Revolut is launching a euro stablecoin into a market MiCA handed to an American company

Revolut is launching a euro-backed stablecoin, entering a market that European regulation has spent two years accidentally consolidating around a single American issuer.

The neobank is also one of the 36 firms the ECB picked for its digital euro pilot, which means it is now building the private euro token and helping test the public alternative to it at the same time.

The regulatory backdrop is what makes this interesting. MiCA requires major stablecoin issuers to hold at least 60% of reserves in EU bank deposits, a rule designed to keep euro stablecoins anchored in Europe.

Tether declined authorisation because its model depends on US Treasuries, leaving Circle’s USDC and EURC as the only stablecoins holding e-money token authorisation in the European regulator’s register.

So the rule intended to protect European monetary sovereignty delivered the European market to a US-regulated company whose reserves sit largely in US Treasury instruments.

The European Commission opened consultations on fixing this in May, and a review report is not due until the middle of 2027, with revised rules realistically arriving in 2028.

That gap is the opening Revolut is walking into. Circle’s EURC passed €400mn in circulation earlier this year, which is a substantial lead in a small market and a modest one in the context of what a euro stablecoin could become.

Revolut has been assembling the licences for this for eighteen months. It holds a full UK banking licence granted in March, an EU banking licence, a MiCA authorisation obtained through Cyprus, and it has a US bank charter application pending.

Banking licences matter more than they might appear here. Holding one means Revolut can keep reserves and issue a regulated instrument on its own balance sheet rather than renting settlement infrastructure from someone else, which is the structural advantage a neobank has over a crypto-native issuer.

The FCA selected Revolut in February as one of four firms from twenty applicants for its stablecoin regulatory sandbox, where it has been developing a pound-denominated token backed one-to-one by sterling reserves.

The Bank of England has been softening its position as that work progressed, replacing proposed per-person holding caps with a £40bn issuance guardrail per systemic stablecoin and reducing the unremunerated central bank reserve requirement to 30%, with the remainder permitted in short-term government debt.

Revolut also has an IPO to think about, having launched a private banking arm while targeting a $200bn listing. Owning an issued currency rather than merely distributing someone else’s is the kind of asset that supports a valuation of that order.

The commercial logic is visible in Revolut’s existing crypto business rather than in any grand thesis about money. The company reported $6bn of revenue for 2025, up from $4bn, with crypto wealth services growing 298%, and it has processed more than $690mn through a Polygon integration for remittances.

It also has 65 million users across 38 countries, which is an asset no crypto issuer can replicate. Distribution has been the binding constraint on stablecoin adoption in Europe, not technology, and a token that appears inside an app people already use for their salary starts from a different place.

There is a tension in doing this while sitting on the ECB’s pilot. The central bank has argued that dollar stablecoin dominance weakens its ability to set rates, and a privately issued euro token is not obviously the remedy it had in mind, though Revolut is plainly betting that both things ship and it would rather be in both.

The specifics have not been independently confirmed. Neither the token’s name, the chains it will run on, where the reserves will sit, nor which markets get it first has been established outside the original report, and those details will determine whether this competes with EURC or merely accompanies it.