Watching Switzerland has always been like looking through a crystal ball into how digital assets will be adopted elsewhere.
First regulator to publish guidelines around ICOs.
First country to license fully regulated, crypto-native banks.
First country to create a specific law for tokenized securities.
This week brought another first.
Switzerland-based Sygnum Bank is now offering its clients access to institutional-grade onchain yield, directly through its e-banking portal.
The product, built in partnership with FalconX, lets clients invest into an overcollateralized, KYC-gated onchain credit facility without leaving their familiar banking environment: log in, open the data room, review the terms, click invest.
"For us, this is first and foremost a yield-generating solution. We see growing client demand looking for ways to put idle capital, including stablecoins, to work," Fatmire Bekiri, Head of Tokenization at Sygnum, told Blockstories.
For the first time, a regulated European bank is offering access to an institutional-grade onchain lending product, and it comes at a moment when the category is picking up speed (we’ll drop a dedicated research piece on this next week).
Naturally, Sygnum is starting cautiously. Gain experience, see what resonates, then potentially expand. "We are open to expanding the platform with pools or partnerships over time, but only where there is a clear differentiation and value for clients," Bekiri added.
In many ways, the move reads like the next chapter in the institutional adoption playbook.
It starts with custody. Then comes trading. After that, tokenization and onchain money. The next frontier is yield. Each step moves the client deeper into the onchain stack, without ever leaving the banking interface.
In today’s Briefing:
Exclusive: 25 additional banks set to join Qivalis
DTCC targets October 2026 to launch tokenization service
HIGH SIGNAL NEWS
DTCC is set to launch its tokenization service in October 2026. For the testing phase, which will begin in July, the leading U.S. Central Securities Depository has announced a list of 50 partners, including J.P. Morgan, HSBC, Nasdaq, NYSE, as well as crypto-native firms Kraken and Ondo Finance. 🌐
Central Bank of Brazil tightens restrictions on stablecoin-powered cross-border payments. Companies that want to keep offering cross-border stablecoin payments will now need a VASP license or a partnership with a licensed entity, instead of operating under the country’s lighter eFX framework. 🇧🇷
Morgan Stanley launches its crypto trading service. The pilot program is currently live for a small group of users through its E*Trade platform. According to Bloomberg, the bank charges clients 50 basis points per transaction, undercutting Coinbase, Robinhood, and Charles Schwab. 🇺🇸
Taurus obtains a MiFID license. Granted by the Cypriot regulator, the license allows the crypto custodian to provide financial instrument services to regulated entities across the European Union. 🇪🇺
Bison Bank launches its EUR and USD stablecoins. The Portuguese private bank will issue USB and EUB in compliance with the MiCA framework. 🇵🇹
Germany’s cooperative‑banking network (Volksbanken und Raiffeisenbanken) is rolling out its ‘meinKrypto’ retail crypto offering. In a first for the BVR, Volksbank Raiffeisenbank Würzburg has begun offering retail clients access to crypto trading directly through its banking app. Additional members of the network, which comprises around 650 banks, are expected to follow suit in the coming months. 🇩🇪
TOP STORY
Exclusive: Qivalis Gains Momentum with 25 Additional Banks Set to Join
A true “bank rush”: Last week, Blockstories reported that 19 banks had committed to join the Qivalis euro stablecoin consortium. Over the past days, that number has grown again, now standing at 25, with Rabobank, Bank of Ireland, and the National Bank of Greece among the latest entrants. Around ten more banks are working through internal approvals and could follow in the coming weeks. The new entrants would join 12 existing members, including BNP Paribas, DekaBank, UniCredit, and ING.
Qivalis: Current and Prospective Members
Why it matters: Stablecoins are fundamentally network-effect businesses: the more participants they attract, the more useful, liquid and widely accepted they become. That dynamic has so far been missing in the euro stablecoin market, where issuers have struggled to assemble the distribution, banking relationships and institutional credibility needed to create meaningful liquidity. By assembling a growing bank consortium ahead of its planned issuance in the second half of 2026, Qivalis is raising its odds of reaching scale while making it harder for rival European efforts to gain traction.
One exception: Although the Qivalis consortium has been broadly open to new entrants, not every applicant has been admitted. Blockstories has learned that at least one private bank has been denied admission to date.
The price of admission: Joining the consortium also comes with a financial commitment. The 12 existing members each contributed €3 million at the consortium’s formation. For banks joining the second wave, the figure now stands at €4 million.
Two-tier returns: The economics of those tickets follow a similar two-tier logic. All members will eventually share equally in the yield generated by the stablecoin’s reserves, but the existing members are first in line: until each of the 12 has recovered its €3 million commitment, new entrants will not be eligible to receive distributions.
The reserve question: Where those reserves sit is the next major decision the consortium has to make. A tender will soon be launched to appoint custodian banks for the stablecoin’s reserves, according to information shared with Blockstories. The list could include both consortium members and non-member banks.
“We want the stablecoin to operate as independently as possible. That means reserve management cannot become a political game where larger banks push for a bigger share,” said Floris Lugt, formerly at ING and now Qivalis’ CFO, in an interview with Blockstories last September.
Bancomat still in play? Qivalis’ recent growth also raises questions for the euro stablecoin project led by Bancomat. In late October, Italy’s leading domestic network for cash withdrawals and debit card payments announced plans for a pan-European euro stablecoin distributed through Italian banks. Yet two of Bancomat’s largest shareholders are already moving toward Qivalis: UniCredit is a founding member, while Intesa Sanpaolo is set to join. How that overlap shapes Bancomat’s own consortium effort will be one of the more interesting questions to watch.
Paul Bureau is Head of Digital Assets Offerings at Banque Delubac & Cie, an independent, family-owned bank. In France, the bank was the first to offer crypto custody and trading services, and the first institution with a banking license to obtain MiCA authorization.
Where do you see the biggest benefits and risks of the consortium model for a euro stablecoin?
A banking consortium solves the cold-start problem that kills most payment infrastructure: it delivers distribution, liquidity, and regulatory credibility from day one. It also spreads balance sheet exposure and governance across multiple institutions, avoiding single-point-of-failure risk.
But history has shown how difficult it is for a consortium to endure over time, as decision-making slows, priorities diverge, and governance itself becomes the bottleneck. To survive, operational discipline has to be locked in from the start, with clear and lasting rules on reserve management, incident response, technical upgrades, and decision rights.
What will be the first use cases you expect to see once the stablecoin is live?
As a potential future distributor, we see three immediate use cases once the stablecoin goes live.
International treasury corridors, where companies need to move liquidity across jurisdictions outside traditional banking hours.
Onchain settlement and collateral movements, as tokenized markets require natively digital cash rails for delivery-versus-payment and margin calls.
Programmable payments, where automated or conditional workflows can simplify reconciliation and reduce operational friction.
Christopher Grilhault des Fontaines is the co-CEO of Dfns, a wallet infrastructure provider working with firms such as Broadridge, Apex Group, and IBM.
If a bank joins Qivalis, what is actually the minimum viable tech stack needed to actively operate with the stablecoin?
The easy answer is “just a wallet.” In practice the wallet is only the entry point. What decides whether the integration actually succeeds are the two layers that sit around it: transaction management and controls.
The first follows each transaction after it leaves the bank, making sure it settles, retries cleanly if it fails, and never goes out twice. The second enforces the bank’s own rules before anything is signed: who can approve, up to what amount, against which counterparties, and against which sanctions and screening lists.
The temptation is to bury those rules inside the wallet provider, or to write them directly into the smart contract. Both shortcuts lock the bank in. Banks pursuing this seriously want the rules to sit one level above the wallets, so they can switch providers, run more than one in parallel, and preserve the kind of redundancy DORA-style resilience increasingly demands.
Bundesbank: Senior Business Expert - Digital Currency Solutions, Frankfurt 🇩🇪
Cecabank: Digital Asset Risk Analyst, Madrid 🇪🇸
Euroclear: DLT/Web3 Solution Architect, Kraków 🇵🇱
Lloyds: Digital Assets - Senior Manager, London 🇬🇧
Revolut: Regulatory Compliance Manager (Crypto), London 🇬🇧
Santander: Crypto Lawyer, Madrid 🇪🇸
Standard Chartered: Executive Director - Business Risk Manager - Digital Assets, London 🇬🇧
State Street: Direct Custody Product Development, Luxembourg 🇱🇺
In two weeks, we’re back on tour with the launch of the Blockstories Horizon 2026 Summer Series, kicking off in Madrid on May 21 before continuing to Amsterdam for our Money20/20 Summit.
Join us and our partners from Visa, Bitwise, Steakhouse Financial, ABN AMRO and others for exclusive evening events exploring the top trends in digital assets over the next 12 to 18 months.
Future European DLT-based Financial Market Architecture (AFME) — AFME lays out a plan for how Europe’s financial markets could be rebuilt around DLT and tokenized assets, with banks and other regulated players running their own ledgers that still connect to the same central‑bank and commercial‑bank money systems we use today.
The State of Tokenization (Pantera Capital) — The investment firm looked at 593 different tokenized assets worth roughly $320 billion in total and created its own scoring system to grade them and provide a data-driven approach on the current state of tokenization.
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Disclaimer: The information provided in the Institutional Briefing by Blockstories does not constitute investment advice. Accordingly, we assume no liability for any investment decisions made based on the content presented herein.