Stablecoins processed $27.6 trillion in transaction volume in 2024. That figure is projected to hit $33 trillion in 2025. And almost all of it flows through tokens pegged to the US dollar.
Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, used those numbers to make a pointed case at the Global Digital Asset Forum in Vienna: Europe is sleepwalking into a future where its digital financial rails run on someone else’s currency.
The stablecoin sovereignty argument
Siu’s keynote on January 26 at the GDAF centered on a thesis he’s been refining since the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year. Stablecoins aren’t just convenient tools for moving money around. They’re instruments of geopolitical influence.
Siu described stablecoins as an “onboarding mechanism” for integrating users into broader digital assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum. The core problem, as Siu framed it, is the absence of a significant euro stablecoin. Europe’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, known as MiCA, is the most comprehensive crypto regulatory framework any major economy has produced.
