If Stablecoins Win, do Banks Lose ?

Speakers

Building the New Money: Privacy, Custody and the Stablecoin Stack

• Clarisse Hagège, Founder & CEO at DFNS
• Antoine Hello, Director of Capital Markets at Zama
• Jan-Oliver Sell, CEO at Qivalis

Banks at the Crossroads: Adapt, Compete or Lose?

• Luke Dufour, EMEA Compliance at TRM Labs
• Nader Souri, MD & Head of Corporate Banking at BNY

Getting 37 European banks to care about stablecoins is already the achievement

Qivalis has not launched yet. But it has done something arguably harder: aligned 37 European banks as equal shareholders around a shared euro stablecoin infrastructure. Each bank holds the same stake, no single entity controls the entity, and new entrants dilute everyone equally. That governance structure, built before a single transaction, is the foundation.

The infrastructure choices reflect where Europe actually is:

• Custody provider: Fireblocks, an American company, selected before the current CEO joined
• Rationale: no fully sovereign European alternative existed at the time at the required scale
• Strategy going forward: deliberate vendor diversification at every layer of the stack, starting with custody

The euro stablecoin problem Qivalis is trying to solve is not just regulatory. It is liquidity. Today there is no real depth in euro on-chain markets: no BTC/EUR book, no ETH/EUR, no euro-denominated perpetuals. Getting there requires the network, not just the token.

Privacy and auditability can coexist, and it costs $0.13

Institutions consistently name privacy as their top requirement for on-chain participation. The assumption until recently was that MiCA's auditability requirements made this impossible. Zama's thesis is that it is a false tradeoff.

Using fully homomorphic encryption, a transaction between two banks can be structured so that:

• The regulator holds an observer key and can audit amounts at any time
• The public view shows only that a transaction occurred, with no amount visible
• The smart contract owner defines who gets access to what, with no default transparency required

The first confidential transaction on Ethereum mainnet ran on December 31. Total cost: $0.13. For wholesale and institutional flows, that is negligible. For micropayments, it is not. The use case is the wholesale market, not consumer payments, and for that market the cost is irrelevant.

European sovereignty in digital finance is a collective action problem

The Fireblocks selection at Qivalis provoked a public reaction from Clarisse Hagège that led directly to a panel discussion. Her actual argument is more precise than a flag-waving exercise: sovereignty in digital asset infrastructure is not achieved by one institution making a different choice. It requires the whole ecosystem to move together.

DFNS's answer to this is a product architecture built around controllability rather than geography. The bank owns the infrastructure completely, it is not delivered as SaaS running on American clouds, and there are no residual ties to the provider once deployed. DFNS announced a rebrand at the event: it is now positioning as a core banking platform for digital assets, integrating natively with Murex, Temenos and other existing bank systems. It processes approximately 1% of global stablecoin volume today.

The broader point: banks are operating two parallel rails for at least the next 20 years. The first phase of digital asset adoption required siloed tokenization POCs. The next phase requires a core banking system that reconciles fiat and digital asset activity simultaneously.

Banks will not lose, but parts of their business will

The unanimous answer to the panel's title question: no. Banks do not lose if stablecoins win. The regulatory framework requires banks at every layer of the stablecoin stack. BNY custodies Bitcoin, ETH and stablecoins, manages reserves for stablecoin issuers including Circle, and launched tokenized deposits in January 2026. 70% of BNY's revenues are recurring. It does not rely on net interest income. The rise of stablecoins creates new revenue lines: reserve management, collateral mobility, settlement infrastructure.

But one prediction from Clarisse Hagège was more specific and more uncomfortable:

• The FI business within banks (inter-bank payment intermediation) is "doomed to disappear" on a 10-year horizon
• Neobanks are already adopting stablecoins not to access DeFi but to optimize internal rails and remove banks from their payment chains entirely
• What survives: lending relationships, custody, compliance infrastructure
• What shrinks: fees earned on moving money between institutions

Luke Dufour from TRM Labs frames the divide differently: banks that are still banning deposits and withdrawals to crypto platforms will lose. Banks that are managing stablecoin issuer reserves and building compliance frameworks will compete. Banks that issue their own stablecoins will define the next generation of the stack.

Compliance teams are racing against criminal speed

Blockchain transparency is an advantage for investigators. The frustration of traditional financial crime work, chasing funds through correspondent banking chains and waiting days for responses, disappears when the ledger is public. But the same speed that benefits legitimate users benefits bad actors equally.

TRM Labs launched the Beacon Network in response:

• Law enforcement flags an illicit asset on-chain (not a wallet, the asset itself)
• The asset is tracked in real time as it moves across the ecosystem
• When it hits a Beacon Network member, an alert fires and connects the exchange directly with the investigating officer
• Iranian state-aligned actors financing weapons programs through stablecoins are a current active focus for TRM's threat intelligence team

The compliance maturity gap between institutions is wide. Some teams are receiving crypto 101 sessions. Others have already built full digital asset compliance frameworks. The deciding factor, according to Luke Dufour, is not regulation. It is education, and the willingness of compliance teams to ask for it before the business forces the question.

Conclusion

Amsterdam produced a cleaner answer than the question deserved. Stablecoins and banks are not in competition. They are in a dependency relationship where each needs the other to scale. The more interesting question is not whether banks survive, but which banks build the infrastructure to benefit from the transition and which ones wait for regulatory clarity that arrives too late. On current evidence, the gap between those two groups is widening faster than most compliance officers in the room are prepared to admit.