Spiko Opens UCITS Funds to Stablecoins

The infrastructure, according to the companies, lets investors move between stablecoins and short-dated government debt around the clock, rather than waiting for conventional bank transfers and multi-day settlement cycles to clear.

Both Circle stablecoins, Euro Coin (EURC) and USD Coin (USDC), will be accepted as payment, broadening the application of stablecoins as an on-ramp to traditional finance. Coinbase said the use of digital assets will make the system faster and more cost-efficient, responding to research the company conducted with institutions earlier in the year.

Ongoing acceptance

Spiko's EU T-Bills Money Market Fund and US T-Bills Money Market Fund will be integrated with the stablecoin payments. The euro fund currently holds €826mn (roughly $943mn) while the US fund holds $168mn.

Both are UCITS products, the European Union's most heavily regulated retail fund standard, with strict regulatory oversight and investor protections – an indication of growing acceptance of stablecoins within the traditional finance fold. Both are managed by Twenty First Capital, the funds' Paris-based manager, with CACEIS, a Crédit Agricole subsidiary, as custodian and PwC as auditor.

The funds are already authorised by France's markets regulator and, according to Spiko, were the first UCITS vehicles in the EU to run a fully tokenized share registry. They invest in short-maturity sovereign treasury bills, and their shares are transferable onchain. 

"While many financial assets have already been tokenised, moving money in and out of those assets have remained dependent on traditional banking rails and settlement cycles, which are inefficient and costly," said Océane Codija, Head of EMEA GTM, Stablecoin Payments at Coinbase. The integration with stablecoin payments addresses what Coinbase called a "bottleneck" in entry and exit routes.

"This also improves liquidity and gives them greater flexibility over how they deploy cash in ways that were previously impossible," said Codija. 

It runs on Coinbase Payments and settles on Base, Coinbase's Layer-2 blockchain. Spiko did not immediately specify the liquidity mechanism underpinning redemption, including whether a stablecoin buffer is held against the fund's net asset value to meet redemption requests outside normal T-bill settlement windows. Sandmark has contacted Spiko and Coinbase for comment.

Settlement problem

Most European securities still settle two business days after a trade, leaving capital in transit and forcing funds to bridge short-term gaps. For UCITS funds, their ability to bridge is constrained by a borrowing limit of 10% of net asset value and a restriction on cash deposits. 

The settlement mismatch with the US, which adopted a one-day settlement cycle in 2024, has already strained some asset managers, according to the European Fund and Asset Management Association (EFAMA).

A Coinbase-commissioned research report conducted with EY-Parthenon in March found that 88% of institutional investors cited T+0 securities settlement as a primary area of interest for using stablecoins. The same study found that 86% of respondents already use stablecoins or are interested in doing so, mostly for internal cash management and money movement rather than trading, and that 73% planned to raise their digital asset allocations during 2026.

Coinbase's end goal is to use stablecoins as the bedrock of a 24/7 market, the company said.

"Crypto is no longer just an asset class, but plumbing for institutions to modernise payments, settlement and treasury management," said Codija. 

"This will only be further accelerated as the UK and the European Union continue to provide greater regulatory clarity for them to adopt blockchain infrastructure for a faster, more efficient and 24/7 financial system."

Not everyone is convinced of the benefits of 24/7 settlement, however. In an April report, the European Central Bank (ECB) cautioned that tokenized money market funds wrap the familiar run and liquidity risks of ordinary funds in new technology. The same wariness was on show among European finance executives at the IDX derivatives conference in London on 16 Jun, where panellists openly questioned whether longer trading hours improve markets at all.