The consortium, which set up an Amsterdam-based company called Qivalis in 2025, now has 37 financial institutions as its members
Twenty-five more banks, including lenders ABN Amro and Sabadell, have joined a European consortium eyeing the launch of a euro-pegged cryptocurrency by 2026-end.
The consortium, which set up an Amsterdam-based company called Qivalis in 2025, now has 37 financial institutions as members, including ING, BNP Paribas and BBVA, from 15 countries.
Euro-pegged cryptocurrency has been envisioned as a medium to counter American dominance in digital payments, apart from participating in a possible future system where assets such as bonds and real estate are traded as blockchain-based crypto tokens. The project has moved on despite the European Central Bank’s reservations about the potential benefits.
Talking more about the project, Qivalis CEO Jan-Oliver Sell said, “the euro is Europe’s currency, and on-chain financial infrastructure should carry it – built by European institutions and governed by European rules.”
Talking about the European Central Bank’s reservations about the project, in May 2026, the central financial institution’s president, Christine Lagarde, stated that the growth of private stablecoins requires a stricter separation of the functions of money and payment instruments, as well as increased attention to risks for the financial system.
The 25 new members include Dutch lenders ABN Amro and Rabobank, Spain’s Sabadell and Bankinter, Bank of Ireland, Sweden’s Handelsbanken and Finland’s Nordea, among others.
The formation of the consortium also coincides with the broader crypto industry’s trend of competing with mainstream financial institutions, putting traditional lenders under pressure to find uses for blockchain technology within their own businesses.
Stablecoins – a type of cryptocurrency pegged to a fiat currency – are mostly used in crypto trading and have surged in size in recent years. The market is dominated by El Salvador-based Tether and US-based Circle, which say they have around USD 190 billion and USD 77 billion of their dollar-pegged tokens in circulation, respectively,” reported Reuters.
While a good chunk of the global stablecoin market has been witnessing a sort of a dollar hegemony, an ECB working paper recently projected that that dollar-backed stablecoins would end up creating additional demand for US government debt, apart from enhancing the global role of the US national currency through digital settlements.
While the paper linked the growth of such tokens to the strengthening of the “dollar-centric” architecture of the global financial system, the euro-pegged cryptocurrency, albeit smaller in scale, wants to challenge the trend.
