Stablecoins are no longer a crypto side story

In the hy StableCoin Playbook (https://hy.co/en/stablecoin-playbook/lp/), they are framed as a strategic upgrade to corporate finance: faster settlement, better liquidity, less reconciliation friction, and a more resilient operating model.

What I found especially relevant from a DARTE perspective is that this conversation becomes even more interesting once you separate two very different stakeholder lenses.

For users - corporates, treasurers, CFOs, and payment teams - the message is simple: stablecoins are about utility. They can reduce trapped liquidity, speed up cross-border payments, automate reconciliation, and improve control over cash movement in a way traditional rails still struggle to match.

For issuers - especially those operating in Europe - the message is different: stablecoins are about structure, regulation, and operating model. At DARTE Helsinki as well as DARTE Paris, we focused on the legal and supervisory questions that matter most: multi-jurisdictional issuance under MiCAR, the MiCAR/PSD perimeter, and the concentration risks around reserves and custody.

The key insight from that discussion was not that MiCAR does not prohibit multi-jurisdictional EMT issuance, and the joint interpretive note is explicit that the real issue is supervisory uncertainty, not a textual ban. At the same time, the market still needs clearer operational standards on reserves, redemption, and supervisory convergence if issuers are to build durable, cross-border models.

That creates a powerful split in the stablecoin story:

🔸 For users: the question is where stablecoins can immediately improve treasury performance.

🔸 For issuers: the question is how to build compliant, scalable, and supervision-ready infrastructure across jurisdictions and beyond the EU.

Let me put it this way: Stablecoins are becoming the new financial plumbing - useful for users, demanding for issuers, and too important for either side to misunderstand.

We will continue discussing these issues on the DARTE Stockholm session on 25 May, as side event to Nordic Blockchain Conference (https://www.nordicblockchain.com/conference-2026)