Banks Move Past Stablecoin Winner Narrative to Multi-Asset Tokenization

Swiss digital asset bank Sygnum says institutional clients are no longer waiting for a single stablecoin to win. They want tokenized deposits, regulated stablecoins, and tokenized money market funds on the same infrastructure.

“The demand from institutional clients is consistent: they are not waiting for any single instrument to prevail,” Thomas Eichenberger, chief strategy officer and deputy group CEO at Sygnum, told CoinDesk on Thursday. “They are asking how tokenized deposits, regulated stablecoins, and tokenized money market funds can be combined and made interoperable, so a treasury function can move between them – permissioned settlement, 24/7 cross-border flows, yield with on-demand liquidity – under one regulatory framework they already trust.”

The shift challenges the narrative that one stablecoin will dominate institutional crypto. Instead, banks are building multi-asset rails. Sygnum partnered with UBS and PostFinance late last year to test blockchain payments on Ethereum. A consortium of 37 EU banks, Qivalis, aims to launch a digital euro before year-end.

European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde has argued that euro stablecoins won't fix Europe's financial market problems. Sygnum's approach agrees that stablecoins alone are not a silver bullet. Eichenberger said euro stablecoins have struggled because they are hard to access, lack bank backing, and don't connect well with the rest of the financial system.