The French multinational investment bank and financial services provider Societe Generale’s subsidiary SG-Forge, which focuses on digital currencies, is releasing a new stablecoin with the euro as its unit currency. 

A few euro-backed stablecoins have already been released in the cryptocurrency space by Circle Financial and Tether, but SG-Forge’s EURCV aims to be an institutional-grade, fiat-pegged token.  The strategy, according to SG-Forge’s announcement on Thursday, entails developing regulations for the world of digital assets that are intended to increase security and transparency for institutional investors.

According to SG-Forge’s announcement, the initiatives fit into the group’s overall strategy and are compliant with banking, legal, and regulatory requirements.  “Digital assets with stabilization mechanisms – i.e. stablecoins – built under a robust banking-grade structure will be a key element to increase trust and confidence in the native crypto ecosystem,” said SG-Forge CEO Jean-Marc Stenger in a statement and added “This issuance is a major step in [SG-Forge’s] roadmap to deliver innovative solutions to its clients, either real-money institutions and corporates or entities of the crypto industry, and to facilitate the emergence of new market infrastructures based on blockchain technology.”

With only one holder and a maximum supply of 10,000,000 EURCV as of right now, it appears that SG-Forge has not yet distributed the stablecoin. Since its creation on April 7, 2023, 14 days ago, only two transfers have been made. The coin is described as an “official institutional euro stablecoin issued by Societe Generale-Forge” in the contract that is hosted on etherscan.  Social media users are discussing Societe Generale’s euro stablecoin, and allegations suggest that SG-Forge’s EURCV contract admin can steal money from an owner and burn their EURCV as well.

The contract analyzer from Web3 security startup Gopluslabs reveals that the smart contract has been updated with a “risky item” and three additional items. The risk assessment says “the contract owner has the authority to modify the balance of tokens at other addresses, which may result in a loss of assets.” According to Gopluslabs’ contract analyzer, the contract also has a “whitelist function,” which means “some addresses may not be able to trade normally.” Why the bank chose to issue an ERC20 is a question raised by software engineer Cygaar, who identified some of the problems with SG-Forge’s EURCV contract.