If you thought Europe's banks would all line up behind one stablecoin consortium, you reckoned without the Italians.
On Wednesday, Bancomat, Italy's largest domestic payment network, said its euro stablecoin project, Eur.Bank, has entered testing. Over the coming months, nine member banks will run transactions among themselves to trial the system.
What's interesting is that with Intesa Sanpaolo, Banca Sella, and BPER Banca, the group features three members that also form part of Qivalis, the other euro stablecoin banking consortium.
Apparently, we're running open relationships in European consortium land.
One reason a bank might play both sides: the two consortia won't treat reserves the same way. Qivalis will keep them in segregated custody, ring-fenced 1:1 from the issuer. Bancomat wants them on the issuing bank's own balance sheet, so the money never leaves the system.
For now, Bancomat's operational details remain thin, and according to our sources, the regulatory work is still early.
What this leaves us with are two things:
Even in stablecoins, Europe finds a way to do it in pieces.
The experimentation in “stablecoins meet banking” is only just beginning.
In today’s Briefing:
MoneyGram launches a U.S. dollar stablecoin
Banca Sella becomes Italy’s first bank to receive a MiCA-CASP authorization
HIGH SIGNAL NEWS
MoneyGram launches stablecoin. MGUSD is directly integrated into the MoneyGram app through a self-custodial wallet. With 55 million customers worldwide, MoneyGram is the world’s second-largest provider of cross-border money transfers. 🇺🇸
Franklin Templeton and MoonPay announce strategic partnership. Through a direct integration of Franklin Templeton’s BENJI Platform into MoonPay's trading infrastructure, eligible institutional users will be able to move between stablecoins and Franklin Templeton’s tokenized money market fund. 🤝
Mastercard expands its settlement hours through stablecoins. Issuers and acquirers will now be able to settle card-based transactions intraday, as well as on weekends and public holidays. Supported stablecoins include Circle’s USDC, Paxos-issued stablecoins such as PYUSD, USDG, and USDP, Ripple’s RLUSD, and SoFi’s SoFiUSD. 💳
The largest U.S. banks are planning to launch a tokenized deposit system. According to The Wall Street Journal, the new network will be operated by The Clearing House, the real-time payments company co-owned by major U.S. banks such as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo. 🏦
Goldman Sachs and Apex Group provide infrastructure for a tokenized real estate fund. Fund units will be tokenized on GS DAP®, Goldman Sachs’ blockchain platform, while Apex Group will support fund administration and lifecycle management. LRC Group acts as the fund manager, Archax serves as custodian and initial distribution partner. Finally, Ownera provides the interoperability layer connecting participants and distribution channels. 🏢
Kaiko acquires leading U.S. crypto market data provider Amberdata. The deal comes less than two weeks after the company acquired Cometh, a MiCA-licensed European DeFi infrastructure provider, underscoring Kaiko’s broader consolidation strategy to build a digital asset data platform tailored to the needs of traditional financial institutions. 💰
TOP STORY
Banca Sella Becomes Italy’s First Bank to Receive a MiCA-CASP Authorization
Italy's first bank under MiCA: Last week, Banca Sella became the first credit institution to receive a MiCA-CASP authorization from the Bank of Italy. The license allows the bank to provide crypto-asset custody and transfer services, putting it in position to launch a regulated crypto offering for its clients later this year.
Why it matters: Italy's MiCA rollout has been one of the slowest in the bloc. Only one entity, the fintech firm CheckSig, had previously been licensed under the framework, while Germany already counts 55 licensed entities, the Netherlands 26, and France 19.
A fintech-leaning bank: That makes Banca Sella's first move all the more notable given its profile. One of Italy's most fintech-forward banks, it manages around €50 billion in assets and serves 3.1 million customers, with a client base concentrated among entrepreneurs, SMEs, and fintech companies. That positioning has shaped its approach to digital assets, which the bank has been building deliberately since 2022.
"We started our journey in the digital asset space in 2022, with the establishment of a dedicated competence center focused on DLT and digital assets. Over the past few years, we have invested in experimentation, internal education, and the development of concrete initiatives, reaching what we believe is now a more mature phase for the market," explained Andrea Tessera, Managing Director of Digital Banking at Banca Sella, to Blockstories.
Already invested in the space: That early start has placed Banca Sella inside several of the most closely watched Italian digital asset initiatives. The bank is among the founding members of Qivalis, the European bank-led euro stablecoin consortium, and is also participating in Eur.Bank, the stablecoin project led by Bancomat.
Why now: Banca Sella's MiCA-CASP license is the foundation it needed to actually launch crypto services. The bank had been observing growing client interest in digital assets for several years, according to Tessera, but until recently the broader market lacked regulated banks able to deliver such services within a supervised framework.
"What clients were missing was the availability of regulated and trusted operators capable of offering these services, such as banks. The ongoing evolution of the European regulatory framework is helping to close that gap."
Beyond custody: Custody and crypto transfers are only the first step of Banca Sella's plans. While the bank's MiCA-CASP authorization currently limits it to these foundational services, Tessera signaled that the bank is already evaluating an expansion in line with the broader maturation of the digital asset space.
"In the early stages, the crypto space was often predominantly associated with speculative activity. Today, we are seeing the emergence of more structural and long-term themes, such as tokenization, stablecoins, programmable assets, digital identity, and new models for value transfer," Tessera noted.
Outlook: The bank plans to launch its crypto offering later this year as it finalizes its operating model and defines its priority client segments.
“We will be able to provide more detailed insights in the coming months, as the services move into the operational phase and client engagement progresses,” concluded Tessera.
Andrea Pantaleo is a lawyer at DLA Piper Italy, where he leads the Crypto, Web3 & Fintech practice and advises firms through Italy's CASP authorization process.
Italy has been notably slower to authorize CASPs than Germany or the Netherlands. What explains that, and where do things stand now?
From our experience, the Bank of Italy and Consob take a genuinely prudent approach. The authorities only began deep-diving into CASPs’ DLT business models in 2025, so the early discussions were a learning curve on both sides. One of the deeper concerns was business plans and viability. The authorities raised concerns on sustainability of proposed business plans and asked for capital reinforcement to cover potential misalignments from the projected financials, to avoid an early wind-down.
On top of that, the delay was sharpened by one external factor. When the EBA published its no-action letter in June 2025, many models built around e-money token transfer and custody no longer worked as designed. Italy extended its transitional period by six months to let applicants adjust or partner with authorized payment firms.
So we arrived late, with only two entities authorized: CheckSig and Banca Sella. Between 10 and 20 applications are now pending, mostly native CASPs, with the next decisions due by the end of June. A couple of banks are under review, but I expect priority to go to the CASPs, since they face the hard deadline to obtain a license or wind down.
Across these applications, the scope is consistent: the majority of the applicants (including the banks) applied for custody, transfer, and execution/exchange services, while a minority of native CASPs are seeking authorization as portfolio managers or advisors. Apparently, no applicant is seeking authorization to operate a trading platform. The firms that clear this bar will be in a strong position, on the solid foundations the authorities intended.
DekaBank: Product Manager Digital Assets, Frankfurt 🇩🇪
Deutsche Bundesbank: Senior DLT Engineer – EVM-Based Systems, Frankfurt 🇩🇪
FCA: Cryptoasset and Technology Associate, London 🇬🇧
Google: Solutions Architect, Financial Services, Google Cloud Universal Ledger, London 🇬🇧
Lise: Project Manager – Capital Markets and Structuring, Paris 🇫🇷
Qivalis: Investor Relations Manager, Remote 🇪🇺
Saxo Bank: Product Governance Specialist for Digital Asset, Copenhagen 🇩🇰
UBS: IB Digital Assets Product Manager, London 🇬🇧
Van Lanschot Kempen: Crypto-Specialist Anti Financial Crime, Den Bosch 🇳🇱
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Webinar: Winning with Stablecoins: Banking Use Cases & The Infra-Stack Required
European banks are rushing towards stablecoins. However, most of them are still figuring out which use cases to prioritize and what infrastructure to build.
On June 16, we’re coming up with answers. We partnered up with four leading infrastructure providers who showcase concrete case studies around use cases like corporate treasury management and stablecoin settlement.
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