MiCA Has Set the Rules, but Europe’s Stablecoin Payments Stack Still Isn’t Ready

Europe’s MiCA regime has removed a lot of the regulatory fog around stablecoins, and that has changed the competitive picture for euro-denominated tokens. But as Myles Harrison, Chief Product Officer at AMINA Group, puts it, compliance is only the first hurdle: banks and payment providers still need custody, settlement, compliance, and reconciliation infrastructure that can actually support 24/7 payments at scale.

1. MiCA’s July 1 deadline pushed non-compliant stablecoins off regulated platforms, leaving a smaller but fully compliant euro stablecoin market. Harrison said that market has more than doubled in market cap over the past year, which is a useful signal for PSPs and banks watching whether the category has moved beyond pilot territory.
2. The bigger change is who is issuing. Traditional banks such as Société Générale are now in the same market as crypto-native players and operating under the same rules. In other words, what used to be a conference-panel hypothetical is now a live competitive environment.
3. USDC has emerged as the primary dollar-pegged stablecoin in Europe, but Harrison’s point is that the euro opportunity is still wide open. The euro underpins a nineteen-trillion-euro economy, while euro stablecoins account for less than one percent of global stablecoin supply. For anyone building payments infrastructure, that gap is the story.
4. Regulatory clarity gets you to the starting line, not the finish. Harrison said the real bottleneck now is operational readiness, because too many banks still treat stablecoins as an innovation project instead of a tool for existing client pain points.
5. Cross-border payments are the clearest institutional use case. The complaints are familiar: settlement delays, intermediary costs, and poor visibility in correspondent banking. Stablecoins can address those issues directly, and clients do not need to touch blockchain infrastructure — or even know they are using stablecoins — to get the benefit.

The practical takeaway for banks and PSPs is simple enough: MiCA gives you a regulatory floor, but it does not build the operating model for you. Harrison’s view is that many institutions do not even realize they do not need to build the stack themselves.