Sygnum: banks want stablecoins, tokenized deposits and MMFs…

Swiss digital asset bank Sygnum says institutional clients are no longer waiting for a single dominant tokenized cash instrument to emerge — they want stablecoins, tokenized bank deposits and tokenized money market funds running interchangeably on a single, regulated infrastructure. "They are asking how tokenized deposits, regulated stablecoins, and tokenized money market funds can be combined and made interoperable, so a treasury function can move between them — permissioned settlement, 24/7 cross-border flows, yield with on-demand liquidity — under one regulatory framework they already trust," Thomas Eichenberger, Sygnum's chief strategy officer and deputy group CEO, told CoinDesk.

Why it matters

The push reframes the stablecoin debate in Europe. ECB President Christine Lagarde has argued euro stablecoins are not a silver bullet for the continent's capital-market fragmentation — and Sygnum's multi-instrument thesis actually supports that view. But where Lagarde points to central-bank-led digital euro solutions, commercial banks are building the plumbing themselves. A consortium of 37 EU banks called Qivalis aims to launch a digital euro before year-end, while Sygnum, UBS, PostFinance, Raiffeisen and Zürcher Kantonalbank are already running a live Swiss franc stablecoin pilot on Ethereum. Euro stablecoins without bank backing have struggled to gain traction; the Swiss trial is a live test of what happens when the issuer, the cash backing and the regulator all sit in the same jurisdiction.

Market impact

Tokenized assets hit a record $28.9 billion in May — their tenth consecutive monthly all-time high — while the global stablecoin market cap extended its run to $320 billion.