We’re watching the birth of Europe's second stablecoin consortium. Or at least, kind of.

Yesterday, six Swiss banks (UBS, PostFinance, Sygnum, Raiffeisen, Zürcher Kantonalbank, BCV) announced that they are teaming up with Swiss Stablecoin AG to build a CHF stablecoin sandbox. The goal is twofold: test real use cases and give Swiss regulators the evidence they need to move faster on a framework that doesn't exist yet.

We talked to members of the consortium. Here’s what we learnt:

  • Origins: The project traces back to a tokenized deposit proof of concept that PostFinance, Sygnum, and UBS ran last September. That trio became the nucleus. The others have joined since.

  • Ambition: The group is building toward a real launch and long-term positioning of their CHF stablecoin. The binding constraint is regulation: members expect a workable Swiss framework no earlier than 2028.

  • Use cases: Specific applications being tested will not be disclosed yet, deliberately, to avoid setting expectations that cannot be met. We'll get more concrete insights at a later stage.

  • Open ecosystem: The group is actively inviting external participants, especially Swiss companies that can bring real use cases.

We were also told the project had been in planning for months. But AllUnity's recent announcement to launch a CHF stablecoin from Germany, under MiCA, certainly sharpened the timeline.

When we spoke to AllUnity’s Managing Director Simon Seiter in March, he told us that demand from fintechs and non-bank financial institutions was the primary driver, many of whom struggle to hold CHF balances.

He also made the store-of-value case: USD/CHF and EUR/CHF have been down-only charts for the better part of two decades. A tokenized Swiss franc that's accessible globally, around the clock, is not a product that needs a sales deck.

In today’s Briefing:

  • Morgan Stanley’s spot bitcoin ETF starts trading

  • Lise opens Europe’s first onchain equity IPO

HIGH SIGNAL NEWS

TOP STORY

Lise Opens Europe's First Onchain Equity IPO Under the DLT Pilot Regime

Onchain IPO: Today, Paris-based Lise opens subscriptions for Europe's first regulated onchain IPO of natively tokenized equity, giving retail and institutional investors direct access to the offering. Backed by BNP Paribas, Bpifrance, and CACEIS, the startup will list ST Group as its first issuer, a French defense manufacturer producing composite components for Airbus and Dassault.

Why it matters: Taking a European SME public today means coordinating a trading venue, a clearing house, and a central securities depository. For most smaller firms, the cost alone puts public markets out of reach. Lise is trying to change this by collapsing all three functions on a single blockchain. Operating under the EU's DLT Pilot Regime, a regulatory sandbox for tokenized securities, it runs exchange and CSD in one infrastructure, reducing dependence on a separate clearing house and the broker intermediation that traditional markets require by default.

  • "Our infrastructure allows issuers to no longer deal with multiple intermediaries; everything goes through us. It reduces entry costs by a factor of four to five for SMEs," Mark Kepeneghian, founder and CEO of Lise, told Blockstories. "There is also very little retail participation in traditional IPOs. You arrive after the party. We made sure everyone is treated on equal footing."

In practice: These cost savings translate to €30,000 in fixed pre-IPO fees, 7% of the amount raised, and €30,000 to €40,000 per year once listed. Investors pay nothing until they sell, at which point a 0.25% transaction fee applies.

Making the Pilot Regime work: The regulatory framework that underpins all of this has had a difficult start. The DLT Pilot Regime has been live since March 2023 but has struggled to gain traction. By June 2025, ESMA reported only three authorized infrastructures with minimal live trading, held back by a €6 billion aggregate cap, restrictions on eligible instruments, and a temporary status that made long-term investment hard to justify.

  • Where Lise fits in: Six firms now hold licenses, but most are constrained by those limits. Lise sidesteps them by focusing on small IPOs below the €8 million prospectus exemption threshold, a segment where the regime's caps do not get in the way. That threshold rises to €12 million under the EU Listing Act in June. The Commission has also proposed lifting the regime's broader restrictions, but those changes are tied to a larger legislative package and could take years.

Overview of all operators that are live, licensed, or have applied under the EU DLT Pilot Regime.

How investors access it: What this looks like in practice is unlike any traditional IPO. Investors sign up directly on Lise's platform, complete KYC, and receive a personal IBAN. Funding happens via bank transfer through MemoBank, and at subscription, euros convert into tokenized bank deposits held at a credit institution, covered by deposit insurance. There is no broker or custodian integration yet, so all activity happens exclusively on the platform.

Under the hood: The deposits and shares that investors hold on the platform live on a permissioned Hyperledger Besu network. Permissioned, because Lise as a licensed CSD must control the shareholder register. When a subscription executes, tokenized shares and tokenized cash settle atomically in a single onchain transaction, compressing what traditionally takes a two-day clearing cycle into seconds.

What comes next: Kepeneghian says many more IPOs will follow this year, with a target of ten additional listings in 2027. The immediate priority is building a functioning secondary market through the integration of liquidity providers and market makers. Broker and custodian integration will follow, giving investors access to Lise-listed shares through their usual banking interfaces.

  • "The secondary market will begin as soon as this first IPO is completed," Kepeneghian told Blockstories.

Morgane Fournel Reicher is a lawyer at Norton Rose Fulbright LLP, specializing in banking and financial regulation, with a particular focus on market infrastructures and tokenization. She advises on a wide range of regulatory issues affecting financial institutions, fintechs, and crypto asset service providers.

Can DLT infrastructure solve what traditional markets couldn’t for SMEs?

For SMEs priced out of conventional markets, the DLT infrastructure offered by Lise makes listings significantly more economically viable.

The trade-off is that SMEs carry a structural information gap: less analyst coverage, fewer public data points, and limited communication resources. This asymmetry has historically deterred institutional investors. Every previous dedicated venue has suffered from the same pattern: thin order books, wide spreads, and a vicious cycle where illiquidity discourages both issuers and investors.

Lise’s challenge will be all the greater given the decline of specialized small-cap funds across Europe, with regulations such as Solvency II constraining how much institutional allocators can direct toward illiquid, small-cap equities.

Until now, however, such a blockchain-based regulated infrastructure has never been tested at scale for this type of market. Lise will therefore be one to watch to see whether it can give rise to a new market for SME listings and serve as a proof of concept well beyond the Pilot Regime. The growing political momentum around mobilizing European savings could also support this ambition.

Anika Patz is a partner at YPOG, advising financial institutions, fintechs, and market infrastructure operators on EU financial regulation, with a focus on DLT-based market models. She and her team advised on the DLT Pilot Regime applications for 21X AG and 360X AG and currently support further market participants seeking admission under the regime.

Does Lise validate the DLT Pilot Regime, or is Lise just a special case?

Lise is a valid proof point, but for a very specific niche. Its SME-focused strategy keeps it below the regime's volume thresholds, it runs a primary market, and it is the source of truth for its own instruments. That means no friction with incumbent infrastructure. Other licensees that want to operate full exchanges, listing derivatives, funds, or securities already traded on traditional venues, hit the regime's caps much harder.

Yet the regime is far from discouraging new entrants. No other framework lets a single firm combine trading and post-trade settlement under one roof. That is genuinely new, and I expect more firms, even large players, to enter on that basis.

This is also increasingly becoming a political matter. The European Commission has proposed lifting these limitations in December, but the changes are part of a much larger legislative package and risk getting delayed. In the US, a single no-action letter from the SEC already lets a custodian like DTCC offer services on crypto rails. Europe has no equivalent mechanism. The risk is that by waiting too long, liquidity and innovation migrate to where the framework is already clearer.

  1. DeFi Lending: Returns, Leverage, and Liquidation Risk (Bank of Canada) — This Bank of Canada staff analytical paper offers a rare, in-depth examination of Aave V3, the largest DeFi lending protocol, analyzing its returns, leverage dynamics, liquidation risks, and overall operational mechanics. What’s notable: The paper concludes that decentralized lending is technically and operationally viable but constrained by overcollateralization and liquidation dynamics, limiting efficiency and creating systemic fragility from leverage.

  2. Agentic Finance and Stablecoins (Dynamic / Fireblocks) — This report provides an overview of the emerging agentic payments landscape, its current state of adoption, and the underlying technology stack.

→ Want more? Visit Blockstories Library for a curated selection of 120+ reports on digital assets.

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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.

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