Qivalis onboards 37 European banks as stablecoin issuer expands to 40 staff
Qivalis, a euro-pegged stablecoin issuer backed by a growing bench of European banks, says trade finance is undergoing a stablecoin-driven overhaul as firms skip fiat off-ramps entirely. The Netherlands-based issuer has onboarded 37 European banks in the past year and grown from one employee to about 40 staffers, showing how quickly European players are moving while U.S. rivals wait on federal legislation.
- Qivalis has onboarded 37 European banks in the past year and grown to about 40 staffers.
- The issuer is close to securing an Electronic Money Institution license from the Dutch Central Bank.
- CEO Jan-Oliver Sell says it took three and a half years to reach this point, a head start he expects over newer U.S. bank-led stablecoin consortia.
- 37 banks European lenders onboarded by Qivalis in the past year
- 40 staff grown from one employee, CEO Jan-Oliver Sell, a year ago
- 3.5 years time Qivalis took to near its stablecoin go-live date
- End of 2026 target launch
Qivalis, an independent euro-pegged stablecoin builder whose shareholders include a number of European banks, says trade finance is being transformed by stablecoin settlement, according to CEO Jan-Oliver Sell in comments reported by CoinDesk. Trade finance, the credit and cash-flow infrastructure behind global commerce, has long been flagged as ripe for a distributed-ledger upgrade. Sell says that shift is now underway, with stablecoins supplying a payment leg that earlier blockchain efforts lacked.
Qivalis Grows From One Employee To 37-Bank Network In A Year
Sell said he was Qivalis’s only employee a year ago. The company now has about 40 staffers and has onboarded 37 European banks in the same period.
Qivalis is close to securing an Electronic Money Institution license from the Dutch Central Bank (DNB), which would let it issue a fully regulated euro stablecoin. Sell said the plan is to go live by the end of this year. He noted that reaching this stage took three and a half years, a timeline he expects to be longer for the newer bank-heavy stablecoin consortia now forming in the United States.
Sell Points To East Africa-Kazakhstan Trade Settled Entirely In Stablecoins
Sell said conversations across the trade finance ecosystem show dedicated trade finance funds, which supply financial instruments and buy commodities, are shifting entire supply-chain operations into stablecoins without converting back to fiat. He cited transactions between suppliers in East Africa and counterparties in Kazakhstan as an example already happening today.
A supplier in East Africa is trading with someone in Kazakhstan and everything is done using stablecoins and they don’t even off-ramp. It means collateral moves so much faster and really the whole business model changes because you can start rotating collateral in minutes rather than days.
Jan-Oliver Sell, CEO, Qivalis
Sell contrasted this with earlier efforts by business blockchain firms such as R3 and Hyperledger, which digitized paper-based trade instruments like letters of credit but never moved the cash leg onchain. “Now there are stablecoins with liquidity, so you’ve got the payment side as well, which was the piece that was missing. So, it’s really interesting to hear from people who are at the coal face about how much it’s changing their business,” he said.
Sell Predicts A Multi-Stablecoin World As MiCA Outpaces Clarity Act
The stablecoin market remains dominated by dollar-pegged tokens from Tether and Circle. Sell argues that dynamic will not hold across every region.
Europeans will not settle in dollars long-term, Sell said, and neither will Japanese or Korean firms, who he expects to prefer yen or won over the greenback. “So we’re going to end up with a multi-stablecoin world where the flows will start to look like they do in fiat,” he said. Asia, Latin America and Africa are already emerging as trade finance focal points, a geographic tilt echoed in a recent CoinDesk Research report mapping the Asia-Pacific stablecoin landscape.
Sell also pointed to renewed delays to the Clarity Act in the United States as an opening for Europe, where the Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) framework already gives institutions regulatory certainty. He said that gap likely puts newer U.S. bank-heavy stablecoin consortia behind Qivalis on any realistic go-live timeline. “It will be interesting to see how long it takes other bank groups doing stablecoins to get off the ground, because it took us three and a half years to get to this point,” he said.
The BlockWest read. The real signal here is what a three-and-a-half-year buildout with 37 bank shareholders does to procurement decisions at trade finance funds. Once a euro stablecoin has a live DNB license, treasury desks at commodity traders and export banks gain a regulated alternative to dollar rails for cross-border collateral. That shifts the competitive question from whether banks adopt stablecoins to which issuer’s compliance stack they trust first.
Qivalis has not disclosed a specific date for its DNB license approval, only that it expects to go live with its regulated euro stablecoin by the end of this year. Whether U.S. bank consortia can close the gap Sell describes will depend in part on how much longer the Clarity Act remains stalled in Washington.
