European banks pick stablecoin partners; Durov warns, WLFI falls

European banks and corporate treasury teams across the continent are moving from pilot projects to live deployment of stablecoins and are actively selecting infrastructure partners to support payments and settlement. Industry participants say procurement and integration discussions have replaced earlier educational conversations.

Lamine Brahimi, co-founder and managing partner at custody technology provider Taurus, observed that the shift accelerated over the past year as firms prepared for production launches. He noted corporate treasuries are seeking stablecoins to speed up transfers, reduce costs and enable payments outside traditional bank hours. Brahimi credited the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, or MiCA, with creating a single EU rulebook that firms can use when planning integrations.

Current vendor assessments focus on custody, compliance, settlement rails and integration with treasury systems rather than proofs of concept, according to participants engaged in those talks.

Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov warned that device-level data can undermine end-to-end encryption. Durov cited recent forensic work by U.S. investigators that recovered messages from a privacy-focused app on an iPhone by accessing push notification system logs. He wrote: “Turning off notification previews won’t make you safe if you use those applications, because you never know whether the people you message have done the same.”

Security specialists note that push notification logs and other metadata stored on smartphones can include message previews or information that allows reconstruction of conversations outside the encrypted app itself.

In a separate development, WLFI, the native token of the World Liberty Financial platform, fell to a record low after on-chain data showed wallets linked to the project used large WLFI holdings as collateral on a lending platform. Blockchain analytics firm Arkham indicated a wallet associated with the project deposited about 5 billion WLFI tokens and used them to borrow roughly $75 million in USD1 and USDC stablecoins. More than $40 million of the borrowed funds were later moved to an institutional trading account on Coinbase Prime.

Dolomite, the lending platform used for the loans, was co-founded by the project’s chief technology officer, Corey Caplan, according to on-chain records. WLFI traded as low as $0.07714 on Saturday, an 83% decline from its roughly $0.46 peak last September. At the time of reporting the token traded near $0.07879, down about 4.7% over 24 hours and roughly 65% over the past year.

Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation is the European Union’s regulatory framework for crypto activities, intended to harmonize rules for issuers, service providers and stablecoins across member states. Stablecoins are digital tokens designed to maintain a stable value, often pegged to fiat currencies, and are being evaluated by corporate treasury teams for faster settlement and lower transaction costs compared with traditional banking rails.