Franco-German banking group ODDO BHF has launched a stablecoin pegged to the euro under the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation.
According to an announcement on Wednesday, the bank will serve as the issuer of the EUROD stablecoin, while market-making platform Flowdesk will provide liquidity and Fireblocks will supply the tokenization infrastructure.
Guy de Leusse, deputy chief operating officer at ODDO BHF, said the group “felt it was essential to offer a European solution denominated in euros to provide an alternative to stablecoins denominated in US dollars.”
Stablecoins are digital tokens pegged to traditional currencies like the euro. The new token will be initially listed on the Spanish-based crypto exchange Bit2Me.
ODDO BHF is a privately owned European financial group formed in 2016 through the merger of France’s ODDO bank, founded in 1849, and Germany’s BHF-BANK, founded in 1854. According to the bank, it operates across France, Tunisia, Germany and Switzerland.
European stablecoins rising
Until now, the stablecoin market has been dominated by dollar–pegged tokens. Tether’s USDt (USDT) and Circle’s USDC (USDC) remain the two largest globally, accounting for more than 83% of the total $306.35 billion stablecoin market capitalization, according to data from DefiLlama.
But the rest of the world, particularly Europe, is beginning to take more of an interest in developing stablecoins pegged to their fiat currencies.
On April 20, 2025, Société Générale’s regulated digital asset arm, SG-Forge, introduced EUR CoinVertible, a euro-denominated stablecoin on Ethereum available to qualified institutional investors onboarded by the bank.
In July, AllUnity, a joint venture backed by Flow Traders, Deutsche Bank’s DWS, and Galaxy, announced the release of EURAU. The regulated euro-pegged stablecoin became publicly available on July 31.
Nine European banks also announced plans to launch a euro-pegged stablecoin, which is expected to launch in the second half of 2026.
According to Bhau Kotecha, co-founder of Paxos Labs, “USD-backed stablecoins have benefited from a multi-year head start.” To achieve comparable growth, he said, euro and other fiat-backed issuers “will need to develop unique adoption strategies focusing on the right partnerships, use cases, and liquidity pathways.”
Since the United States passed the GENIUS Act stablecoin bill in July 2025, momentum appears to be building in Europe to develop homegrown, euro-denominated stablecoins.
In September, European Central Bank (ECB) president Christine Lagarde cautioned that the European Union needs to close regulatory loopholes around foreign stablecoins, warning that unregulated issuers could draw liquidity away from the euro and the broader EU financial system.
Speaking on Thursday during a hearing on the eurozone’s economic outlook, Pierre Gramegna, managing director of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), said “Europe should do its best to facilitate the generation of euro-denominated stablecoins by domestic issuers.”
Europe has also been debating a digital euro, a central bank digital currency, in the European Parliament since 2023, but its launch is not expected before 2029.