In most European capitals, the story is the same: if you run a crypto startup and walk into a bank branch asking for a corporate account, the meeting ends the moment you say the word “Bitcoin.”
The guest of this episode, Marcus Mølleskov, knows that conversation by heart. As Chief Risk and Compliance Officer and co-founder of Januar, a Danish payment institution, he built an entire business on the gap between crypto’s growing economic relevance and the banking sector’s unwillingness to touch it.
Januar does not call itself a bank — regulators would object — but for many crypto SMEs in Europe, it plays that role in everything but name. The company offers euro accounts with IBANs, SEPA Instant capability and crypto rails underneath. A broker or exchange can receive customer payments in euro, hold different currencies side by side, and convert between fiat, Bitcoin and Stablecoin balances through a single interface.
The origin story is rooted less in ideology than in infrastructure. Trained in mathematical finance and seasoned in market and credit risk at large Danish banks, Mølleskov watched early crypto markets from the sidelines. His co-founder Simon, meanwhile, was experimenting with tokenized concert tickets and then joined Chainalysis as one of its first non-engineers, helping banks and exchanges understand on-chain activity. Together, they saw the same pattern: serious players were trying to comply; banks saw only risk and shut their doors.
Januar was founded to fix that one problem: de-banking.
Stablecoin Rules: The Curveball No One Saw Coming
Then came an unexpected twist that turned a niche payment institution into a pivotal player in the Stablecoin debate.
Under Europe’s flagship crypto regulation MiCAr, stablecoins — or “e-money tokens” — are supposed to bring price stability and trust into the digital asset world. But a recent interpretation by the European Banking Authority (EBA) added a sting: stablecoins are now treated as funds under payments law. Any crypto asset service provider offering stablecoin custody or transfer is suddenly expected to hold a PSD2 payment license or to work with a partner who does.
The deadline is concrete: March 1, 2026. After that date, CASPs that continue to handle Stablecoin transactions without the right payments setup risk fines or being forced to shut those activities down.
For most exchanges and wallets, this is not just another regulatory tweak. Obtaining a PSD2 license is costly, time-consuming and, in practical terms, nearly impossible on that timeline. Many startups are still struggling just to secure their MiCA license, let alone a second, equally demanding authorization.
By historical accident, Januar ended up with both: a PSD2 license as an account-bearing payment institution and, soon, a MiCAr license as a CASP. What began as a pragmatic way to serve crypto SMEs has transformed the company into one of the very few dual-licensed actors in Europe able to legally offer stablecoin custody and flow on behalf of others.
In other words: while much of the industry celebrates MiCA as a victory for legal clarity, the Stablecoin chapter may quietly force dozens of players to either partner up — or exit.
Beyond Another Stablecoin: The Fragmentation Problem
Mølleskov’s vision, however, is not to issue “yet another Stablecoin.” On that front, the market is already crowded. New euro-denominated tokens surface almost weekly, each issuer imagining itself as the future global standard for digital payments.
The likely outcome is not monopoly, but fragmentation.
Multiple Stablecoins will coexist: regulated and unregulated, dollar- and euro-based, running on different blockchains with varying degrees of transparency and liquidity. That world may be fascinating for technologists but deeply inconvenient for treasurers, CFOs and payment departments of large corporates.
Januar’s bet is to occupy the plumbing layer below the marketing slogans — the integration layer between Stablecoin ecosystems. Instead of building its own token, the company is positioning itself as a “minting partner” and infrastructure provider for multiple issuers, connecting regulated Stablecoin networks to its customers through a single, compliant platform.
In practice, that means a German manufacturer could use one Stablecoin to move funds within Europe, another to pay a supplier in Asia, and still rely on a single counterparty for custody, conversions and compliance. The complexity of chains, tokens and licensing sits behind the scenes.
Tokenization, Velocity and the Forest Ahead
For Mølleskov, Stablecoin infrastructure is not an end in itself, but a necessary step toward a broader financial transformation: tokenized financial assets.
He deploys a simple thought experiment. Traditional markets settle slowly: stock trades in two days, bonds in five. At any moment, tens of trillions of dollars are “in limbo,” locked in settlement pipelines, forcing banks to hold capital against counterparty and settlement risk. Compress that settlement window to an hour or less with tokenized assets and Stablecoin payments, and a massive amount of liquidity is unleashed. Velocity rises, capital requirements fall, economic activity accelerates.
In his analogy, the early Bitcoin world was a desert; Chainalysis and compliance were the first grass stabilizing the soil. Solving debanking for crypto SMEs planted the next layer of vegetation. Stablecoin infrastructure, he argues, is the undergrowth that must spread before a full “forest” of tokenized assets can thrive.
That future is not guaranteed. European regulators may overcorrect, and startups may suffocate under the weight of licensing. But if they get the balance right — investor protection without extinguishing experimentation — the combination of Stablecoin rails and tokenized securities could quietly redraw the global map of finance.
For now, companies like Januar operate in the narrow passage between promise and prohibition, carrying two faces like the Roman god Janus from which its name is drawn: one toward crypto’s volatile, experimental past, the other toward a more regulated, Stablecoin-powered future.
Marcus Mølleskov, CRCO at Januar, on LinkedIn
Michael Blaschke on LinkedIn
Stefan Grassman on LinkedIn
Januar’s thinking and resources
Recent BFRR News Episode ‘Stablecoins Everywhere – While European Parliament Rethinks the Digital Euro | News’
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