“The basic philosophical difference between the traditional financial system and the cryptocurrency system …”

… according to Matt Levine (“Money Stuff”) “…is that traditional finance is about the extension of credit, and crypto is not”. He acknowledges that this is an exaggeration but argues that it does contain an essential truth about the two systems.

He uses the different ways that crypto approaches money and trading to illustrate his point.

In the traditional financial system money mostly represents an entry on the ledger of a bank. There are ways in which the risk is enhanced but people holding this form of money are essentially creditors of the bank. Crypto, Matt observes, is deeply unhappy with the idea of building money on a credit foundation and he cites Bitcoin as crypto’s attempt to build a form of money not based on credit.

In the case of trading, deferred settlement is a feature of the way that traditional finance operates whereas the crypto trading paradigm operating on a decentralised exchange is based on the principle that trade and settlement occur simultaneously.

Matt goes on to argue …

“Many advocates of crypto like this; they think that crypto’s philosophical uneasiness with credit is good. Money without debt – without fractional-reserve banking – is sounder, less inflationary and safer, they argue; trading with instant settlement is clearer and more logical and safer than trading with delayed settlement and credit risk”

I have to say that, as much as I like Matt’s overall body of contributions to deconstructing finance, I struggled with some elements of this argument. The better crypto analogue for money is I think a stablecoin (ideally one that is at least fully reserve backed and ideally has some capital as well) not a crypto asset like Bitcoin.

That said, the argument that the crypto trading model involves less credit risk than the traditional deferred settlement model does seem broadly right to me. Different context but the fact that bank supervisors have pursued Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) models I think illustrates the advantages of real time settlement of intraday credit risk.

There is of course a range of stablecoin business models currently being employed, but it still feels to me that anyone holding a stablecoin is probably still effectively lending fiat money to the stablecoin issuer but without the protections and enhancements that people holding money in the form of bank deposits enjoy.

The inspiration for Matt’s observations on this question was the proposal by Sam Bankman-Fried’s (SBF) proposal for changes that would allow a decentralised form of trading settlement. Matt notes that there are plans within traditional finance to move some trading exchanges to a T+1 model. That would reduce but not eliminate credit risk so the question remains as to whether the simultaneous settlement model proposed by SBF represents the future.

Matt argues that at least one consequence of moving to the crypto trading settlement model is that there will be less room (none?) for people to smooth over technical settlement failures and “market dislocations” or to reverse errors.

“There are debates about whether this is good or bad; simplistically, you’d expect the FTX model to lead to more defaults and liquidations, but for those defaults to be less bad. IN the traditional system, sometimes people will have a “technical issue”, and the exchange will “give the appropriate amount of time not to dislocate the market and create a bigger stress on that”, and it will work out fine – but occasionally it won’t work out fine, and by delaying the exchange will have caused a much bigger problem”

I don’t pretend to know the answers to the questions posed above (I am somewhat biased towards systems that favour resilience over efficiency) but I do think it is an issue that is worth putting on the radar as it plays out.

Let me know what I am missing …

Tony – From the Outside