For months, quantum computing has been one of the largest tail risks hanging over the crypto industry. This week, the quantum scare got a sibling. Possibly a nastier one.
It was born on Tuesday, when OpenAI published 722 maths manuscripts. By Wednesday, one of Ethereum’s best-known researchers was telling the crypto industry to get ready for “bunker mode”.
Justin Drake’s worry: AI might break ECDSA, the signature scheme behind Bitcoin and Ethereum wallets, before quantum computers even get the chance. Worst case, “in months not years”.
In plain terms:
If ECDSA breaks, anyone who knows your public key could work out your private key and take your coins.
Most wallets keep that public key hidden as long as they only receive funds. Send one transaction, and it’s onchain for good.
So Drake wants holders, big ones first, to park the bulk of their funds in wallets that have never sent anything.
Systems that have to sign all the time, like price oracles, can’t hide. They should consider switching keys with every signature or adding a second, hash-based one.
His call for bunker mode made waves and drew pushback. Coinbase’s Head of Cryptography, Yehuda Lindell, called the post “the very definition of FUD”. Vitalik Buterin said he takes the risk seriously but advised people not to scramble. He has “lost more money in botched migrations than I have lost in all hacks combined.”
The obvious take is that uncertainty keeps growing exponentially, and cryptography has joined the already long list of things AI is making people anxious about.
For now, nobody can say whether bunker mode is pure doomerism or a reasonable recommendation.
But before we go there, let’s try one last prompt: “Chat, provide a fix. Make no mistakes.”
IN TODAY’S BRIEFING:
Samsung introduces stablecoin payments
Eurøpe Consortium launches to grow EURØP stablecoin
WITH INSIGHTS FROM
Martin
Bruncko
Schuman Financial
Igor
Mikhalev
EY
Aymeric
Salley
Banking Circle
HIGH SIGNAL NEWS
Samsung introduces stablecoin payments. Launching in the last week of October, Samsung Wallet will support USDC transfers to compatible wallets and eligible bank accounts in more than 60 countries, where bank account recipients may receive local currency. Under the hood, the payments are powered by infrastructure provider Bastion, with custody provided through Coinbase Prime. 💸
Securitize launches tokenized U.S. stocks. Securitize Stocks will give eligible investors in the U.S., the EU and other markets access to 1:1-backed tokenized equities, initially launching on Solana. The products represent security entitlements to underlying shares, preserving dividends and voting rights, with trading launching through Securitize’s broker-dealer and later planned for the NYSE’s digital venue and OKX-ICE Tokenized Securities Venue. 🇺🇸
Ondo launches private markets platform. Ondo Private Markets will give eligible investors onchain exposure to individual private companies through tokenized notes linked to their share value, rather than direct equity ownership. 🪙
GSR expands into vaults. The crypto trading and market-making firm is launching Hare, a new business creating and managing Aave-powered onchain vaults for stablecoins and tokenized gold, with GSR committing $100 million in anchor liquidity ahead of outside investors. 💰
TOP STORY
Eurøpe Consortium Launches with 11 Members to Grow EURØP Stablecoin
A new euro alliance: On Monday, a new euro stablecoin consortium entered the market. The Eurøpe Consortium brings together 11 founding members, including retail broker eToro, infrastructure provider DFNS and French crypto platform Coinhouse, around EURØP, a euro stablecoin issued by Paris-based payments company Schuman Financial.
Why it matters: The euro stablecoin market has grown around 50% over the past 12 months to roughly €800 million in supply, yet more than half of it sits with a single issuer, Circle, while EURØP holds about 2%. The issuers that have entered the market since the summer bring their own clients with them: Crédit Agricole launched EURXT through its asset servicing arm CACEIS in July, Revolut began rolling out EURR to its app users in August, and the banking consortia Qivalis and Bancomat are set to follow. The Eurøpe Consortium aims to bring issuance and distribution just as close together for EURØP, relying on digital-asset native firms instead of a banking network to drive the token's growth.
A familiar model: That approach most closely resembles Paxos's Global Dollar Network (GDN), whose more than 150 partners distribute the USDG stablecoin in exchange for a share of its reserve income. USDG has grown to around $3.1 billion in circulation, but 66% of it sits on just two partner chains, OKX's X Layer and Robinhood Chain, highlighting both the leverage that large distribution platforms provide and how much the network depends on them.
A different starting point: Eurøpe applies the model under different conditions. Its founding members distribute EURØP through existing exchange, brokerage and wallet platforms, but none runs its own blockchain on which the token could anchor an onchain ecosystem. According to information provided to Blockstories, the consortium has also not yet put a comparable reserve-sharing structure in place.
Building on established ground: The consortium does not start from scratch, though. EURØP has been live since late 2024 and has a circulating supply of around €17 million. Schuman Financial issues it under a French e-money institution licence and has applied for a MiCA CASP licence. Beyond issuance, it offers businesses an API-based stack covering virtual accounts with named IBANs, treasury tools, and automatic 24/7 conversion between fiat and EURØP.
Backers and leadership: The company raised a €7 million seed round in 2024 from investors including Lightspeed Faction and Kraken Ventures and is led by founder and CEO Martin Bruncko, previously Binance's Executive Vice President for Europe.
More flow than float: Schuman’s payment stack is also why EURØP's supply says little about its use. According to figures shared with Blockstories, the platform’s September activity corresponds to more than €4 billion in fiat and stablecoin payments on an annualized basis. Much of it runs as a so-called stablecoin sandwich, in which EURØP settles the transfer between two fiat legs, so clients don’t need to hold the token themselves.
"The main use case we see today is B2B cross-border payments. Our clients include money service businesses as well as companies that need to move treasury funds across jurisdictions. In terms of corridors, Europe to francophone Africa is the fastest-growing, while we are also starting to see flows from Europe to Asia and Latin America and are developing a Europe–Middle East corridor," Bruncko told Blockstories.
What members sign up to: Members are expected to work together on new products and use cases, but their formal commitments are light. According to Bruncko, the main obligation is to make EURØP a preferred stablecoin on their platforms. In terms of governance, the consortium is fully formalized, but decisions do not have to pass through a central steering body.
"We try to move fast, and that means decisions cannot be tied down by bureaucracy. This is why we don't have slow-moving formal steering committees and instead rely on working groups to move things forward," Bruncko said.
Growth strategy: Schuman, for its part, is building out capabilities members can integrate, from trading-related tools for exchanges and brokers to onchain FX and agentic payments.
"One area we think could become really big is agentic payments. We have built a full bank-to-agent-to-blockchain loop: an agent can trigger a payment from a company's treasury bank account, we instantly convert it into stablecoins for the transaction, and any remaining balance can move straight back into the bank account," Bruncko said.
Outlook: Schuman’s next step is to widen the consortium beyond digital-native firms, and according to Bruncko, the announcement has already generated inbound interest.
"We want to keep the consortium open to any type of member, and we are already in discussions with banks, neobanks and other companies that you would not consider digital natives," he said.
Igor Mikhalev is a Partner at EY-Parthenon focused on digital assets, working with banks, central banks, major stablecoin consortia and CSDs on stablecoins, tokenized deposits and CBDCs. He also played a key role in developing research tools including CBDC Tracker and Stablecoin Tracker.
Based on your work with European banks and stablecoin consortia, which euro stablecoin use cases are gaining traction today, and what is preventing broader adoption?
There is growing usage around cross-border and corporate payments, as well as more programmable applications such as escrow and payment-versus-delivery. Banks and consortia are actively exploring these areas.
What euro stablecoins still lack, however, is broad consumer demand. Dollar stablecoins are already the preferred form of digital money for many users, including in Europe, supported by deep liquidity, tight spreads and broad DeFi integrations. There is little reason to switch unless a euro alternative offers something meaningfully different.
Europe’s policy approach makes scaling harder. While the U.S. is promoting privately issued stablecoins, Europe is developing a digital euro and, in my view, takes a more protectionist approach to commercial bank deposits. This is reflected in MiCA’s current bank-deposit requirements for reserves and European central banks’ recent push to extend restrictions on stablecoin yield to lending, borrowing and staking.
That matters because yield could give users a stronger incentive to hold euro-denominated digital money. Without that kind of differentiation, or a uniquely European use case creating comparable demand, euro stablecoins will struggle to build the liquidity and network effects needed for broader adoption.
Aymeric Salley is Head of Digital Assets Platform at Banking Circle, a B2B bank and financial infrastructure provider helping payment companies and financial institutions process cross-border payments across fiat and stablecoin rails, including through its EURI stablecoin.
Where could Europe-specific demand emerge that gives EUR stablecoins a stronger reason to exist?
European trade corridors are one area worth watching. Europe may manufacture and export less than it once did, but trade volumes remain substantial. Wherever goods and services are priced and settled in euros, EUR stablecoins could provide a natural digital settlement asset.
We are already seeing demand emerge around just-in-time funding for cross-border payments, as well as atomic settlement of tokenised assets. Both are still at an early stage, but these kinds of payment, settlement and trade use cases are where I see the strongest potential for EUR stablecoin demand beyond crypto trading to develop.
Checkout.com: Manager, Treasury New Products (Crypto & Digital Assets), London 🇬🇧
Kraken: Senior Product Manager - Payments Platform, Remote 🇪🇺
Morpho: Product Manager (Protocol), Paris 🇫🇷
Revolut: Business Risk Manager (Crypto), Remote 🇪🇺
Strategy: Account Executive - Nordics, London 🇬🇧
Talos: Head of Tokenization, London 🇬🇧
Worldpay: Senior Strategy Manager - Crypto, London 🇬🇧
Spiko | $90 million | Series B : Leading provider of tokenized money market funds and cash management products.
Meanwhile | $37.5 million | Late-stage : Life insurance provider offering Bitcoin-denominated policies that allow clients to grow, borrow against, and pass on their BTC holdings.
Catalyst | $30 million | Seed : AI-powered trading platform enabling users to create and automate trading strategies across crypto, tokenized stocks, and prediction markets using natural language.
Navra | $19 million | Series A : Financial platform connecting retail and institutional investors to blockchain-based financial products. It is led by Figure and SoFi co-founder Mike Cagney.
Noah | $16 million | Seed extension : Stablecoin-powered payments infrastructure platform helping businesses move money globally and connect fiat with stablecoin rails.
Bottlenecked: The Capital Cost of Protected DeFi Lending (Gauntlet) — This paper looks at how DeFi lending protocols can be designed to better protect lenders from losses that spread across connected markets. The authors argue that carefully limiting which borrowers can access which pools of liquidity can reduce the capital needed for protection while preserving the benefits of shared liquidity.
Breaking The Wall (Citrini Research) — Citrini argues that the convergence of tokenized assets and AI agents could finally give blockchains a major role in mainstream finance, as markets become increasingly programmable and always-on. The piece then turns that thesis into an investment basket of crypto tokens and public companies it expects to benefit as the wall between TradFi and DeFi comes down.
→ Want more? Visit Blockstories Library for a curated selection of 120+ reports on digital assets.
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Disclaimer: The information provided in the Crypto Briefing by Blockstories does not constitute investment advice. Accordingly, we assume no liability for any investment decisions made based on the content presented herein.
