June 21, 2026
What Is a Stablecoin Depeg and What Should Businesses Do?
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You can accept any of them. USDT included. Not because MiCA writes an exception for shops — it doesn't — but because taking payment for your own goods and services was never one of the things MiCA set out to regulate. The regulation defines a closed list of ten crypto-asset services that require authorisation, and selling your own product is not on it. The licence belongs to whoever holds and moves the money on your behalf.
That disposes of the three headlines you probably arrived with. Tether never applied for EU authorisation, which is why USDT sits outside the register. Nothing in that stops you being paid in it, or changes how USDT works and what it costs to accept. The EUR 200 million figure is an obligation on a token's issuer, and no level of your turnover triggers it. The 1 July 2026 licence deadline is real, and it lands on your provider.
So the question worth your time has two halves: who do you receive through, and what do you turn it into? The coin is settled. The counterparty and the exit are the work.
This is not legal advice. The picture below is the European Union as of 31 August 2026; what your company owes depends on its country of registration, its model and its role in the payment chain.
MiCA's real list names authorised issuers of e-money tokens — stablecoins pegged to a single official currency, which is what almost every payment stablecoin is. At its 21 August 2026 update the register held 23 issuers; one issuer can stand behind several tokens, and more than forty token white papers have been notified across them.
Five of the 23 — a sample, and the roster keeps moving. Each date is when that token's white paper was notified to the regulator, which is what the register shows; the company itself is usually authorised earlier:
The country is the issuer's country of authorisation: EURC comes from a French-licensed company and is usable across the whole EEA. The last section shows you how to open the register yourself.
One thing the register does not tell you: whether a token will hold its peg. Authorisation covers reserves and obligations, and a listed token can still break its peg under stress.
MiCA requires authorisation for ten services, and every one of them is performed for somebody else. Grouped by who that somebody is:
Holding or moving other people's crypto
Trading with or for other people
Advising or managing for other people
Look for your own activity in there. Selling your own software subscription and being paid in USDC is not in it, and the list is closed.
One item is worth a direct word, because it is where readers scare themselves. "Exchange of crypto-assets for funds" sounds exactly like turning your USDC into euros. The regulation defines it as exchanging with clients — running the desk. Send your own receipts through somebody else's desk and you are a client of that service.
So the correct statement is not that merchants are exempt; there is no exemption article to point at. It is that accepting payment for your own goods is not among the regulated services, so no CASP licence applies to you.
The line runs on role. Collect payments for third-party sellers on your marketplace, or run a conversion counter for other people's money, and you are performing services from that list at any volume.
The licence therefore belongs to whoever receives, holds, converts or forwards the money for you. A processor that takes a customer's USDT into its own wallet, converts it and pays you out does several of those things at once, and must be authorised in an EEA member state. "MiCA-ready" on a pricing page carries no legal weight; a register entry does, and the last section walks that check. Same for the AML and KYC duties sitting on the provider — ask which entity screens payments, and under whose supervision.
All of this assumes the merchant on the paperwork is you. Turn the picture around — your brand on the checkout, someone else's rails underneath, and merchants of your own paying you for the service — and the ten services above start describing what you do for them. Which of you holds the authorisation is then settled by who signs the contract with the merchant, not by whose logo the payment page carries — the second of three questions, asked in a fixed order, when you weigh white label against building your own crypto gateway.
Article 23 sets it, and Article 58(3) carries Articles 22, 23 and 24(3) across to tokens pegged to a currency that is not an official currency of a Member State — the dollar, for instance, though not the Polish złoty.
The rule: if a token's quarterly average use as a means of exchange within a single currency area — usage measured inside one currency zone alone — exceeds both 1,000,000 transactions per day and EUR 200,000,000 in aggregate daily value, the issuer must stop issuing it and, within 40 working days, submit a plan to its supervisor to bring usage back below the thresholds. Issuance resumes once both are cleared.
Three things follow for you:
If a token you accept ever reached those levels, you would read about it as a supply story. Your checkout would carry on.
Tether is absent from ESMA's e-money token register because the company did not apply — which is not the same as refused, and not the same as banned.
What MiCA restricts is the public offering of e-money tokens in the Union, their admission to trading, and crypto-asset services performed on non-compliant tokens. Being paid in one is none of those, and no provision makes holding or receiving USDT unlawful.
On 17 January 2025, ESMA and the European Commission published guidance on non-compliant tokens: providers were to be brought into line by the end of Q1 2025 — restrictions on existing services complete by the end of January 2025, a sell-only window to 31 March 2025 so holders could exit. The addressee was crypto-asset service providers — not merchants, not holders.
The January 2025 guidance named purchase, trading and exchange among the services providers had to stop for non-compliant tokens — but only where the service constitutes an offer to the public. The same statement leaves custody and transfer possible. So a provider may still hold your USDT and move it, and during Q1 2025 regulated venues serving EEA users removed or restricted the pairs.
Conversion itself stays inside the regulated perimeter: exchanging crypto for funds is one of the ten services, so the firm turning your USDT into euros is authorised and doing authorised work. What varies is where each firm draws the offer-to-the-public line. The Commission's guidance says an exchange service makes an offer where the provider promotes or advertises the token as part of it, assessed case by case. That is why one authorised firm converts your USDT and another declines, and why no one publishes a token policy you could look up.
So put them to yours in writing before you invoice another month in USDT: will you accept it, will you convert to euros, on what terms, and does that go in the agreement?
The coins you may take stayed as they were. What changed is who may serve you.
MiCA's rules for asset-referenced tokens and e-money tokens have applied since 30 June 2024, the rest of the regulation since 30 December 2024. In between, member states ran a transitional regime that let existing crypto firms operate while their applications went through. That period ended on 1 July 2026, with no mechanism in the regulation to extend it, and authorisation is now mandatory across the EEA.
For you it becomes one recurring task: the firm receiving crypto on your behalf holds an EEA authorisation, and you can name the regulator and find the entry.
That authorisation also brings checks on you as the firm's customer. Since 30 December 2024, a crypto-asset service provider authorised in the EU carries the same anti-money-laundering duties as banks and other financial institutions, customer checks included. So a firm that receives your crypto and advertises no KYC deserves a second look against the register, and it helps to know what a no-KYC crypto gateway actually promises.
The differences that matter now are commercial ones. Three situations, three answers.
Your customers already pay in USDT. Keep accepting it. Dropping a payment option customers actually hold costs real orders to solve a legal problem you do not have. What you manage is the road to euros: which provider converts it for an EEA business, and on what terms.
You price, invoice and report in euros — SaaS, B2B, subscriptions. A euro stablecoin closes the gap between what the customer pays, what you hold and what your accounts are denominated in, and EURC is the straightforward pick. Add it as a second option: euro stablecoins are growing fast and are still small. An industry report tracking the ones with measurable market capitalisation counted eight by 28 June 2026, up from five twelve months earlier, with combined capitalisation rising from USD 295.6 million to USD 673.9 million. Hundreds of millions, against hundreds of billions for dollar stablecoins. A euro-only checkout meets customers with nothing to pay you in.
You need an asset you can defend to a bank, an auditor or a large partner. USDC — same issuer as EURC, same electronic money institution licence from the ACPR in France, granted 1 July 2024, days after the stablecoin rules took effect, with dollar-scale liquidity behind it.
For the wider comparison of tokens on their own merits, see the guide to choosing a stablecoin for payments.
Regulation defines the perimeter. Below it sit the three failures that actually cost European merchants orders.
The network is a separate decision from the coin. USDT on Tron and USDT on Ethereum are one ticker and two payment rails — different fees, confirmations, address formats, failure modes. Decide which networks appear at checkout first, and show only the ones you can reconcile. The trade-offs between USDT networks and what each costs are worth an hour.
Gas breaks payments in three predictable ways. The customer subtracts the network fee from the invoice and underpays. The customer holds 100 USDT but no TRX, ETH or BNB for the transfer, and cannot send at all. Or everything is right except that the invoice has expired. None of these is a legal problem, and all three are solved at checkout — exact amount, explicit network, visible deadline, plain word on whether a native token is needed for gas. The catalogue of why crypto payments fail runs the same way.
Payment currency, settlement currency and reporting currency are three different things. What the customer sends. What you hold afterwards. What your accounts and tax filings are denominated in. A customer can pay USDT against a price quoted in euros while you settle into something else — manageable, but only if the system records the rate, when it was fixed, the fee logic and the settlement amount.
Someone regulated stands between the blockchain and your IBAN. That is exchange of crypto-assets for funds, item three on the list above. Have an on-ramp and off-ramp route you can explain before volume arrives: the receiving bank will ask about the origin of funds either way.
On cost there is a gap in the public record worth knowing about. No verifiable public figures exist for stablecoin acquiring fees or settlement times in the EU. Providers publish "fast and low-cost" and quote real terms in conversation, priced by volume, corridor and risk. Compare quotes against your card costs including failures, and put the numbers in writing.
Whatever the route, every incoming payment should reach finance carrying:
A hash proves something moved on-chain. It does not tell your accountant who paid or what for — the whole subject of reconciling stablecoin payments as a finance process.
Every name in this article has a shelf life. These checks are what you keep.
Two MiCA registers answer two different questions, and mixing them up is the usual way this goes wrong. Licences come from national authorities; ESMA publishes the EEA-wide registers on top.
Your provider — the check that matters, because that firm holds your customers' money.
The token's issuer — the shorter half. On esma.europa.eu, go to Databases and library, then Registers and data, and on to the Interim MiCA Register on ESMA's MiCA page; you want the e-money token file. Search by issuer legal entity: typing "EURC" returns nothing, because tokens hang off the entity that issued them. Read the register's own update date, which makes your check citable, and the home authority — for issuers the names differ again, the ACPR in France or DNB in the Netherlands. Circle sits under the ACPR as an electronic money institution. For the largest tokens, once designated significant, the EBA takes on part of the supervision alongside the national authority.
Run the provider check when you sign and each audit cycle, the issuer check when you add a token. Screenshot the entry with its date; it answers your bank's eventual question better than any article can.
Create an account and connect the checkout yourself, or talk to sales and we will plan the integration with you.
