Berlin-headquartered fintech Unstoppable Finance announced its aim to build Europe’s first fully regulated DeFi-native bank and a fiat-backed euro stablecoin. In contrast to other stablecoin issuers, the bank will become a full bank, offering a broad suite of banking and financial services, both on traditional and on DeFi rails.
The blockchain industry has created innovative approaches to tokenize assets, issue digital identities and facilitate payments and financial services at a global scale. Still, major parts of this industry remain separate from the real economy. At the same time, the slew of recent banking failures such as Silicon Valley Bank, Credit Suisse, and others showed that the traditional banking system is far from stable. The verdict: banking needs to be rethought from the ground up.
“The banking system today still largely runs on legacy rails. Money doesn’t flow in real-time. With the advent of stablecoins money became programmable, settling in seconds around the clock, and providing transparency into transaction ledgers. Now is the time to leverage this huge innovation and rebuild the financial system into the one we’d build today,” said Peter Grosskopf, Unstoppable Finance co-founder and CTO, in a statement.
The bank will issue a fiat-backed stablecoin following the guidance of the EU’s new Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulation, which was voted into effect by the European parliament in April. The stablecoin will be an e-money token and will serve as a bridge between traditional finance and the decentralized economy.
The first product of Unstoppable Finance launched in 2022, a smartphone self-custody wallet that allows token trading and interaction with DeFi protocols on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains.