A French bank from the "big four" received a license to provide crypto services
Date: 2023-07-20 Author: Karina Ziganova Categories: BUSINESS, IN WORLD
A subsidiary of the financial conglomerate Société Générale has received approval from the French regulator for the provision of cryptocurrency services
The French bank Société Générale, one of the four most important banks in the country, has received a license from the local regulator to operate in the cryptocurrency market. The bank's cryptocurrency division is included in the register of crypto platforms of the French Financial Service (AMF).
According to reports, it was not the bank itself that received a license to work with cryptocurrencies, but its subsidiary Société Générale-FORGE. The division has received regulatory approval for the purchase and sale, storage and trading of cryptocurrencies. This is the first firm in the AMF register, controlled by a French financial institution.
Why exactly Société Générale needed a "crypto license" from the French regulator is unclear. Earlier, the bank introduced its own stablecoin based on the Ethereum network. The EUR CoinVertible (EURCV) stablecoin is pegged 1:1 to the euro and is available to institutional investors to settle or provide liquidity. It is unclear whether the French bank plans to allow individual investors into the stablecoin. PriceWaterhouseCoopers was responsible for the audit of the stablecoin's smart contract.
Later, the cryptocurrency community criticized EURCV due to the excessive centralization of power at the issuer. A Twitter user under the nickname alpeh_v noticed that the bank had prescribed a special ban on third-party interaction with the stablecoin in the smart contract. Anyone wishing to try out EURCV must first get approval from the bank through the blockchain, and only then will they be able to send the stablecoin. A blockchain developer under the pseudonym 0xfoobar even named the architectural part of the EURCV project "the most horrible code" he'd ever seen.
The total supply of EURCV is 10 million tokens. At the time of writing, the bank has not begun to conduct operations with its stablecoin, follows from the data of the smart contract in Etherscan.
