of Gnosis itself is definitely contributing to the growth of Euro stable coin in real life. Um here's uh another, I think, very very simple uh interesting map to see where the current stable coins are positioned.

So, based on this, Arwen Vertigo is one of the researchers who is researching a lot about Gnosis, uh uh about Euro stable coins. Um and yeah, he positioned this very very interesting map where you can see where the the stable coins fall into. Uh but yeah, Euro stable coins or stable coin in in general, you have a lot of institutions who are playing this uh part of the game. And yeah, EUR CV, for example, is the second biggest one besides Circle, and they're doing very very well. And I think based on their examples and their showcase, a lot more institutions will be entering this uh this part of the industry.

But today, because this is uh Devcon and this is uh Gnosis event, I would like to more talk a little bit more about the consumer side of Euro stable coins. And I'm going to explain a bit or maybe showcase a little bit of the a little bit a few projects that we my company is using to build uh different products uh on Euro stable coins. I would, for the onboarding part, I would like to highlight three projects, Monerium, Transak, and MoonPay. So, what I'm what we're what the main challenge is, how can we bring non-crypto people on chain, right? And these three companies are very good example who are try examples who are trying to solve this

and try to make their products better, more convenient, more easy to use, so non-crypto people can use them. For example, how Monerium is doing this. So, on Monerium, you can create and sign up for their wallet, but once you do and you if you want, you can do a KYC, but if you do KYC, you get an IBAN. You probably all everybody in Europe know their IBAN number. So, if you imagine, it's easy then to send your euro from your bank to your Monerium wallet, and from Monerium wallet, you can send it either to your custodial non-custodial wallet, or you can send it to somebody else.

You are then your money is then on chain right? And I think they solve this problem very very well, because even I don't know, my mom understands, okay, I have to send this money to this IBAN account. Um few other few other projects or companies who are doing things very well and there's some very interesting stuff, uh Li.Finance, CowSwap, of course, and uh Relay. So, we have different chains, money is flowing from different chains, we need bridges, we need swap options, and I think those three companies are doing very, very good stuff uh for to solve and make these things easier.

Uh Li.Finance for is one of the products that we use quite a lot in my studio, because they offer they offer these APIs and SDKs, where as a builder, you can easily integrate the swapping and the bridging within your app, so you can make it very seamless for for people. Um they're also, I think every month they're giving out new features, new ideas, which is very, very welcoming because yeah, we need more of those infrastructure built so people and builders can can build easier. Um yield and savings, right? Because we're talking about stable coins here, it's very important that we have a lot of different options where we can stake or, you know, get some kind of a yield

on our euro stable coins. Um Morpho, Yo Protocol, Aave, of course, are a few examples that are they have a lot of TVL um of euros in their in their protocols. And of course, Euro XYZ as my project where you can easily compare the TVL and the yield betw- between those projects. Um Morpho, they're doing some amazing stuff with EURCV. They offer great yields, you know, and great products for institutions. But for consumers, maybe it's easier the easiest way to compare different protocols is just to go just to go to Euro XYZ and then you can see how much TVL, how much API each of those protocols um offer.

And now the payment, right? The euro stable coins, of course, they live on chain, but we have to use them in real life or find find an easy way to use them in real life. Here, I would definitely like to highlight Gnosis Pay. You have a lot of the team members here in the building. They have a booth there. If you don't use Gnosis Pay yet, check it out. It's a my go-to payment card that I've been using for the last 2 years, actually every day. Uh but not only Gnosis Pay, you know, Gnosis Pay is just one piece of this puzzle. You have because their infrastructure can be integrated within other apps like Rebind, for example, here. Rebind is another uh payment or credit card issuer that actually uses Gnosis Pay technology in

the back. But it makes it super easy, yeah, for non-crypto people to be onboarded and to start using on-chain money. Zeal is another example that of a wallet that integrated Gnosis within their wallet. So, uh yeah, another great project that need to be highlighted here. Metamx, Wirex are one of the, of course, pioneers as well in this field and they're also always try to innovate and find new find new features. Um maybe I would just like to highlight Gnosis ecosystem because at the end of the day we are at Devcon. Right here on the left side you can see Gnosis Pay.

This is how your app looks like. But on the on the right side now we are you can see app Gnosis. I know it's a little bit confusing now but the Gnosis Pay, app Gnosis and also Circles, those are three different products that Gnosis is now trying to integrate together. But I think they're integrating them together in a very unique and very interesting way. Uh especially if you're a builder, you know, there's this uh mini app uh hackathon happening at the moment. You have a lot of talks, I think. Now one of them is happening downstairs. But yeah, it's very very interesting to to see and and innovate in this part of the part of the part of the ecosystem.

Um so now because we are at the at the builder stage um I decided to do two demos of two of the apps that my company has built that is directly addressing the Euro stable coin part. Um I know this is a curse whenever you try to showcase something live something doesn't work but I will try my try it anyway. Uh so first example is a mini app on Circle. So Circle is basically app Gnosis now. So here's a mini app that my company built. The mini app is called Yield. Uh so basically if you have money on your app Gnosis, you can easily then take your either EUR E, EUR E is the Monerium stable coin or USDC E

and get an Ave yield on that on that um on that balance. So how it works, we were really focusing on UX. We tried to make the whole experience very smooth and very easy to understand. So, how it works, for example, I have 42 euros now on my on my wallet. So, I want to let's say deposit 25 euros to the to this Ave pool. I'm going to prove it. I don't know if you use the Gnosis it uses account abstraction, so you can Yeah, you can you you you do it like this and confirm the transaction like that.

So, what I'm doing now? I'm scanning the QR code with my phone. Going to confirm the transaction. All right. And now we can see the euros are now earning me 2.5% of API and they've been deposited to Ave V3. So, this is a pool on Ave and my euros are being lent out through Ave and how this is how I'm earning my yield. Uh what is interesting here about how this app has been built. So, this app doesn't have any database. It doesn't use it have there's there's not one line of one smart contract that was written for this app. Because everything is because it's

DeFi, it's composable, right? You can take the smart contracts from Ave, just integrate them within your app. So, there's no risk of your smart smart contract being uh fraudulent or buggy or whatever, so people could lose money. But, we're just using the very well-established, you know, protocols and offering them a very simple and easy to understand UX to to to deposit their money. The last feature the second feature that we integrated is for the for people to invest their money. So, investing into Bitcoin or Ethereum here, uh we actually integrated um CowSwap, right? So, people could easily deposit their euros and buy Bitcoin.

And in the back, we're using cow swap. So, as a again, there's no smart contracts written from our side. We just used what is out there, what is already well uh yeah, easy accessible and easy to use. All right, so this is one example of an app that we built. And now, another one. And uh and the last one. This one actually addresses the situation that I mentioned at the beginning of my talk. So, there was a dinner for all of you who missed the beginning. There was a dinner in Italy that bunch of crypto people had. And after I paid for the dinner, I wanted to get euros from everybody, but they just used either PayPals, the Revoluts, the N26. I wanted to be I wanted to get create an app that

is simple for people to send money to uh euro stablecoins to. And this is the the product that we built. It's called Euromax, of course, because we want to Euromax uh the this this process. And this is an app that is built as a mini app within Farcaster. I don't know uh who if any of you know Farcaster, but it's a web3 social app. And how it works is directly in here, people can open the Euromax app. And the wallet uh through their social profile on uh Farcaster it is directly integrated within Euromax.

Um so, then you can easily just say, "Okay, how much money do you want to send to whatever a friend?" How much is coffee in Berlin? Let's call it 3 euros. Uh and 5 euros, all right. 5 euros. I'm going to live demo it. So, who who here has Farcaster account? All right. Can you tell me your username? He was the first one. Maybe I have something else maybe for you.

Okay. Do you remember yours? Who who Who has a Farcaster account? Okay. Is it You're sure? Then you can use the app to send half of it to him or something. Okay, what's the What's the username? A E M E D D O Let me see. Is this it?

Do you find yourself already? No. Met This one? Metodo. Okay. And what's Let's see if this will work because this is a little bit more. So, it's simple. We picked number of euros that we're going to send and we have an easy database to search for who we're going to send it to. Let me increase a little bit. But now what what we're using is LiFi. LiFi, it's easy to bridge, easy to swap, the protocol that I mentioned before. So, what I'm going to do now, I'm not going to I don't have euros on this account, right? But I'm going to send him euro, USD euroc.

So, here through LiFi I can pick to actually spend, for example, USDC on Arbitrum. Right? So, let's see if this finds a bridge and a swap. It does. It's the CCTP. Something that normal people don't need to know about. I'm just going to confirm and send. It's going to spend 3.5 USDC to send him €3, right? It's the conversion. And it's on Arbitrum. So, what now is happening, funds are being bridged from Arbitrum to base and swapped from USDC to euroc. And let's say let's see if it will work.

Again, we wanted to hide with this apps we wanted to hide all of this complexity behind, you know, so people don't really and it worked awesome. So, three EURC has been sent to your wallet. I don't know if you have your wallet on your phone, but you can check. It should be there. Um but basically, yeah, these are the ideas that my studio is trying to develop and think about how can we make Euro stable coin sending or using simple, easy to understand and so on. So, to conclude my presentation, um I think I have yeah, the last slide, right? And the message is, you know, the rails are already here. The infrastructure is

being built. So, actually it's up to us, the builders, you know, uh to bring, you know, Euro stable coins to 350 million people because this is the amount of people that use Euros as their daily, you know, currency, right? And hopefully my presentation gave you some ideas or maybe something to think about because yeah, I really wanted to see more Euros uh being adopted. Uh thank you very much. Yeah. >> [applause] >> So, um does anyone have any questions?

Sure. >> Thank you for the present Can is this working? >> Um thank you for the presentation. It was very nice to see a very localized like stable coin uh you know, maxi >> Yeah. >> trying to incentivize >> and everything. >> And trying to incentivize that. I hope I can see that in every market that there is more stable coins. Something that you you showed very fast that I was uh wondering in your page is like sometimes you show all of these stable coins and for us who are building are like excited that there are more stable coins, but at the end of the day for the user is just confusion, right? Like what's the difference between EUR, EURC, EURCV, EUR blib blib? Like, do we need to to enforce some sort of

like curation on this regulation on this stablecoin regarding what's behind it? Or the yields like, "Oh, we have 2.5." And the other one gives 3.5. And the other one goes 5.5. It's like, "What's behind the yield, right?" Like, what is the risk? People are putting their euros into this yield. Um and and if we need to educate about that or it's just like magic internet money. >> Mhm. Well, overall, I think more providers, more issuers, for example, it's better because more competition, more uh you know, those stablecoin issuers can uh let's say regulate or report each other just to make the end product for the end user better.

So, I think more issuers is better. But, on the other side, especially in the consumer side, let's think about how to make it simple. Like the app that I demoed, you know, the Euromax, this is the users user sees this. He doesn't know that he's going to be sending EURC. Maybe yeah, if you look in deeper, but they just want to see the euro logo, and this is how they send it. They don't want to really care about uh is it Monerium? Is it Circle? Or whatever, right? >> But, do you want to know the risk? >> That's Yeah. Yeah. That's another very important topic, right? I think now with MiCA, there are of course split uh opinions about the effects of MiCA because on one side, uh MiCA, for example, yeah, it's this regulation from

Europe that if you issue, for example, stablecoins, you have to pay quite a lot, you know, to get MiCA licensed. So, which means that you can exist on either uh DEXes or CEXes and so on. But, on the other side, it's definitely limiting new players entering this field, you know, like any regulation, it's good for the big companies who have a lot of money, but it's bad for the small ones. But at the end of the day, the consumer side, I believe it's safer now, much safer and much more protected because of those regulations.

But yeah, I think maybe the same question could be asked to a bank. You know, you if you go to 10 different banks here, people don't really ask about what are the risks because yeah, this doesn't really happen that much often, but once we have a big crisis, yeah, these are the questions that people then ask, you know, what is risky, what's not. Too late to ask. Exactly, yeah. So yeah, don't have all the answers, but from my side, I think I think more issuers is better, more competition is better. But let's try to make it easier for the consumers.

>> Um so you yeah, you talked about um your stablecoin. How do you see like the introduction of the digital euro competing with the stablecoin? Will the stablecoin still have its place or what do you think will be its role when that happens? >> I don't really have a clear opinion because it's not really clear how that will work, but I know for a fact that people who are building uh euro stablecoins that they're they're like those that I mentioned here, um they don't really see it as a stablecoin. It's a digital euro. It will probably use different tech, very regulated. It's going to be known for the local uh IRSs uh what the transactions are, and yeah, it's not the decentralized way

decentralized way to do uh a stablecoin. So not really sure when it will be introduced, how it will affect it, but yeah, this is I can just say what I hear from the other people, yeah. >> Okay, um no more questions? You have one more? Okay. You you have 1 minute. >> 1 minute? >> Yes. >> I really like this this this app. I thought like for the dinner a a There's also like this kind of apps that could be embedded in other places, right? Because I for for a user on stablecoin what we most

the most difficult part is trying to show and and let others use it as well. So like sharing a meal, you put a link and everybody pays there. It makes a lot of sense. How do you see the other builders in the space interacting with consumer Euro stablecoin? Is this happening or is just you on the page? And >> It's not a lot of competition. It's There's not a lot of competition, but I really like the you know, Gnosis the mini app hackathon that is currently happening. I think they have also workshop tomorrow the same same format as now.

If you're a builder, check that out because Gnosis has been all about Euro or mostly about Euro stablecoins. And now with the mini apps, they actually opened the pathway for us the builders to build on top of the app Gnosis. And you can do stuff like that. You know, the Euro mex, yeah, it's currently being built for Farcaster, but this will also be a mini app on app Gnosis, right? So more of those is definitely encouraged. We want to see more of those companies supporting the builders who are building that, yeah. >> Do you see builders like more of those companies >> I don't know. I I I I am aware as a builder once you start building something you see it all over the place like some other. So yeah, I wasn't sure

what was happening before, but yeah, I think events like this, events like the one in Khan, they bring more people together. You know, I'm sure that today we will talk also after the event and maybe you'll have some ideas to build something. So yeah, yeah. Let's encourage each other to build more. >> All right, I think that's it. Thank you so much for joining us for this one. And thanks for an amazing topic. >> Thank you.