Cross-Border Stablecoin Transfers Jump 80%, Chainalysis Data Shows

Stablecoin Rails Take Over the MERGE Madrid Agenda

MERGE Madrid ran from October 27 to 29, opening on the floor of Bolsa de Madrid, the city's stock exchange, before the main program moved to Palacio de Cibeles, and the clearest number of the three days came from Chainalysis global policy lead Jordan Wain. He put cryptocurrency economic activity at about $9.4 trillion between June 2025 and June 2026, down 1.6% year on year, while cross-border stablecoin transfers rose 80% over the same window. In his reading, digital assets are settling real transactions rather than tracking price, so usage held even as a bear market pressed on valuations. Visa's Alexandra Soroko pointed to stablecoin card settlement, which lets institutions clear obligations seven days a week, and named cross-border business payments and corporate treasury as the next growth areas. OSL EU managing director Marie Winter said the firm has held a MiCA license in Austria since the beginning of July and is now applying for a payment institution license and an EMI license, with the European Union focus on third-party payment, exchange services and on- and off-ramp work. Bankers on the same stage described a shifting role. Stijn Vander Straeten, CEO of Crypto Finance Group, a Deutsche Börse company, said bank revenue on digital assets still comes from the crypto offering to clients, with staking, tokenized deposits and settlement infrastructure behind it. Executives from Commerzbank, N26 and Applied Blockchain described banks acting as the infrastructure that lets clients use stablecoins instead of holding large balances. Mirko Pfiffner of Liechtenstein's Bank Frick rejected the idea that the sector no longer needs banks: exchanges, liquidity providers and market makers remain very large in fiat operations and still need banking, he said, and he expects banks to specialize over the next five to ten years into payment rails, custody or trading. Bison Bank, Portugal's first CASP inside a licensed bank, said it sits between crypto-native and traditional customers.

Qivalis Consortium Grows to 37 Institutions

The most concrete build-out presented in Madrid came from Qivalis, the Amsterdam-based consortium developing a regulated euro stablecoin. The consortium has grown from nine founding banks to 37 institutions across 15 countries and plans to operate under MiCA with supervision from the Dutch central bank, running on public Ethereum. Founding member Raiffeisen Bank International was represented by stablecoin strategy lead Elma Saric, alongside Niccolò Bardoscia of Intesa Sanpaolo's IMI CIB and Tania Griffith of Ripple. The gap the project is chasing is wide: euro-denominated stablecoins total less than $1 billion in market capitalization, against more than $300 billion for dollar-backed tokens. Western Union and Anchorage Digital described their own rail on the same stage. Western Union launched USDPT, its dollar-backed token, on Solana in May, issued by Anchorage and starting in Bolivia and the Philippines, two remittance-heavy markets; the company positions it as a replacement for the rails it uses to settle with agents rather than a consumer product, while Anchorage aims to swap pre-funded correspondent accounts for stablecoin balances and cut settlement from days to minutes. Tokenization also moved from theory toward issuance. Bit2Me chief strategy officer Abel Peña said the company has received authorization to launch STX, a security token offering to tokenize shares and bonds, aimed first at medium-sized companies, a category adjacent to the tokenized stock products now circulating in regulated venues. BBVA and Bullish warned on the same panel that tokenization only works if investors keep enough liquidity to trade, including in volatile stretches. A separate session with Mastercard, Tether and the Cardano Foundation covered AI agents paying on behalf of consumers and businesses, and why clear permissions and digital identities matter. BitGo's Latin America managing director Luis Ayala tied the payments shift to the AI crypto wallet, an agent built on a large language model that can pay on behalf of a natural person, and TRM Labs' Guillaume Rodenas said know-your-customer checks for agents should start with the human or company controlling them.

Read together, the threads point one way: the stablecoin build-out is decoupling from price. Total activity slipped 1.6% year on year while transfer volume rose 80%, which means settlement demand, not speculation, is doing the work. The Qivalis expansion from nine to 37 institutions is the largest institutional commitment announced at the event, and euro issuers are racing a 300-to-1 gap against dollar tokens, with MiCA supervision by the Dutch central bank as the compliance path that makes a bank-grade euro instrument possible. The test ahead is execution: OSL EU's pending payment and EMI licenses and Qivalis's launch will show whether the new rails reach settled volume.