Animoca Brands’ Yat Siu warns Europe about dollar dominance through stablecoins

Stablecoins processed $27.6 trillion in transaction volume in 2024. That figure is projected to hit $33 trillion in 2025. And almost all of it flows through tokens pegged to the US dollar.

Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, used those numbers to make a pointed case at the Global Digital Asset Forum in Vienna: Europe is sleepwalking into a future where its digital financial rails run on someone else’s currency.

The stablecoin sovereignty argument

Siu’s keynote on January 26 at the GDAF centered on a thesis he’s been refining since the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year. Stablecoins aren’t just convenient tools for moving money around. They’re instruments of geopolitical influence.

Siu described stablecoins as an “onboarding mechanism” for integrating users into broader digital assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum. The core problem, as Siu framed it, is the absence of a significant euro stablecoin. Europe’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, known as MiCA, is the most comprehensive crypto regulatory framework any major economy has produced.

Vienna itself is positioning as a European digital asset hub, and Siu declared the city a future powerhouse for the continent’s digital finance ambitions.

Animoca’s stablecoin play

Siu isn’t just an outside observer making academic arguments. Animoca Brands has skin in the game.

The company secured one of Hong Kong’s first regulated stablecoin licenses through a partnership with Standard Chartered and HKT. That puts Animoca alongside institutions like HSBC in Hong Kong’s emerging stablecoin ecosystem.

What Europe’s stablecoin gap means for investors

The projected jump from $27.6 trillion to $33 trillion in stablecoin transaction volumes suggests that traditional finance players are increasingly using stablecoins for settlement, treasury management, and cross-border payments. Each of those use cases deepens the dependency on whichever currency denomination dominates the stablecoin market.

The risk of inaction, as Siu frames it, is that Europe becomes a consumer of American financial infrastructure rather than a builder of its own. Siu’s argument is that stablecoins offer Europe a chance to avoid repeating that pattern in finance.