Which stablecoins are actually legal in the EU?

There are about $290 billion of stablecoins in circulation worldwide; Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC alone account for about $250 billion. In the European Union, only a short list of them can be offered to the public. Since MiCA’s stablecoin rules took effect on 30 June 2024, any token pegged to a single currency must be issued by a bank or an authorised e-money institution that has filed a white paper with its regulator.

By 30 October 2026, ESMA’s interim register listed 25 such issuers in 14 countries, with 50 white-paper entries between them. The largest stablecoin in the world, Tether’s USDT, worth about $179 billion, is not on it.

What makes a stablecoin legal

MiCA calls a stablecoin tied to one currency an e-money token. The rules are close to those for electronic money in a payment app, and they are strict on the points that matter when a stablecoin fails.

The second kind of stablecoin in MiCA, the asset-referenced token, is backed by a basket of currencies, commodities or crypto. No issuer of one has been authorised anywhere in the EU; ESMA’s register for them is empty. Tokens that try to hold their peg by algorithm alone, without reserve assets, cannot be authorised as either kind of stablecoin.

Most of these tokens are tiny. Euro stablecoins as a whole were worth €790 million on 3 November, roughly 0.3% of the stablecoin market, and Circle’s EURC alone was 57% of that. The list is long because MiCA made issuing a stablecoin a regulated business that banks and payment firms can enter, not because Europeans use many of them.

Why Tether isn’t there, and what that means

Tether is not authorised as an e-money token issuer anywhere in the EU. In December 2024 it invested in StablR, one of the authorised issuers, rather than seeking a licence for USDT. On 17 January 2025, ESMA and the European Commission told national regulators to make sure crypto firms stopped offering non-compliant stablecoins by the end of March 2025. Major exchanges serving the EU removed USDT trading for European customers.

That does not make holding USDT illegal. A European can still keep it in a self-hosted wallet or use it outside the EU. What changed is that a licensed European platform cannot sell it to them. For the world’s most-used dollar stablecoin, Europe is now a market it serves only at arm’s length, and USDC, through Circle’s French licence, is by far the largest dollar token that EU platforms can list.