Member-only story
Stablecoins under new European rules, what changes for users
This summer, I received three almost identical messages from different platforms, a few weeks apart. They all said essentially the same thing. USDT pairs are no longer available to customers in the European Economic Area, and balances must be converted or withdrawn. For someone who has held some money in stablecoins for years, that message is not an administrative formality, it is a forced move.
What happened in Europe over the past eighteen months was not a ban, although many headlines suggested that. It was an architectural change. European rules don’t say what you’re allowed to own, but who’s allowed to issue it and who’s allowed to sell it to you. The difference seems subtle, but its effects are felt directly in the app on your phone.
I wrote this text for someone who doesn’t follow the official journals of the European Union every day, but who has a few hundred or a few thousand euros in stable tokens and wants to understand where they stand. Without unnecessary jargon, without dramatization. With the numbers and data that matter.
Where did the whole regulation story start?
In 2019, when Facebook announced its Libra project, central banks got really scared. The idea that a company with billions of users could launch its own…
