欧洲对Tether打击升级，Revolut月底自动转换USDT

On the 31st of August, Revolut will finish automatically converting whatever USDT is left in its European accounts into ordinary fiat. This is a $187 billion asset that has never once been made illegal to own inside the European Union, but yet here we are with the EU about to intensify its crusade against the [music] biggest stablecoin in the market. And remember, Europe didn't ban Tether. Instead, regulators have effectively pushed licensed exchanges and financial firms to stop offering it.

And from 2027, those restrictions are now set to go further, [music] much further, including rules that will reach your crypto wallet. So, today we're breaking down how the European stablecoin market has shifted, why Tether refused to comply, who's collecting the market it left behind, and how the template is now being compiled into law everywhere from America to Hong Kong. My name is DC, and this is The Coin Bureau.

So, let's start with the deadlines that have been hit recently. MiCA, or the Markets in Crypto Assets Regulation, splits stablecoins into two separate categories. And the one that matters here is the e-money token, or EMT. That's any token pegged to a single official currency. Think USDT, USDC, EURC, all of it. The stablecoin chapters became applicable on the 30th of June 2024, but individual member states were allowed to run transitional arrangements for legacy tokens.

And those grandfathering windows closed on the 1st of July 2026. The enforcement pressure came from that cutoff, with national authorities policing it through the licenses. But prior to this, the European Banking Authority, or EBA, published policy in February that dealt with a narrow question, which is how payment services rules apply to providers handling e-money token transfers. And the important detail here is that none of that instruction is addressed to the individual, but the licensed intermediary instead.

The crypto asset service provider, or a CASP, is the entity with a license, and the license is the thing that gets threatened, which is exactly why the wind down happened long before the deadline did. Coinbase's European arm cleared non-compliant stablecoins for EEA users back in December 2024 with the full removal of USDT trading pairs reported as complete by the end of March 2025. Crypto.com, Binance, and Kraken all ran phase restrictions across the same window.

Revolut, which operates through a Cypriot CASP license, halted purchases in early July this year, stopped deposits at the end of the month, and auto converts the remainder at the end of this month. And Tether itself wound down redemptions for EURT, its euro token, back in November 2025 before anyone forced it to. So, the euro-denominated exit was voluntary because Europe didn't outlaw any token, it just removed the license of anyone who touches it.

But then, why did Tether simply refuse to comply with regulations? Well, under MiCA's reserve rules, a non-significant EMT issuer must hold a minimum of 30% of its reserve assets as deposits with European credit institutions. So, if the EBA designates you as significant, and a $187 billion stablecoin is pretty significant, that floor rises to 60%. The remainder sits in highly liquid, low-risk instruments like short-dated sovereign debt.

That may seem pretty straightforward, but let's pay close attention to the details here because the rule isn't asking whether the dollars backing these stablecoins exist. Instead, it's just dictating where they need to be. Think of it like a safety inspector who doesn't care whether your gold is real, only that it's stored in a vault down the road that he happens to own. So, the audit passes either way, but the counterparty changes completely.

And Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino's objection is exactly that. He argued the bank deposit mandate imparts risk rather than removing it, describing the rule in interviews earlier this year as {quote} very dangerous. His logic is that a short-dated US Treasury bill is a direct claim on a country, the mightiest country in the world at that. A commercial bank deposit on the other hand is a unsecured claim on a fractional reserve institution.

And European deposit insurance stops at 100,000 euros, which is virtually nothing against a reserve pool this size. And to be fair, Ardoino has one major piece of evidence in this argument. In March 2023, Circle had 3.3 billion dollars of USDC reserves stranded at Silicon Valley Bank, and USDC depegged to 87 cents before a federal backstop stepped in. A dollar token broke because of where its dollars were parked. So, MiCA isn't primarily a disclosure regime for stablecoins.

In actuality, it's a custody regime for their reserves. And a rule that says, "Your dollars must sit in our banks" doesn't really come across as consumer protection. This is industrial policy. Now, in all fairness though, Circle's people argue the opposite case. Jeremy Allaire and Circle's EU policy lead Patrick Hansen have both defended the bank deposit mandate as the thing that makes redemption at par enforceable. At the same time though, Circle also happens to be the single largest beneficiary of the rule it's defending.

Circle secured an electronic money institution license from France's ACPR on the 1st of July 2024 and passported it across the block, giving USDC a clean regulated route into every European venue while its largest competitor was being delisted from them. USDC became the default dollar of regulated European exchanges by process of elimination. And on the euro side, the numbers are even more revealing. EURC, Circle's euro token, sits at roughly 435 million dollars, which is somewhere between 41 and 50% of the regulated euro stablecoin market, depending on which tracker you're using.

Second place is EURCV, issued by Societe Generale Forge, the digital assets arm of a French systematically important bank, which grew over 180% year-on-year to roughly $140 million. Together, those two are around 2/3 of the entire regulated euro market. But then, of course, we have EURI from Banking Circle in Luxembourg, EURQ from Quantoz under Dutch supervision, EURR from Malta-licensed Stabler, EURAU from All Unity in Germany with Monerium and Membrane Finance rounding out the register.

Now, I didn't list that out to bore you. There's actually an important pattern here. There's a bank, a bank's digital arm, a bank-adjacent payments institution, an asset manager consortium. So, in other words, the regulation has pushed the stablecoin market toward traditional financial institutions. Surprise, surprise. But of course, keeping track of a regulatory story this complicated and wondering what it means for your portfolio requires countless hours in front of a screen.

So, that's why we decided to make things a lot easier for you, because right here on YouTube, you can join the Coin Bureau Club Light plan. You'll get daily updates across crypto and TradFi and our team's read on the best opportunities in the market every single day. Just tap the join button below this video to get started. Right, back to stablecoins, because there's one bit of detail in the saga that changes how you should look at everything we've just covered.

Tether didn't leave Europe. No, it actually bought its way back in. In late 2024, Tether took an equity stake in Quantoz Payments in the Netherlands, the issuer of EURQ and USDQ supervised by the DNB. In December of the same year, it took a stake in Stabler in Malta, the issue of EURR and USDR supervised by the MFSA. Both of those tokens are on the compliant register we just looked at. Then Tether launched Hadron, a white-label tokenization platform with KYC and AML built into the issue and stack where they focus on institutions that want to tokenize commodities, funds, equities, and sovereign debt.

And in the United States, Tether backed USAT, a separate American token issued through the federally chartered Anchorage Digital Bank with reserve management handled by Cantor