Eighteen months of MiCA stablecoin regulation, audited: authorized issuers, USDT delistings, reserve rules, the GENIUS Act and euro stablecoins.
MiCA's stablecoin chapter has been in force since 30 June 2024, and the licensing regime for exchanges and custodians since 30 December 2024. More than eighteen months after full application, the results are measurable: roughly a dozen authorized e-money token issuers, zero authorized asset-referenced tokens, USDT gone from every major regulated venue in the EEA, and a euro stablecoin market that more than doubled in a year while remaining a rounding error next to the dollar.
That last sentence is the whole story in miniature. MiCA worked as a market-structure instrument. It decided who may issue, forced exchanges to pick sides, and handed the European distribution of regulated dollar liquidity to Circle. What it did not do, so far, is create a large euro-denominated on-chain money market: euro stablecoins crossed 674 million dollars in mid-2026, while Tether alone sits above 180 billion.