A senior UniCredit executive warns that MiCA rules create an alliance between stablecoins and banks without the insurance safeguards needed to handle potential financial shocks.
Elena Carletti, vice-chair and head of the risk committee on the board of directors of UniCredit, warned on Thursday that Europe may not be able to contain a crypto-related financial crisis, having less effective tools at its disposal than those used by the United States during the banking turmoil of 2023. The remarks were made during a banking conference hosted by IESE Business School in Madrid.
Carletti stressed that European authorities may not be able to guarantee crypto-linked deposits in the same way US regulators did following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. The American decision to protect all deposits, including those of stablecoin operators, helped stabilize crypto markets during the crisis. “The same decision cannot easily be made in Europe”, Carletti said.
The most emblematic case dates back to the collapse of SVB in March 2023. Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, revealed that $3.3 billion of its reserves were deposited at the bank at the time of the crisis. USDC temporarily lost its dollar peg as investors rushed to redeem their tokens. The intervention of US regulators, who guaranteed all deposits at SVB and Signature Bank — including balances above federal insurance limits — was decisive in restoring confidence in crypto markets.
The European regulatory landscape makes the problem worse. The MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets) regulation pushes stablecoin issuers closer to traditional banks, requiring that certain reserves be held in liquid assets such as bank deposits and government securities. This structural link between crypto and the banking system increases mutual risk exposure, but without an adequate safety net.
The European deposit guarantee scheme generally protects up to €100,000 (approximately $116,500) per depositor per bank — a threshold that could prove entirely insufficient in the event of pressure on large stablecoin reserve accounts. Carletti described the situation as a “double form of weakness”: “It means we are forcing a certain alliance between stablecoin and crypto providers with the banking sector without the ability to extend insurance in the same way”.
