European crypto trading volume is soaring, but a hidden “venue gap” is silently killing your execution price

The euro finally has a substantial stablecoin market, and for once, it’s not just a niche corner of DeFi. When MiCA’s stablecoin rules kicked in June 2024, they turned euro-pegged stablecoins into a regulated product category with paperwork, reserve rules, and an actual licensing lane.

Under MiCA, stablecoins that reference a single fiat currency sit in the “e-money token” bucket, while tokens tied to a basket fall under “asset-referenced tokens.” This means that if an issuer and an exchange want to keep a euro stablecoin available to EU users, the compliance burden is now explicit, and it shows up in listings, disclosures, and what gets routed where.

A year and a half later, it’s easy to find the headline number. DECTA’s “Euro Stablecoin Trends Report 2025” puts the post-MiCA arithmetic plainly: across its monitored set of major euro-pegged stablecoins, market cap in the 12 months after MiCA’s rollout increased by 102%, reversing a 48% decline in the 12 months leading into MiCA.

It also says the combined market cap reached $500 million in May 2025, and that aggregated monthly transaction volume jumped from $383 million to $3.832 billion, with EURC and EURCV logging the biggest transaction-volume jumps in the dataset.

That’s the very positive and straightforward story of stablecoin rails in the EU. But the harder question that needs answering, the one traders actually feel in their P&L, is actually in their orderbook.

The euro stablecoin boom was real, but a lot of it was forced

If you want to understand why euro stablecoin market share snapped into place so quickly, we need to start with an uncomfortable truth: early MiCA “adoption” was not a sudden wave of fresh demand.

Kaiko’s October 2024 note put a number on the shelf reset. Roughly three months after MiCA’s late-June start, Kaiko found that MiCA-compliant euro stablecoins (including EURC and Société Générale’s EURCV) hit a record 67% market share. But Kaiko also noted that weekly trading volumes for EUR-backed stablecoins stayed around $30 million, far below the ~$100 million levels seen in March 2024. In other words, the pie didn’t suddenly get much bigger. The slices just got rearranged because exchanges needed to align listings with the new rule set.

By November 2024, that rearrangement had largely finished. In Kaiko’s “State of the European Crypto Market” report, MiCA-compliant EUR stablecoins (EURC, EURCV, and Banking Circle’s EURI) reached a record 91% market share.

This is the first useful lesson for the liquidity test: stablecoin supply and stablecoin market share can move fast when the rulebook forces venue behavior. But that doesn’t automatically mean BTC-EUR and ETH-EUR become easier or cheaper to trade. A stablecoin can be plentiful and still fail to turn into better execution if it sits on the wrong venues, lives in thin pools, or just gets used as a settlement chip that ultimately routes into the same few deep books.

So what would better liquidity look like?

First, you’d want tighter spreads and deeper books. The bid-ask spread is the gap between the best displayed buy price and the best displayed sell price, the toll you pay to cross the market. Market depth is the size you can trade without pushing the price around. Kaiko uses the “1% market depth” metric, which is a simple, trader-friendly proxy: how much size is sitting within 1% of the mid-price on both sides of the book.

Stablecoin rails help most when they make it easier for market makers and large traders to fund and rebalance positions across venues, especially when fiat transfers are slow, cut off by weekends, or loaded with banking friction. But the rails only matter if they connect to books that can absorb flow.

If Europe’s BTC-EUR and ETH-EUR got better, it was mostly about concentration

The cleanest “scoreboard” numbers in Kaiko’s Europe report are about BTC-EUR’s role in global bitcoin-fiat trading, and they are hard to ignore. Kaiko reports that BTC-EUR’s share of global BTC-fiat trade volume rose from 3.6% to nearly 10% in 2024. That is a big jump in a world where USD pairs usually dominate by default.

But the rest of the report tells you how Europe achieved that, and it wasn’t a broad-based, every-venue renaissance.

Kaiko shows that euro trading is clustered tightly: Bitvavo, Kraken, Coinbase, and Binance together accounted for over 85% of total euro-denominated trading volume in November 2024, and for euro-denominated volumes excluding stablecoins-to-fiat pairs, Bitvavo sat around 50% share with Kraken second.

That concentration matters because it challenges the notion that liquidity in Europe improved. If liquidity gets pulled into a small set of venues, spreads can compress and books can deepen on those venues even if the long tail stays expensive and patchy. For a retail trader, it can feel like liquidity in Europe got better as long as they happen to trade on the winners. For a sophisticated trader, it means routing choice matters more than slogans about regulation.

Kaiko’s spread data makes the point in a single line: the 30-day average bid-ask spreads for top tokens ranged from over 20 bps on One Trading to 2.6 bps on Bitvavo and 3 bps on Kraken.

Depth tells the same story. Kaiko reports that BTC-EUR ranked as the second-deepest BTC-fiat market in its sample, averaging daily depth of 758 BTC, more than double BTC-GBP at 350 BTC. If you’re trying to trade size in a European time zone, that’s the kind of metric that decides whether you execute calmly or end up slicing orders into dust.

So, did euro stablecoins actually “cause” this improvement? The honest answer is that the evidence points to euro stablecoins as a necessary rail, not a standalone proof.

First, a lot of the early euro stablecoin story was compliance-driven reshuffling. Kaiko explicitly frames the post-MiCA euro stablecoin market-share move as driven by delistings and venue policy updates more than a sudden wave of demand.

Second, the euro market’s execution quality looks like a venue story. The best spreads in Kaiko’s dataset sit on Bitvavo and Kraken, and the worst sit elsewhere.

That pattern is exactly what you would expect from liquidity concentrating in a few books with serious maker participation, predictable routing, and enough flow to keep market makers engaged.

Third, stablecoin-euro activity is uneven across exchanges. In Kaiko’s report, stablecoin-to-euro pairs were about half of euro volume on Kraken and about 30% on Coinbase, but only about 4% on Binance and 2% on Bitvavo.

In practice, that means the venues with the tightest euro spreads are not necessarily the venues where euro stablecoin trading dominates. The stablecoin rail can be thriving on one platform while the best BTC-EUR execution sits on another.

That doesn’t make stablecoins irrelevant. It just pins down their real job: they reduce friction in funding and rebalancing, especially across borders and outside banking hours. They also give exchanges a compliant euro-adjacent product to list when certain legacy stablecoins become harder to support in the EU. But if you’re looking for a straight line from “EURC market cap up” to “ETH-EUR slippage down,” the better lens is microstructure: where liquidity concentrates, how routing behaves, and whether the best venues keep attracting both flow and makers.

The “bridge” story, meanwhile, is still forming. Europe already had plenty of crypto ETP plumbing before MiCA, and it has continued to expand. BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin ETP, for example, launched in March last year.  And weekly fund-flow snapshots from CoinShares are a decent public proxy for how much institutional-style allocation is running through listed products and where it is landing geographically.

Still, you can land a plain-English verdict without pretending to have a perfect causal model.

MiCA’s first year delivered what regulation is best at delivering: clearer categories, cleaner shelves, and a compliant euro stablecoin lineup that issuers and venues can scale. The “doubled market cap” story is real in the data DECTA publishes. (decta.com) The “euro got tradable again” story is also real, but it reads less like a continent-wide upgrade and more like liquidity concentrating into a few venues with genuinely tight spreads and meaningful depth.

If you’re a trader, the practical takeaway is almost boring: euro stablecoins are the rails, but the ticket price is set by the books: MiCA just helped make the rails credible. The books got better where liquidity concentrated. And Europe’s real test in year two is whether that quality spreads beyond the winners, or whether the euro’s crypto market keeps behaving like an archipelago where one or two islands are easy to live on and the rest are still expensive to visit.

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