European crypto trading volume is soaring, but a hidden “venue gap” is silently killing your execution price

The euro lastly has a substantial stablecoin market, and for as soon as, it is not simply a area of interest nook of DeFi. When MiCA’s stablecoin guidelines kicked in June 2024, they turned euro-pegged stablecoins into a regulated product class with paperwork, reserve guidelines, and an precise licensing lane.

Under MiCA, stablecoins that reference a single fiat forex sit within the “e-money token” bucket, whereas tokens tied to a basket fall beneath “asset-referenced tokens.” This implies that if an issuer and an alternate need to preserve a euro stablecoin accessible to EU customers, the compliance burden is now specific, and it exhibits up in listings, disclosures, and what will get routed the place.

A 12 months and a half later, it is easy to seek out the headline quantity. DECTA’s “Euro Stablecoin Trends Report 2025” places the post-MiCA arithmetic plainly: throughout its monitored set of main euro-pegged stablecoins, market cap within the 12 months after MiCA’s rollout elevated by 102%, reversing a 48% decline within the 12 months main into MiCA.

It additionally says the mixed market cap reached $500 million in May 2025, and that aggregated month-to-month transaction volume jumped from $383 million to $3.832 billion, with EURC and EURCV logging the most important transaction-volume jumps within the dataset.

That’s the very optimistic and easy story of stablecoin rails within the EU. But the tougher query that wants answering, the one merchants truly really feel of their P&L, is truly of their orderbook.

The euro stablecoin increase was actual, but a lot of it was compelled

If you need to perceive why euro stablecoin market share snapped into place so rapidly, we have to begin with an uncomfortable reality: early MiCA “adoption” was not a sudden wave of contemporary demand.

Kaiko’s October 2024 note put a quantity on the shelf reset. Roughly three months after MiCA’s late-June begin, Kaiko discovered that MiCA-compliant euro stablecoins (together with EURC and Société Générale’s EURCV) hit a document 67% market share. But Kaiko additionally famous that weekly trading volumes for EUR-backed stablecoins stayed round $30 million, far beneath the ~$100 million ranges seen in March 2024. In different phrases, the pie did not abruptly get a lot greater. The slices simply bought rearranged as a result of exchanges wanted to align listings with the brand new rule set.

By November 2024, that rearrangement had largely completed. In Kaiko’s “State of the European Crypto Market” report, MiCA-compliant EUR stablecoins (EURC, EURCV, and Banking Circle’s EURI) reached a document 91% market share.

This is the primary helpful lesson for the liquidity take a look at: stablecoin provide and stablecoin market share can transfer quick when the rulebook forces venue conduct. But that does not routinely imply BTC-EUR and ETH-EUR turn into simpler or cheaper to commerce. A stablecoin may be plentiful and nonetheless fail to show into higher execution if it sits on the fallacious venues, lives in skinny swimming pools, or simply will get used as a settlement chip that in the end routes into the identical few deep books.

So what would higher liquidity appear to be?

First, you’d need tighter spreads and deeper books. The bid-ask unfold is the hole between the very best displayed purchase price and the very best displayed promote price, the toll you pay to cross the market. Market depth is the dimensions you may commerce with out pushing the price round. Kaiko makes use of the “1% market depth” metric, which is a easy, trader-friendly proxy: how a lot measurement is sitting inside 1% of the mid-price on either side of the ebook.

Stablecoin rails assist most once they make it simpler for market makers and huge merchants to fund and rebalance positions throughout venues, particularly when fiat transfers are sluggish, reduce off by weekends, or loaded with banking friction. But the rails solely matter in the event that they hook up with books that may soak up move.

If Europe’s BTC-EUR and ETH-EUR bought higher, it was principally about focus

The cleanest “scoreboard” numbers in Kaiko’s Europe report are about BTC-EUR’s position in international bitcoin-fiat trading, and they’re onerous to disregard. Kaiko reviews that BTC-EUR’s share of worldwide BTC-fiat commerce volume rose from 3.6% to almost 10% in 2024. That is a huge bounce in a world the place USD pairs often dominate by default.

But the remainder of the report tells you ways Europe achieved that, and it wasn’t a broad-based, every-venue renaissance.

Kaiko exhibits that euro trading is clustered tightly: Bitvavo, Kraken, Coinbase, and Binance collectively accounted for over 85% of complete euro-denominated trading volume in November 2024, and for euro-denominated volumes excluding stablecoins-to-fiat pairs, Bitvavo sat round 50% share with Kraken second.

That focus issues as a result of it challenges the notion that liquidity in Europe improved. If liquidity will get pulled into a small set of venues, spreads can compress and books can deepen on these venues even when the lengthy tail stays costly and patchy. For a retail dealer, it might probably really feel like liquidity in Europe bought higher so long as they occur to commerce on the winners. For a subtle dealer, it means routing selection issues greater than slogans about regulation.

Kaiko’s unfold information makes the purpose in a single line: the 30-day common bid-ask spreads for high tokens ranged from over 20 bps on One Trading to 2.6 bps on Bitvavo and three bps on Kraken.

Depth tells the identical story. Kaiko reviews that BTC-EUR ranked because the second-deepest BTC-fiat market in its pattern, averaging every day depth of 758 BTC, greater than double BTC-GBP at 350 BTC. If you are making an attempt to commerce measurement in a European time zone, that is the type of metric that decides whether or not you execute calmly or find yourself slicing orders into mud.

So, did euro stablecoins truly “trigger” this enchancment? The sincere reply is that the proof factors to euro stablecoins as a needed rail, not a standalone proof.

First, a lot of the early euro stablecoin story was compliance-driven reshuffling. Kaiko explicitly frames the post-MiCA euro stablecoin market-share transfer as pushed by delistings and venue coverage updates greater than a sudden wave of demand.

Second, the euro market’s execution high quality seems like a venue story. The greatest spreads in Kaiko’s dataset sit on Bitvavo and Kraken, and the worst sit elsewhere.

That sample is precisely what you’d count on from liquidity concentrating in a few books with critical maker participation, predictable routing, and sufficient move to maintain market makers engaged.

Third, stablecoin-euro exercise is uneven throughout exchanges. In Kaiko’s report, stablecoin-to-euro pairs had been about half of euro volume on Kraken and about 30% on Coinbase, but solely about 4% on Binance and a pair of% on Bitvavo.

In apply, which means the venues with the tightest euro spreads should not essentially the venues the place euro stablecoin trading dominates. The stablecoin rail may be thriving on one platform whereas the very best BTC-EUR execution sits on one other.

That does not make stablecoins irrelevant. It simply pins down their actual job: they scale back friction in funding and rebalancing, particularly throughout borders and outdoors banking hours. They additionally give exchanges a compliant euro-adjacent product to checklist when sure legacy stablecoins turn into tougher to help within the EU. But in case you’re in search of a straight line from “EURC market cap up” to “ETH-EUR slippage down,” the higher lens is microstructure: the place liquidity concentrates, how routing behaves, and whether or not the very best venues preserve attracting each move and makers.

The “bridge” story, in the meantime, is nonetheless forming. Europe already had loads of crypto ETP plumbing earlier than MiCA, and it has continued to increase. BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin ETP, for instance, launched in March final 12 months.  And weekly fund-flow snapshots from CoinShares are a first rate public proxy for the way a lot institutional-style allocation is operating by way of listed merchandise and the place it is touchdown geographically.

Still, you may land a plain-English verdict with out pretending to have a excellent causal mannequin.

MiCA’s first 12 months delivered what regulation is greatest at delivering: clearer classes, cleaner cabinets, and a compliant euro stablecoin lineup that issuers and venues can scale. The “doubled market cap” story is actual within the information DECTA publishes. (decta.com) The “euro bought tradable once more” story is additionally actual, but it reads much less like a continent-wide improve and extra like liquidity concentrating into a few venues with genuinely tight spreads and significant depth.

If you are a dealer, the sensible takeaway is nearly boring: euro stablecoins are the rails, but the ticket price is set by the books: MiCA simply helped make the rails credible. The books bought higher the place liquidity concentrated. And Europe’s actual take a look at in 12 months two is whether or not that high quality spreads past the winners, or whether or not the euro’s crypto market retains behaving like an archipelago the place one or two islands are straightforward to reside on and the remaining are nonetheless costly to go to.

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