Explaining the New Milestone for STASIS
Why Do We Need to Re-KYC EURS Customers
The new season marks another vital milestone for STASIS. Having received numerous questions, our team feels the importance of explaining why we need to re-onboard following a new Sellback service launch.
A properly designed and self-regulated transparent stablecoin is somewhat a luxury in today’s market of failed expectations. Hundreds of teams worldwide tried to use this approach and built their version of an on-chain dollar, euro, and other currencies. Still, only a few have succeeded in delivering a working product which they’ve shaped to fit a continually changing market. For now, there is no shortage of opportunities to receive yields in DeFi, but EURS is the only stablecoin that offers a gateway into triple digital gains.
Our user-base grew significantly over the last year and EURS enjoys high demand on multiple international markets. Off the back of this success, many users have been surprised that we decided to launch a new interface for EURS purchase or sell.
When observing the digital asset market development over the last few years, we have increasingly come to the opinion that the digital euro market has to be competitive and not oligopolized.
The era of negative interest rates and sluggish economic growth disincentivizes banking institutions to onboard and service new clients as there is no business model for every additional customer involved in the current state of things. At the same time, collateralized stablecoin issuance does neither increase leverage in the banking sector nor influence money supply, containing risks by providing an open and transparent ledger of transactions on top of the frequently audited balance sheet.
Moreover, our team is convinced that every issued DLT asset (regardless of whether MIFID regulates it or not) should have a cash equivalent in the same environment to have similar settlement characteristics. At STASIS we firmly believe that private companies can fill that role to compete for the fungibility of their stablecoin.
Moving forward to create EURS ecosystem
Rising stablecoin adoption is paving the way for new emerging use cases in Decentralized Finance. We have long recognized the opportunity of DeFi and achieved major partnerships with companies such as Chainlink, Curve, Synthetic, Cream, and more.
In fact, the STASIS Team has only last year launched a new API and received numerous requests for microtransactions. We could foresee that in EU jurisdiction, limits are falling, and more strict regulations will apply. Despite our team’s three-year-long efforts, the lack of regulation of stablecoins in Europe still goes strong. Having weighed all pros and cons, we decided to move forward and raise the bar by improving the service for purchasing and selling Euros for the secondary markets.
At the same time, we didn’t want to move out of Eurozone to some non-regulated entity since STASIS promotes the E-money 2.0 initiative, issuing regulated and most transparent euro-backed digital assets.
Eventually, staying in Europe made perfect sense for us. Switzerland-based counterparty was a natural choice because it’s the world’s most respectable jurisdiction with an ideal trading atmosphere. Moreover, bank counterparties’ availability is the widest here (hint: we also plan to open other accounts in the future).
However, it’s impossible to instantly exchange vital extensive client data between European and Swiss entities. We tried to meet increased demands for security and compliance and pack it all as simple as possible, providing you with an easy-to-use interface. Our compliance team took the time necessary to tweak everything and establish a reliable service making sure the service fully complies with the European Union (“EU”) 5th Anti-Money Laundering Directive (“AML5D”).
Now, in Spring 2021, the wait is finally over, along with months of dedication and sleepless nights. Our legal work is completed, and the sky-high paperwork is finalized. We launched the Sellback in functionality allowed by legal officers, but full features will be available soon. Eventually, we will enhance the customer experience and provide our clients with the possibility to sell up to 1,000 EURS without KYC.
We promise that the benefits will be worth the wait: raised limits in light KYC mode, new FINMA-regulated entity format, the possibility to broaden the list of partners, and the support of SWIFT transfers. The counterparty, which we feel is of high quality, will make it possible to build a more convenient and fungible infrastructure for EURS transactions.
Considering a combination of factors, simplicity of onboarding, reliability of jurisdiction, and quality of counterparties, we selected SCB AG to delegate the EURS market’s facilitation. Still, we will gladly work with other liquidity providers.
Important!
In accordance with the new legal rules, we want to emphasize a specific regulatory requirement that implies receiving a bank transfer from a client before purchasing Euros from them.
Please note that this is only a one-time condition, and the minimum amount of transfer is only 1 euro! There is another option to do it — you can go through additional verification. This process is smooth and will not take much time. The choice is yours.
Summary
Combating the global USD monopoly is one of the tasks we have been successfully performing since 2018. We have been acting as the most transparent stablecoin issuer since the project inception and will continue to spread our initiative beyond Eurozone and explore EURS use cases in emerging markets like DeFi. Stay tuned for more news — visit our Telegram group and subscribe to Twitter as we are about to announce another vital development milestone in March!
