MiCA’s First 100 Days: Euro Stablecoin Liquidity Grows as Banks Lag on Crypto Trading

Liquidity is the test after MiCA’s first 100 days

MiCA’s registration milestone has changed the shape of Europe’s crypto market, but the more consequential question is whether regulated firms can build meaningful liquidity. One hundred days after the 1 July 2026 deadline, the initial European Securities and Markets Authority list showed 280 firms, compared with 2,747 operating under national transitional regimes in 2024. Finery Markets’ two October reports suggest that the shift is showing up more clearly in trading flows than in the number of registered firms.

Euro stablecoins are gaining supply, though their market footprint remains modest. Euro-denominated stablecoin supply grew 22.6% in 2026 to about $848 million, while dollar-denominated supply was flat. EURC, issued by Circle, recorded 46 times its year-earlier volume on Finery Markets’ platform in the first nine months of the year. Yet EURC represented only 0.12% of stablecoin flow across the network. The constraint, as the firm frames it, is trading volume rather than token availability.

Institutional activity shifts toward OTC

The report’s trading data covers 16 million institutional spot trades over nine months. Over-the-counter volume on the network increased 57% year on year, while the top 20 centralized exchanges together saw comparable activity fall 47%. Stablecoins accounted for 83% of trades on Finery Markets’ network. Banking Circle, Fipto, The Vault and identity and compliance provider Sumsub were among the contributors.

That divergence points to a change in where institutions execute crypto trades. Exchange activity is not the only measure of demand; OTC growth suggests firms are seeking routes suited to institutional flows. The available figures describe activity on Finery Markets’ network and should be read in that context.

Banks have budgets, but few live trading products

Finery Markets’ bank strategy report identifies a sharp gap between plans and production: 89% of banks have an active digital asset budget, while 16% have a product in production. Among the large institutions surveyed were JPMorgan, Citi, BNY, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Standard Chartered, Société Générale, Deutsche Bank, BBVA and Revolut. Nearly every live offering relies on third-party infrastructure. Banks have introduced custody, tokenized deposits and access to exchange-traded products, but crypto trading remains a missing service.

Custody can establish a relationship with clients, but it doesn’t by itself create a trading business. Clients may want to trade assets held with a bank without sending them to an exchange outside its control. Building that capability in-house can mean negotiating separate bilateral liquidity and credit agreements, managing fragmented prices, and developing settlement systems over a period measured in quarters.

Finery Markets proposes a non-custodial connection to firm liquidity across more than 200 crypto and fiat pairs, with automated netting, role-based permissions and audit records. It offers a white-label master account, where the bank remains the regulated counterparty, and a white-label network that lets clients trade with one another. The company says the second model can typically spare the bank the capital requirements associated with a broker-dealer license.

Rules and infrastructure shape the next stage

In the United States, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency granted 16 digital asset trust charters over ten months, according to the report. The GENIUS Act, MiCA, the UK’s developing digital asset regime and Basel III treatment of crypto exposures are also influencing the services banks can offer and their costs. Banks now make up roughly one fifth of the MiCA register, a sign of institutional participation alongside compliance demands that smaller specialist crypto-asset service providers have been quicker to absorb.

Finery Markets also announced updates to its platform. Its connectivity hub now lets institutional participants store exchange API credentials in the interface and combines price discovery from venues that the company says cover more than two thirds of global crypto liquidity. The white-label stack includes embedded API documentation. Finery Markets says an AI-assisted integration repository cut client integration timelines by a factor of 18.7 against its previous baseline; the release provides no independent benchmark for that figure.

At a private TOKEN2049 Singapore luncheon co-hosted with Caladan, Utila and Stablecoin Insider, about 150 professionals from OTC trading, market making, payments and stablecoin infrastructure took part. Finery Markets reported a shared view that routing, settlement and prefunding are increasingly being treated as core infrastructure decisions. For banks, the practical test is whether their budgets translate into live execution services—and whether those services can attract enough liquidity to matter.

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