Non-USD Stablecoins: The Rise of On-Chain Euros, Reais, Yen and SGD

Non-USD stablecoins explained: EURC, EURCV, BRLA, XSGD and JPYC, liquidity, regulation, payments and on-chain FX.

An editorial illustration of euro, real, yen and Singapore-dollar stablecoin markets connected across a world map

Last verified: 2026-08-23

The first successful stablecoin product was not really a new currency. It was a better way to move an old one.

USDT and USDC put dollars on public blockchains, gave crypto markets a unit of account that did not move with Bitcoin, and eventually became useful well beyond trading. By late 2025, more than 97% of stablecoin supply was concentrated in USDT and USDC, according to Visa Consulting & Analytics. The Bank for International Settlements reached a similar conclusion this year: stablecoin growth remains overwhelmingly concentrated in dollar-pegged tokens, while non-dollar issuance is still minute by comparison.

That dominance makes sense. The dollar is already the world's principal funding and reserve currency. It is widely wanted outside the United States. Crypto exchanges quote against it. Offshore savers use stablecoins to obtain dollar exposure. Years of liquidity have made the largest dollar tokens useful almost everywhere.

Payments create a problem that dollarization does not solve. A German company keeps books in euros. A Brazilian merchant pays staff and taxes in reais. A Singapore business receives SGD. A Japanese supplier prices goods in yen. If all of them settle through a dollar stablecoin, the blockchain may be new but the transaction still contains foreign exchange.

Local-currency stablecoins are an attempt to put the other side of that trade on-chain.

The market is still small. Visa and Dune estimated combined supply of non-dollar stablecoins at about $1.2 billion in February 2026, after roughly 90% year-on-year growth. Euro tokens accounted for more than 80% of that supply and about 85% of transfer volume. By August, Circle's EURC alone had passed €400 million in circulation. Societe Generale-FORGE reported another €138.3 million of EUR CoinVertible outstanding on Aug. 6.

The dollar won for reasons a blockchain cannot erase

A stablecoin needs more than reserves and a smart contract. It needs somebody who wants to hold it, somebody who will redeem it, exchanges and market makers willing to quote it, payment companies willing to route through it, and enough liquidity that a meaningful transaction does not move the price.

Research published by the IMF in March found that more than 70% of cumulative net fiat inflows into four major dollar stablecoins between 2021 and 2025 originated in non-dollar currencies. Much of global stablecoin demand is therefore already an FX trade: people are using local currencies to acquire digital dollars.

The same research found that acquiring dollars through stablecoins can trade away from the price implied by conventional spot FX, particularly in markets with inflation, capital controls or other frictions. Stablecoins are becoming a parallel venue for dollar access, with their own liquidity and pricing.

So why put euros, reais or Singapore dollars on-chain?

Because a payment does not end when a dollar token reaches the destination.

Take a European company that owes a U.S. supplier $1 million. If the company funds USDC from euros, somebody must sell EUR and buy USD. The stablecoin moves the dollars after that conversion, but it has not removed FX.

If both currencies have liquid on-chain representations, the payment can instead be quoted directly as EURC/USDC. Currency conversion and settlement can occur in the same programmable environment.

Payment flow

EUR bank balance → EURC → EURC / USDC FX → USDC → recipient

Using the European Central Bank's Aug. 21 reference rate of $1.1699 per euro, €1 million has a reference value of $1,169,900.

Worked example

Reference conversion

€1,000,000 × 1.1699 = $1,169,900

At 20 basis points of spread/slippage: $2,339.

At 100 basis points: $11,699.

The blockchain fee can be pennies and the payment can still be expensive if the FX market is thin. Liquidity, not simply token issuance, is the real threshold for local-currency stablecoins.

The liquidity problem is still obvious

Visa and Dune found that only about 2% of non-dollar stablecoin supply sat in decentralized-exchange liquidity pools in early 2026. A token can have $100 million outstanding and still be a poor FX instrument if most supply sits in wallets, lending protocols or treasury accounts rather than two-sided markets.

Metric — What it tells you — What it does not prove

Circulating supply — Demand to mint or hold — Large FX trades execute cheaply

Transfer volume — The token is moving — Movement is payment or FX

DEX liquidity — Some executable on-chain FX depth — Institutional-size trades have tight pricing

Direct redemption — Token can return to reference currency — Every holder can redeem directly

Payment integrations — Distribution into money movement — The token is customer-facing

Market makers want flow before committing capital. Payment companies want liquidity before routing flow. Users want utility before holding the token. Dollar stablecoins solved that loop through crypto trading and offshore dollar demand. Local stablecoins need a different starting point.

Europe is building the first credible non-dollar market

The euro has the clearest combination of currency scale, regulation, institutional issuers and growing on-chain liquidity.

Circle said EURC passed €400 million in circulation on Aug. 17; its product page showed €403.1 million on Aug. 20. Visa and Dune estimated euro stablecoins represented more than 80% of tracked non-dollar supply in February, with EURC processing roughly $10 billion to $20 billion of monthly transfer volume at that point.

Societe Generale-FORGE provides a different route. Its EUR CoinVertible is issued by the bank group's regulated digital-asset subsidiary. SG-FORGE's Aug. 6 disclosure showed €138.3 million in circulation, backed by segregated collateral.

MiCA gives the market a legal structure that dollar stablecoins did not have during their formative years. Under the EU framework, a token seeking to maintain value by referencing one official currency is an e-money token. Only credit institutions and electronic-money institutions can offer EMTs to the public or seek admission to trading in the EU.

Visa and Dune observed a clear increase in euro-stablecoin activity after MiCA, while cautioning against assuming regulation alone caused the growth. The BIS makes the other side of the argument: robust domestic regulation has not, by itself, produced large non-dollar stablecoin markets.

Both can be true. Regulation can remove an obstacle. It cannot manufacture liquidity or demand.

Brazil shows a different route: connect to a payment system that already works

Brazil does not need a blockchain to make domestic payments fast. Pix already does that. The interesting use of a real-denominated stablecoin is connecting Brazilian money to financial activity outside Pix.

Visa and Dune highlight BRLA, whose transfer volume grew eightfold year on year to more than $400 million a month by early 2026. Their description is telling: BRLA acts as settlement infrastructure between Brazil's instant-payment system and global rails, often without the end user seeing the stablecoin.

That is a more plausible model than asking every merchant to accept a token directly. The local payment system remains the interface people know; the stablecoin extends its reach.

Singapore is testing the same idea with SGD

StraitsX describes XSGD as an on-chain Singapore-dollar rail for local payments and cross-border FX. It supports Ethereum, Polygon, Hedera, Base and Zilliqa, publishes monthly reserve attestations, and states that XSGD is redeemable 1:1 for Singapore dollars. Its July 2026 disclosures say XSGD and XUSD have been acknowledged by the Monetary Authority of Singapore as substantively compliant with Singapore's upcoming stablecoin framework.

Visa and Dune point to a practical Southeast Asian use case: tourists can pay through local wallets while merchants receive SGD, with XSGD operating in the settlement path.

There is another route. Circle Mint added local-currency on- and off-ramps for eight currencies in August, including SGD, MXN and BRL. A payment company can therefore keep using a dollar stablecoin in the middle while giving customers local-currency entry and exit.

That is the competitive question local stablecoins have to answer: is it better to put the local currency itself on-chain, or simply make the dollar stablecoin easier to enter and exit locally?

Japan shows what happens when regulation unlocks a new currency

Visa and Dune identify the October 2025 launch of JPYC as the point at which yen-stablecoin activity changed materially. Monthly senders rose from a few hundred to about 10,000 shortly after launch, and yen stablecoins reached roughly 6.6% of unique holder share in their non-dollar dataset.

JPYC's 2026 white paper shows the ambition is larger than the current market. Its issuance framework contemplates progressively higher supply limits as distribution expands, while an incentive program is explicitly designed to seed DEX liquidity.

Issuing yen on-chain is straightforward compared with creating a market in which somebody can reliably exchange a large amount of yen for dollars, euros or another token without paying an absurd spread.

Local stablecoins are already behaving differently from dollar stablecoins

Visa and Dune found that about 80% of non-dollar activity outside euro stablecoins consisted of straightforward transfers consistent with payments, payroll and treasury settlement rather than complex DeFi strategies. Activity also slowed on weekends, which is more consistent with business use than with 24/7 crypto trading.

At the same time, lending is growing quickly. The share of non-dollar stablecoin supply deployed in lending protocols increased from 1.4% to 7.5% over the study period, with value rising from $9 million to $86 million.

Local stablecoins may not retrace the path dollar stablecoins took through crypto trading. Their first durable markets could instead be regional settlement, treasury, payroll and local financial products.

What would a real on-chain FX market look like?

Today, most stablecoin FX is still a local-currency-to-dollar-stablecoin trade. The IMF's 2026 work says conversion between fiat and dollar stablecoins occurs primarily on centralized exchanges and regulated on/off-ramp providers, creating a parallel FX ecosystem.

Route — Example — Where FX occurs — Main dependency

Traditional FX — EUR → USD bank balances — Bank/FX venue — Banking liquidity

Local fiat → dollar stablecoin — BRL → USDC — Exchange/on-ramp — Local access + dollar liquidity

Dollar stablecoin → local fiat — USDC → SGD — Off-ramp/PSP — Destination liquidity

Stablecoin → stablecoin FX — USDC → EURC — DEX, RFQ or market maker — Two-sided liquidity

Local stablecoin → local stablecoin — XSGD → EURC — Direct or routed FX — Deep liquidity in both currencies

The last route is the genuinely new one. It allows currencies to exchange and settle on-chain without requiring a dollar bank account in the middle.

But “without a dollar bank account” is not the same as “without the dollar.” If the deepest route from XSGD to EURC is XSGD → USDC → EURC, the dollar remains the vehicle currency even if all three legs happen on-chain. FX markets have always concentrated around liquid vehicle currencies. Stablecoins do not repeal that logic.

The market is growing fast because it is starting from almost nothing

Visa and Dune's $1.2 billion February estimate was up about 90% in a year. Holder addresses grew from roughly 40,000 in January 2023 to more than 1.2 million by February 2026, while monthly active senders rose from around 6,000 to 135,000. Transfer volume increased sixteenfold from 2023 to early 2026.

Those are impressive growth rates. The BIS nevertheless showed non-dollar fiat-backed stablecoin capitalization at only a fraction of 1% of dollar-stablecoin capitalization for major currencies in May.

The useful conclusion is neither that local stablecoins are taking over nor that they do not matter. A market which barely existed is beginning to develop measurable users, regulation and payment flows, while remaining far below the dollar incumbents' liquidity.

What to watch from here

Circulating supply will get the headlines, but four other numbers will tell us more.

Executable FX depth. How much EURC can be exchanged for USDC at 10, 25 or 50 basis points of price impact? The same question applies to BRL, SGD and JPY.

Direct redemption. Can institutions reliably move between the token and its reference currency, and under what eligibility and timing constraints?

Payment distribution. Is the token integrated into PSPs, payroll systems, wallets, merchant products and treasury platforms, or does it mostly circulate among crypto addresses?

Local use. Does holding the stablecoin solve something that holding USDC does not?

Dollar stablecoins succeeded because people around the world wanted digital dollars. A euro, real, yen or Singapore-dollar stablecoin has to win for a different reason. It has to make the local currency more useful once it leaves the bank.

If that happens, the next phase of stablecoins will not be about replacing the dollar. It will be about giving the dollar something it has barely had on-chain until now: other currencies worth trading against.