Opinion by: Jamie Elkaleh, chief marketing officer at Bitget Wallet
Stablecoins started as a workaround for crypto traders. By pegging tokens to the US dollar, they created liquidity in a market that never closed. In just a few years, however, they have outgrown that role. The result is an onchain financial layer where dollar-pegged coins set prices, collateral norms and risk appetite.
The danger lies here: Without the growth of credible, well-regulated alternatives in the euro, yen and offshore yuan, the US dollar’s dominance will be locked into crypto’s foundation for years.
If that happens, liquidity will track US rates and policy more tightly, amplifying drawdowns when Treasury markets wobble and exporting Washington’s policy shocks directly into DeFi.
Dollar tokens have already transmitted TradFi conditions into crypto. The headline numbers change each quarter, but the mechanism is stable: Reserves sit in US government money markets, so crypto liquidity rises and falls with US rates.
That plumbing is efficient and transparent, but concentrates macro exposure through a single sovereign’s money markets. Treating that dependency as “neutral” is a choice that the industry should correct in the market structure it builds next.
Europe and Japan should turn policy into liquidity
Europe is done admiring the problem. If dollar stablecoins set the rules of onchain finance, the euro has to appear in the order books, not just in white papers. EURAU is the first test: Is euro liquidity clear at depth and becomes a base pair? Alongside MiCA-compliant EURC and EURCV, Europe now has the plumbing — what it needs is deliberate market-making to seed euro books.
Regulators should pick winners and underwrite liquidity instead of merely publishing guidelines — otherwise “strategic autonomy” becomes a slogan with a bid-ask spread.
The European Central Bank has already said the quiet part out loud: Dollarized stablecoin rails weaken euro autonomy, so policy must create euro-native ones.
Related: ECB president calls to address risks from non-EU stablecoins
Japan is moving in parallel. Fintech group Monex is preparing a yen-backed stablecoin, while JPYC recently received approval, marking one of the first regulated fiat-backed tokens in Asia. That will only matter if a JPY token moves remittances and supplier payments and shows up as deep base pairs on major exchanges. It will remain a compliant pilot without strict reserve transparency and broad distribution through exchanges, PSPs, and wallets.
Hong Kong is the proving ground for non-USD rails
Hong Kong’s new licensing regime matters because it offers a supervised path to non-USD tokens with enforceable reserves, redemptions, and disclosures — exactly the constraints Europe and Japan need in Asian hours.
It starts with the Hong Kong dollar, but the framework can accommodate the offshore yuan, or CNH, which makes Hong Kong the practical bridge for an offshore-yuan pilot that can be monitored and scaled. Success will hinge less on code and more on policy — CNH pools are shallow, so a licensed CNH token will be a useful corridor until liquidity widens and hedging gets cheaper.
What would actually shift the base pair?
Non-USD tokens will only matter if they become the units where price discovery happens. That means daily reserve disclosures and independent attestations that meet — or beat — USDT/USDC standards. It also requires native multichain issuance for wrapper-free settlement and hard redemption SLAs so institutions can comfortably fund in euros or yen overnight. Exchanges should list non-USD base pairs and direct incentives to them — even if early spreads are wider — so price discovery happens off the dollar.
Europe has the first two pieces: a regulated issuer pipeline and a central bank openly arguing for euro rails. Hong Kong supplies the third: a venue that can license and supervise issuers serving Asian trading hours, with clear expectations on reserves and conduct. Put together, those elements can chip away at the dollar’s onchain monopoly without pretending the dollar disappears.
The bigger picture: multicurrency rails
Dollar stablecoins are not going away — and shouldn’t. However, a one-currency base layer would make crypto more brittle and not more open. Europe’s EURAU approval shows how policy can become liquidity; Japan’s licensing wave adds regional depth; and Hong Kong’s regime supplies the testbed to prove whether non-USD rails can clear in size.
If euro and yen liquidity consolidates on exchanges — with a transparent, licensed CNH token following through — pricing, collateral, and funding onchain will diversify beyond a single sovereign’s money markets, reducing concentration risk without sacrificing speed or composability. The next cycle will reward issuers and jurisdictions that turn compliance into competitive FX liquidity — and penalize those that rebuild dollar dominance by default.
Opinion by: Jamie Elkaleh, chief marketing officer at Bitget Wallet.
This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.