EU releases a proposal for regulating crypto assets and stablecoins as part of its new Digital Finance Package
Valentus Capital, a private equity investment firm based in the U.S., is planning to raise $50 million for its first fund via a token sale. — The token offering is expected …
Context & Ripple Effects
The EU's Digital Finance Package is the bloc's attempt to give crypto-assets and stablecoins a single legal home rather than leaving each member state to improvise. At the time of the proposal, crypto businesses in Europe — from exchanges to lenders like those in earlier coverage of BlockFi's Valar-backed expansion — operated in a patchwork with no dedicated rulebook for tokens pegged to fiat.
What makes this worth tracking is how much stablecoin activity followed: five years later, Stable raised a $28M seed co-led by Bitfinex and Hack VC to build a Layer 1 purpose-built for stablecoins, and in 2026 Visa launched its stablecoin platform for ~15K financial institutions and 200M+ merchants. The 2020 proposal is the regulatory starting line for that build-out.
First-order effects
- Crypto-asset issuers and stablecoin providers serving the EU gain a defined compliance path under one framework, replacing country-by-country uncertainty with licensing obligations set at bloc level.
Second-order effects
- Regulatory clarity lowers the barrier for mainstream financial infrastructure to touch stablecoins — a prerequisite for later moves like Visa opening stablecoin settlement to its institution network and venture capital funding stablecoin-native chains such as Stable.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, stablecoin regulation shifts these tokens from trading collateral into payments infrastructure, pushing compliance requirements upstream into chain design and card-network integrations rather than bolted-on exchange controls.
The trend: Stablecoins are moving from unregulated trading instruments toward licensed payments infrastructure, with the EU's 2020 Digital Finance Package as an early template that later entrants like Stable and Visa built against.