Walk the halls of Money 20/20 Europe this year, and one question kept surfacing, often with a sceptical edge: do we even need stablecoins? Tokenized deposits, the banks murmured, might do the job instead. So I put it to one of the people most qualified in Europe to answer it. Marieke Flament, a board member of Qivalis, the euro-stablecoin venture backed by a consortium of more than 35 European banks, did not hesitate. The premise, she said, is wrong.
| What You Need to Know |
|---|
| 1Interview recorded at Money 20/20 Europe 2026, 2 to 4 June, at the Amsterdam RAI. |
| 2Marieke Flament is a board member of Qivalis, a euro-stablecoin venture backed by a consortium of 35+ European banks, targeting a launch in the second half of 2026. |
| 3She argues stablecoins, tokenized deposits and CBDCs each do different things and are all needed; it is not an either/or. |
| 4A key distinction: a stablecoin is a bearer instrument (give it and it's yours), while a tokenized deposit still needs a bank to cash out. |
| 5She sees the MiCA deadline as useful pressure, the US GENIUS Act as "permission" for institutions, and privacy as the defining theme of 2026. |
This was our second conversation, and Flament has a rare vantage point: a former CEO of the NEAR Foundation and a former Managing Director for Europe at Circle, now helping steer a bank-built euro stablecoin toward launch. Her argument is that the whole “stablecoins versus tokenized deposits” debate is a false choice, and that Europe cannot afford to have it.
It was never either/or
Flament’s core point is that “tokenizing money” is not one thing. There are several versions, central bank digital currencies, tokenized deposits, stablecoins, potentially a digital euro, and they do not all do the same job. They form a stack, and they can work together.
The distinction she drew most sharply is the one most people miss:
“A stablecoin is a bearer instrument. If I give you a stablecoin, it’s yours, you do whatever you want with it. But if I give you a tokenized deposit, you need a bank to be able to cash it out. So it’s not the same role. Both have a role to play, but it’s not either/or. Nothing in life is either/or.”
There is also a simple reality check, she added: today, tokenized deposits largely do not exist yet. The instrument that exists, right now, is the stablecoin. Banks are organising around tokenized-deposit initiatives, and those will matter for payments between banks and central banks. But stablecoins are already here doing something different, and pretending the question is “which one wins” misreads the moment. As she put it, echoing a line from a Deloitte event we both attended, “the pie is big enough.” Europe, she argued, does not have the luxury to shut down routes; it needs to move at speed in every direction at once to stay relevant.
The MiCA deadline as useful pressure
With the MiCA transition deadline of 1 July looming, I asked whether it is good or bad pressure. Good, she said, and her framing of regulation was the most strategic I heard all week. She considers it to be global competition: the euro is competing with the dollar and other currencies, and a deadline is a moment to take stock, what has worked in MiCA’s first few years, what needs improving, what the competitive landscape demands next.
That competitive lens is also how she reads the US GENIUS Act. It was years of bipartisan work, she noted, and what it really delivered was permission. “Regulation says: yes, off you go, you can do it.” That clarity lets institutions move in and unlocks volume, and it sets a tone other jurisdictions now have to answer. For Europe, the message is that standing still is itself a decision, and not a good one.
The criticism and the privacy answer
The standard critique of a bank-built stablecoin is that it betrays crypto’s origins, handing big institutions the power to watch and control everything. Flament’s response was not defensive. If you had told her years ago that major firms would put treasury into Bitcoin and start tokenizing their assets, she would have been astonished; that adoption is, to her, genuinely amazing. The more libertarian dream of living entirely outside the system may fade, she conceded, but in exchange an enormous industry is embracing this technology, and the spirit is not lost.
The bridge between control and freedom, she argued, is privacy, which she expects to be the defining theme of 2026. She had just come off a panel pointedly titled “my staff can’t get paid without stablecoins,” whose conclusion was that paying people in stablecoins requires privacy because you do not discuss your salary at work. (That panel also featured Fahmi Syed of Midnight, whose case for selective-disclosure privacy we covered separately.) Her point widens it: privacy is just a rule of business, you would not want a trading partner to know the price you pay a competitor either. And here she turned the usual criticism on its head. Blockchains are so transparent that the real industry complaint should be the opposite of “it enables sanctions evasion”; in fact it makes activity easier to see and to sanction. The work now is balance: building privacy layers on top of transparent rails, so what should be public stays public and what should be private stays private.
35 banks, and the hard part of making them move
Bank consortiums announce stablecoin ambitions and then go quiet, so I asked what should actually happen next. Flament was honest about why these efforts stall, and it is not technology. It is governance. With 35 banks involved, she said, not everyone can have a say in day-to-day operations, or nothing ships. The trick is to let each partner contribute its real strength, distribution, liquidity, the users it represents, while a dedicated Qivalis team is empowered to actually build the thing. The consortium started early in 2026 and is, in her words, going full speed: get the licence, then launch the euro stablecoin live. She sees it as one component of a broader European stack alongside ECB initiatives and a potential digital euro, all meant to keep the euro strong at home and abroad.
Why this is relevant for the Dutch and European reader
For a Dutch and European audience, this is close to home in every sense, Qivalis is Amsterdam-based, and the stakes are continental. Flament’s framing reframes a debate that has been stuck in a defensive crouch. The question is not whether Europe should pick stablecoins or tokenized deposits; it is whether Europe builds a credible euro presence in tokenized money at all, while the dollar races ahead with the clarity the GENIUS Act provided.
Her quiet warning is the part worth holding on to. Money is being rebuilt for the next century, and the instruments, stablecoins, tokenized deposits, a digital euro, will coexist rather than crown a single winner. The risk for Europe is not choosing wrong. It is debating so long that it forfeits a seat at the table. On the evidence of this conversation, Qivalis is, as Flament put it with a smile, definitely moving.
This interview was recorded live at Money 20/20 Europe 2026 at the Amsterdam RAI. For more conversations on the future of money, watch the full Cryptofocus series.
