The consortium -- which last year established an Amsterdam-based entity called Qivalis -- now counts 37 financial institutions as members, including ING, BNP Paribas, and BBVA, spanning 15 countries.
The project is positioned as a means to counter U.S. dominance in digital payments and to participate in a potential future ecosystem where assets such as bonds and real estate are traded as blockchain-based crypto-assets, despite skepticism from the European Central Bank regarding its benefits.
'The euro is Europe's currency, and on-chain financial infrastructure should support it, built by European institutions and governed by European rules,' Qivalis CEO Jan-Oliver Sell said in the statement.
Among the 25 new members are Dutch lenders ABN Amro and Rabobank; Spanish banks Sabadell and Bankinter; Bank of Ireland; Sweden's Handelsbanken; and Finland's Nordea, among others.
Several media outlets had reported in early May that some of these banks were set to join the initiative.
The cryptocurrency sector is increasingly competing with traditional financial institutions, putting pressure on legacy lenders to find applications for blockchain technology within their own operations.
Stablecoins -- a type of cryptocurrency pegged to a fiat currency -- are primarily used in crypto trading, and their volume has increased significantly in recent years.
The market is dominated by El Salvador-based Tether and U.S.-based Circle, which claim to have approximately 190 billion and 77 billion dollars, respectively, in circulation via dollar-pegged tokens.
Even so, there is little evidence of demand for euro-pegged alternatives. Société Générale's crypto division, SG-FORGE -- which is not part of Qivalis -- launched a euro-pegged stablecoin in 2023, but has only 105.6 million euros (122.40 million dollars) in tokens in circulation.
(1 dollar = 0.8627 euros)
(Reporting by Elizabeth Howcroft and Jesús Aguado; editing by Philippa Fletcher; Spanish translation by Paula Villalba)
