Five of Europe's biggest mobile wallets have stopped talking about cooperation and built an organisation to run it. The European Network for Payments connects Bancomat, Bizum, Wero, MB WAY and Vipps MobilePay, and it exists because a domestic success story still stops at the border.

The ECB's new settlement platform has carried its first transaction — a billion-euro bond, settled in central bank money on a blockchain, five weeks after the platform opened.

In the same fortnight, two of Europe's largest banks said they would rather use stablecoins than tokenised deposits. The alternative was live. They went the other way.

And Visa has published research on where stablecoins land in the Nordics and Baltics. The short answer: not where the sales pitch says. In a region where payments already work, speed is not an argument — and what does arrive will arrive in the back office, out of sight.

Morten
Founder & Editor, Kaupr

One thing is happening as this goes out. Finans Norge's payments and digitalisation conference opens at Fornebu today and runs over two days. AI runs through most of the programme — as a practical tool, as an agent acting on a customer's behalf, and as a source of uncertainty for the industry — alongside the central bank's role and what the next payment infrastructure should look like.

We are live-blogging both days, and we will come back to what comes out of it in the next edition of Onchain Money.

What is on the programme →

Bancomat, Bizum, EPI's Wero, SIBS' MB WAY and Vipps MobilePay established the European Network for Payments on 30 September — a Madrid-based company owned in equal shares by the five. Their apps together reach around 130 million users in 13 countries.

Not a new wallet and not a merger. Each app keeps its brand and its users, and ENP operates the layer that routes a payment from one scheme to another. The rollout is staged: person-to-person transfers first, then online checkout, then payments in shops.

"Europe needs to move fast in building strong, independent European payment solutions," says Kim Fuglsang Kristoffersen, head of strategic partnerships at Vipps MobilePay.

Spain shows the size of it. Bizum handled 1.24 billion transactions last year. Across borders — through EuroPA, the existing link to Bancomat Pay in Italy and MB WAY in Portugal — it handled 69,400, worth 5.7 million euro.

That is what a domestic success looks like when it stops at the border. These schemes won at home; abroad, their users fall back on cards.

The wider case is the ECB's own figure: more than two-thirds of card transactions in the euro area run under rules set by companies outside Europe. Thirteen of the euro area's twenty-one countries have no domestic card scheme at all.

Cross-border transfers run today between Bizum, Bancomat and MB WAY. In April, Bancomat, Wero and MB WAY demonstrated cross-border payments in shops by QR code. Vipps MobilePay made its own first cross-border test payment, to MB WAY, in November last year.

Feasibility is settled. What is not is running five schemes as one network — common rules for processing, fraud, disputes and service levels, and a pricing model that works for partners with very different volumes.

Five owners hold equal shares, but their businesses differ in size, architecture and priorities, which means their exposure to any given decision differs too. Romain Rica of SBS puts the risk plainly: "Equal ownership should protect the partnership, not prevent the organisation from making decisions."

Zach Meyers, director of research at CERRE, raises two more. Whether cross-border payments end up priced higher than domestic ones, which would blunt the point of the exercise. And whether ENP's initial design makes it harder for other European schemes to join later — European coverage and an open network are not the same thing.

One date to hold alongside this: the digital euro pilot is expected in the second half of 2027, the same window ENP is aiming at. ENP connects private money. The digital euro would introduce central bank money.

Vipps absorbs MobilePay on 12 January — the Nordic consolidation that has already happened reaches its last step, with Danish and Finnish users moving to the Vipps app.

The Dutch scheme iDEAL will migrate to Wero, with the transition running to 31 December 2027. The announcement came on 26 October.

iDEAL handles around 1.5 billion payments a year and is how Dutch consumers pay online — not one option among several, but the one checkouts lead with. Wero is not entering the Dutch market. It is inheriting it.

That solves Wero's hardest problem in one country. In Germany it launched without an incumbent to absorb and hit the usual deadlock: merchants wait for users, users wait for merchants.

Sweden's Swish confirmed on 29 October that it has begun work on connecting to payments elsewhere in the Nordics. Anna Ragnartz leads the company, which has around 13 million users.

Swish is not part of the European network announced in Madrid. This is a separate track, aimed at the region.

What it would replace is expensive. Vipps, led by Rune Garborg, charges four per cent on a transfer to another Nordic currency — and the five Nordic central banks published a joint analysis the same week showing that four to seven per cent is normal for Nordic-currency transfers, against under one per cent for euro.

Swift wants phone numbers to work abroad — the network behind international bank transfers is building a service that lets you send money using a phone number or email address, the way domestic wallets already do.

The European Stability Mechanism issued a digital bond worth one billion euro on 26 October and settled it in central bank money on Pontes, the Eurosystem's new platform. It is the first time a European supranational issuer has done so.

The Bundesbank acted as issuing and paying agent and has been onboarded to Pontes. Clearstream created and managed the bond on its own blockchain infrastructure, and the cash leg settled directly in TARGET.

"With the launch of Pontes, wholesale central bank money transactions have become an operational reality," said Stephanie Eckermann of Deutsche Börse Group, who chairs Clearstream.

When a security lives on a blockchain, something has to settle the payment side. Until now that meant commercial bank money or a stablecoin. Pontes makes it central bank money, with both legs exchanged in one operation.

The platform opened on 21 September. Five weeks later it carried a billion-euro transaction. When we covered the launch, Clearstream's Thilo Derenbach said new issuance would come before existing securities moved across. That is what happened.

How Pontes works →

Four operators are registered on Pontes — Clearstream, SWIAT, Cashlink and the Lithuanian firm Axiology, which we covered when it joined.

The European Central Bank announced its selected providers on 30 October, with Nexi and Deutsche Telekom ranked first in their categories.

Nothing has been issued and no political decision has been taken — the legislation sits with the European Parliament and Council. But procurement has moved from consultation to award. The ECB is now paying companies to build it.

Visa Consulting & Analytics has published research on stablecoins in the Nordic and Baltic markets, surveying 410 people it calls Informed Insiders — consumers already using stablecoins, and payment professionals in banks, PSPs and fintechs.

The finding that matters is about what does not work as a pitch here.

Eighty-four per cent rate current cross-border payment speeds as acceptable or better. In a region where instant transfers are free and cash sits at nine per cent, "faster" is not an argument.

Where respondents do report friction, the largest answer is foreign exchange rates and spreads, at forty-three per cent. That is a cost and visibility problem.

Settlement, treasury movements, B2B payouts, and the cash leg for tokenised assets. Visa's own phrasing is that the opportunity "will not be highly visible".

Trust sits with the incumbents. Respondents name their own bank first; crypto-native firms are chosen by fewer than one in ten. One bank, quoted anonymously, is blunt about the motive: "The growing interest is driven more by fear of missing out than by clearly identified opportunities."

The report →

SEB and Danske Bank are building a euro stablecoin — both are founding members of a pan-European consortium aiming to launch a MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin before the end of this year.

Norges Bank's survey finds awareness of stablecoins among Norwegians has doubled in a year, to nineteen per cent. Of those who know what they are, seventy-two per cent have never bought any.

Which matches what Visa found across the region. People have heard of stablecoins. Almost nobody has a reason to use one, because the payments they already make work.

Nine Italian banks are testing EUR.BANK — a bank-issued euro stablecoin, with BANCOMAT, the company behind Italy's domestic card scheme, announcing the pilot on 29 October.

BBVA and Santander both told the MERGE conference in Madrid on 4 November that they are prioritising stablecoins over tokenised deposits.

That choice was made against a live alternative. The ECB put central bank money on the table in September and had a billion-euro transaction settled on it in October. Two of Europe's largest banks looked at that and went the other way — towards an instrument they issue themselves, that moves on public infrastructure, and that works outside the euro area.

Visa settled $25 billion in stablecoins over the past year — measured on an annualised basis, up roughly tenfold from the year before.

Fireblocks has published figures on x402, the protocol that lets software agents pay each other: 196 million payments, ninety-nine per cent of them in USDC on Base.

Two numbers describe what kind of activity this is. Ninety-two per cent happen outside ordinary business hours, and the median wallet making one is eighteen minutes old. These are not people. They are processes, created to do one thing and pay for it.

Coinbase's Brian Armstrong has argued this is what replaces subscriptions — software paying per use instead of per month.

Walmart is setting spending limits for AI agents — the retailer is building controls for how much an assistant may spend on a customer's behalf, which is the consumer-facing end of the same shift.

Seventy-three per cent of stablecoin volume moves outside banking hours — the clearest single measure of what they are currently used for.

Kinexys settles around seven billion dollars a day — JPMorgan's blockchain payments unit runs on tokenised deposits, the instrument BBVA and Santander have now put second.

Tokenised money market funds grew by 110 per cent — to roughly seven billion euro, as treasurers look for somewhere to hold cash that still earns while staying available.

Thirty per cent of mid-sized American companies use stablecoins in some form — against the seven per cent Visa found among informed users in the Nordics and Baltics.

Tether volumes in Brazil are up 800 per cent — in a country whose domestic instant payment system is among the most used in the world.

One thing worth keeping open if you follow euro-denominated stablecoins.

A tracker of every euro-denominated stablecoin in circulation, with supply, issuer and chain for each. Total supply sits around 796 million euro, with Circle's EURC holding roughly 57 per cent of it. The site is independently maintained and carries a disclosure about its maintainer's industry affiliation — worth reading before you cite the numbers.

eurostablecoins.xyz →

Thanks for reading the second edition of Onchain Money.

Onchain Finance comes in two tracks. Money follows how money moves — payments, currency and the rails underneath. Invest follows what you can own and how you get to it.

Onchain Money → · Onchain Invest → · kaupr.io →

Morten
Founder & Editor, Kaupr