Crypto community criticises French bank’s release of a digital euro

On 20 April, the French bank Societe Generale-Forge (SGF) выпустил стейблкоин с привязкой к евро — EUR CoinVertible (EURCV), available only to qualified institutional clients.

“The ‘stablecoin’ is built on the Ethereum blockchain under the ERC-20 standard. According to Etherscan, the bank has issued a total of 10 million EURCV — all of them are stored at a single address.

The new European development drew a flurry of negativity in the crypto community. The smart-contract engineer going by the pseudonym alephv.eth explained that the coin is coded in such a way that operators would have to manually whitelist users, and also “personally process transfers and even confirm ERC20” before the usual command to execute a transaction would fire.

I noticed something 100x funnier: THEY HAVE TO DO A BLOCKCHAIN TRANSACTION TO PROCESS YOUR APPROVALS.

They coded it so they have to whitelist all users, process all user transfers, and even process your ERC20 approvals before they process your ‘transferFrom’ lmao https://t.co/AhGNK4HHC7 pic.twitter.com/0QEFXWISL8

— alephv.eth (@alpeh_v) April 20, 2023

In a separate post, the developer mocked the protocol’s code, calling it “a radical pursuit of inefficiency in the name of regulation that could only come from a French bank.”

The founder of the NFT project, known by the handle foobar, called the code “the worst he has ever seen.”

France launched a stablecoin on Ethereum and it’s the worst code I’ve ever seen

Every ERC20 single transfer has to be approved in a separate eth tx submitted by a centralized registrar

What a laughingstock, is this your CBDC?https://t.co/hKkHiQTCyN pic.twitter.com/S6tRfh54wz

— foobar (@0xfoobar) April 20, 2023

“Every single ERC20 transfer must be approved in a separate ETH tx, submitted by a centralized registrar. What a joke, is this your CBDC?”, — said in the post. 

Crypto analyst Mason Versluis also described the code as “absolutely awful” and urged the bank to “stop trying to penetrate the crypto sector.”

BREAKING: France launches stablecoin on #Ethereum, but every single transfer has to be approved in a separate ETH transaction submitted by a centralized registrar! ?

Absolutely horrible. Keep your centralized bullshit over there, stop trying to weasel it into crypto.

News Via:… pic.twitter.com/mcg9fvUoSp

— MASON VERSLUIS ?? (@MasonVersluis) April 20, 2023

Investor Ryan Berckmans expressed a more neutral view. He explained that many traditional financial institutions, such as SGF, will take “small steps” as they move toward blockchain and digital assets.

good catch. Looks like SmartCoin is not ERC-20 compliant because their transfer doesn’t actually transfer the coins, it requests a transfer for approval in a later transaction. Obviously, non-compliant, non-composable, allowlist-style stables are going to be uncompetitive in the…

— Ryan Berckmans ryanb.eth?? (@ryanberckmans) April 20, 2023

“Obviously, non-compliant, non-composable and whitelist-based stablecoins are not competitive. Tradfi’s childish steps will be understood soon and they will switch to a blacklist-style approach like USDC,” he explained.

Berckmans expects that in the coming months other banks will follow SGF’s example.

As reported in January, the Australian banking group National Australia Bank announced that it was developing the stablecoin AUDN. The coin will run on Ethereum and Algorand, with a mid-year launch.