Search Results
Briefing
Central Bank Digital Currencies and Regulatory Alternatives: the Case for Stablecoins
Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) have been in the spotlight as the Federal Reserve and other central banks explore introducing them. At the same time, stablecoins are also growing in popularity, and many people including politicians and regulators have started discussing how to properly regulate their issuance and use. In this article, I discuss the question of whether a regulatory framework for stablecoins — where regulated banks can issue stablecoins backed 100 percent by deposits at the central bank — could serve as an alternative to issuing CBDCs.
Speech
The Song Remains the Same
Remarks at the New York Fed and Columbia SIPA Monetary Policy Implementation Workshop, New York City.
Discussion Paper
The Future of Payments Is Not Stablecoins
Stablecoins, which we define as digital assets used as a medium of exchange that are purported to be backed by assets held specifically for that purpose, have grown considerably in the last two years. They rose from a market capitalization of $5.7 billion on December 1, 2019, to $155.6 billion on January 21, 2022. Moreover, a market that was once dominated by a single stablecoin—Tether (USDT)—now boasts five stablecoins with valuations over $1 billion (as of January 21, 2022; data about the supply of stablecoins can be found here). Analysts have started to pay increased attention to the ...
Journal Article
The Financial Stability Implications of Digital Assets
Financial activity associated with digital assets has grown rapidly, raising concerns about financial stability risks. This article presents an overview of these risks, adapting the Federal Reserve’s framework for monitoring financial stability in the traditional financial system. The overview reveals that the observed fragility of digital assets is associated with several financial vulnerabilities: valuation pressures of crypto assets, funding risk in most crypto sectors, the widespread use of leverage, and a highly interconnected crypto ecosystem. However, to date, these vulnerabilities ...
Working Paper
Embedded Supervision: How to Build Regulation into Blockchain Finance
The spread of distributed ledger technology (DLT) in finance could help to improve the efficiency and quality of supervision. This paper makes the case for embedded supervision, i.e., a regulatory framework that provides for compliance in tokenized markets to be automatically monitored by reading the market?s ledger, thus reducing the need for firms to actively collect, verify and deliver data. After sketching out a design for such schemes, the paper explores the conditions under which distributed ledger data might be used to monitor compliance. To this end, a decentralized market is modelled ...
Working Paper
Runs and Flights to Safety: Are Stablecoins the New Money Market Funds?
Stablecoins and money market funds both seek to provide investors with safe, money-like assets but are vulnerable to runs in times of stress. In this paper, we investigate similarities and differences between the two, comparing investor behavior during the stablecoin runs of 2022 and 2023 to investor behavior during the money market fund runs of 2008 and 2020. We document that, similar to money market fund investors, stablecoin investors engage in flight-to-safety, with net flows from riskier to safer stablecoins during run periods. However, whereas in money market funds run risk has ...
Journal Article
Opinion: Digital Assets and Blockchain Through an Economics Lens
It seems like everyone is talking about "crypto" these days. The word spans a diverse array of financial products and services, which collectively I'll refer to as "digital assets." Digital assets have developed into a complicated ecosystem, with a foundation in blockchain technology. Blockchain is a decentralized and distributed database, similar to a massive virtual ledger where each block is an entry. A blockchain can often be public and permanent, meaning no one owns it, everyone can see everyone's accounts, and transactions, which are updated in real time, cannot be reversed once they ...
Report
The Financial Stability Implications of Digital Assets
The value of assets in the digital ecosystem has grown rapidly amid periods of high volatility. Does the digital financial system create new potential challenges to financial stability? This paper explores this question using the Federal Reserve’s framework for analyzing vulnerabilities in the traditional financial system. The digital asset ecosystem has recently proven itself to be highly fragile. However, adverse digital asset market shocks have had limited spillovers to the traditional financial system. Currently, the digital asset ecosystem does not provide significant financial ...
Journal Article
Technological Change and Central Banking
The decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) represents a radically new way to manage databases. Since money and payments are all about managing databases and since banks play a central role in money and payments, DAO-based money and payments systems are potentially a disruptive force in the banking system—which includes central banks. One would normally expect regulatory frameworks to evolve with a changing technological landscape. However, the decentralized governance structure characteristic of DAOs renders it near impossible to regulate these entities directly—a property that makes ...
Journal Article
Policy Update: Stability for Stablecoins?
Cryptocurrencies have come a long way: From an academic idea in the 1980s to the birth of bitcoin in 2009 to their current state as a multi-trillion-dollar tradable asset class, they have become a major part of the financial system and, increasingly, an important policy issue. State and federal governments have sought to understand the risks and benefits of these often volatile assets, resulting in a patchwork of regulatory structures. One important type of cryptocurrency for which regulation has been contentious is stablecoins, whose value is pegged to an existing asset, often the dollar.