Category: Crypto – DeFi – Digital Money

Stablecoin business models – I need a dollar

There has been a lot written on stablecoins in the wake of Terra’s crash. Matt Levine has been a reliable source of insight (definitely worth subscribing to his “Money Stuff” newsletter) but I am also following Izabella Kaminska via her new venture (The Blind Spot).

Maybe I am just inexplicably drawn to anything that seeks to explain crypto in Tradfi terms but I think this joint post by Izabella and Frances Coppola poses the right question by exploring the extent to which stablecoin issuers will always struggle to reconcile the safety of their peg promise to the token holders with the need to make a return. The full post is behind a paywall but this link takes you to a short extract that Izabella has made more broadly available.

Their key point is that financial security is costly so your business model needs an angle to make a return … to date the angles (or financial innovations) are mostly stuff that Tradfi has already explored. There is no free lunch.

If it’s financially secure, it’s usually not profitable

So, what was the impetus for issuers like Kwon to focus on these innovations? For the most part, it was probably the realisation that conventional stablecoins – due to their similarities with narrow banks – are exceedingly low-margin businesses. In a lot of cases, they may even be unprofitable.

This is because managing other people’s money prudently and in a way that always protects capital is actually really hard. Even if those assets are fully reserved, some sort of outperformance has to be generated to cover the administration costs. The safest way to do that is to charge fees, but this hinders competitiveness in the market since it generates a de facto negative interest rate. Another option is cross-selling some other service to the captured user base, like loan products. But this gets into bank-like activity.

The bigger temptation, therefore, at least in the first instance, is to invest the funds in your care into far riskier assets (with far greater potential upside) than those you are openly tracking.

But history shows that full-reserve or “narrow” banks eventually become fractional-reserve banks or disappear.

“Putting the Terra stablecoins debacle into Tradfi context”, Frances Coppola and Izabella Kaminska, The Blind Spot

Tony – From the Outside

Izabella Kaminska shares a stablecoin reading list

the-blindspot.com/crypto-reflexivity-and-the-ultimate-stablecoin-reading-list/

You may or may not agree with her stance on Bitcoin but this post offers a useful list of what Izabella has identified as the more informed contributions to the debate about stablecoins.

I have read most of these already but it offers a useful reference point for anyone trying to make sense of this corner of the financial universe.

Tony – From the Outside

“Safe” assets can be risky – check your assumptions

Anyone moderately familiar with crypto assets is no doubt aware that the Terra stablecoin has been experiencing problems with its algorithmic smart contract controlled peg mechanism. There are lots of lessons here I am but I think Matt Levine flags one of the more interesting ones in his “Money Stuff” column (13 May 2022).

Safe assets are much riskier than risky ones.

Matt goes on to expand on why this is so …

This is I think the deep lesson of the 2008 financial crisis, and crypto loves re-learning the lessons of traditional finance. Systemic risks live in safe assets. Equity-like assets — tech stocks, Luna, Bitcoin — are risky, and everyone knows they’re risky, and everyone accepts the risk. If your stocks or Bitcoin go down by 20% you are sad, but you are not that surprised. And so most people arrange their lives in such a way that, if their stocks or Bitcoin go down by 20%, they are not ruined.

On the other hand safe assets — AAA mortgage securities, bank deposits, stablecoins — are not supposed to be risky, and people rely on them being worth what they say they’re worth, and when people lose even a little bit of confidence in them they crack completely. Bitcoin is valuable at $50,000 and somewhat less valuable at $40,000. A stablecoin is valuable at $1.00 and worthless at $0.98. If it hits $0.98 it might as well go to zero. And now it might!

The takeaway for me is to once again highlight the way in which supposedly safe, “no questions need be asked”, assets can sometimes be worse than assets we know are risky due to the potential for them to quickly flip into something for which there is no liquidity, just a path to increasingly large price falls. This is a theme that I regularly hammer (so apologies if you are tired of it) but still for me one of the more important principles in finance (right up there with “no free lunch”).

Tony – From the Outside

Lessons from Brazil’s “Pix” fast payment system

In a recent post devoted to a BIS report summarising the results of interviews on what a small group of central banks had been doing with regard to Central Bank Digital Currencies, I posed the question whether central bankers might be better placed using their resources and powers to foster the development of fast payment systems rather than Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and offered the following perspective:

the business case for a retail CBDC seems to have the most weight in the emerging market and developing economies with relatively poorly developed financial infrastructure

the business case for a retail CBDC in an advanced economy is less obvious

other initiatives such as central bank sponsorship of fast payment systems might be a better use of central bank resources

not explicitly referenced in the paper, but the recent experience with the roll out of fast payment systems in Brazil and India offer interesting case studies

the central bank focus on CBDCs seems to continue to be heavily weighted toward account based systems

token based CBDCs are mentioned in passing but do not seem to be high on the list of priorities

From the Outside – 15 March 2022 – “Central Bank Digital Currencies: A new tool in the financial inclusion toolkit”

For anyone interested in CBDC’s and fast payment systems, the BIS has published another report exploring the lessons to be learned from Brazil’s adoption of the “Pix” fast payment system. The authors identify three takeaways from Brazil’s experience which I think broadly support the thesis that fast payment systems often have the potential to achieve many if not all of the public policy objectives associated with CBDCs:

Public payment infrastructures build on the central bank’s foundational role in the monetary system by promoting competition and interoperability between payment platforms. They can reduce costs for users and promote financial inclusion.

Brazil’s recent experience with the Pix retail instant payment system illustrates the potential gains. In little over a year since its launch in November 2020, Pix has signed up 67% of adults in Brazil, with free payments between individuals and low charges for merchants.

The two key ingredients in the success of Pix are, first, the mandatory participation of large banks to kick-start network effects for users, and second, the central bank’s dual role as infrastructure provider and rule setter.

It is important to note however that these benefits do not flow automatically from just building the payment system infrastructure, the report highlights the importance of the central bank using its power to:

  • mandate the participation of large banks and other large players in payment services in order to kickstart the network effects and
  • to set rules that promote competition

I may be missing something here but it still feels to me like CBDCs are over-rated and (well constructed) fast payment systems under-rated. There are no doubt some economies where a CBDC has a role to play but I for one am paying more attention to the roll out of their less glamorous sibling.

Tony – From the Outside

The E-Cash alternative

CBDCs and stablecoins have been getting most of the attention lately. In contrast the release in late March 2022 of a draft bill titled the ECASH Act seems to have flown under the radar. The bill as I understand it is only a proposal at this stage and not something actively in the process of becoming law. It is however worth noting for a couple of reasons

  • Is is a useful reminder that an account based CBDC is not the only form of government issued digital money that might be pursued (though the account based model does seem to be the model preferred by the BIS mostly due to concerns about illegal use of anonymous forms of money)
  • Primary responsibility for E-Cash is assigned to the US Treasury, not the Central Bank (so technically it is not a CBDC per se)
  • Although I personally am not overly concerned by the current state of Know Your Customer and related anti money laundering, anti terrorist financing requirements applied to bank accounts, I respect the views of those for whom privacy is a priority or don’t have the benefit of living in the kind of economy/society that allows me to be relaxed about these questions
  • So long as the digital form of cash is subject to an equivalent set of controls on illicit activity as is applied to physical cash, then I can’t see why the digital option should be prohibited
  • Adding a digital money option that is capable of operating in an off-line environment also looks to me like a useful (albeit limited) level of redundancy and resilience in a world that increasingly relies on a 24/7 supply of power and internet connectivity for money to function
Who needs e-cash?

You can find more detail about the proposal here but for those short of time the argument put up by the Act’s proponents for why someone might want to use E-Cash is summarised as those who:

1. Lack access to traditional banking/payments services;

2. Value privacy and wish to avoid surveillance and/or data-mining;

3. Are concerned about third-party censorship and/or discrimination;

3. Lack reliable internet or digital network connectivity; and

5. Are low-income and/or cannot afford high transaction, withdrawal, and exchange fees.

www://https.ecashact.us/#whyuse

The Act’s proponents emphasise however that “… E-Cash, like physical cash, does not pay interest, and offers less third-party protections than traditional bank accounts or payments app (chargebacks, loss and fraud-prevention, etc).” The basic idea is that this is a complement to the existing forms of money (physical and digital) and it is not envisaged that most people will seek to hold large amounts in the form of E-Cash.

What exactly does the ECASH Act proposes?

1. Directs the Secretary of the Treasury to develop and introduce a form of retail digital dollar called “e-cash,” which replicates the offline-capable, peer-to-peer, privacy-respecting, zero transaction-fee, and payable-to-bearer features of physical cash, and to coordinate their efforts with other agencies, including the Federal Reserve through an intergovernmental Digital Dollar Council led by the Treasury Secretary;

2. Establishes an Electronic Currency Innovation Program within the U.S. Treasury to test and evaluate different forms of secure hardware-based e-cash devices that do not require internet access, third-party validation, or settlement on or via a common ledger, with a focus on widely available, interoperable architectures such as stored-value cards and cell phones;

3. Establishes an independent Monetary Privacy Board to oversee and monitor the federal government’s efforts to preserve monetary privacy and protect civil liberties in the development of digital dollar technologies and services, and directs the Treasury Secretary to, wherever possible, promote and prioritise open-source licensed software and hardware, and to make all technical information available for public review and comment; and

4. Establishes a special-purpose, ring-fenced Treasury overdraft account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to cover any and all government expenses related to the development and piloting of E-Cash, and directs the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System to take appropriate liquidity-support measures to ensure that the introduction of e-cash does not reduce the ability of banks, credit unions, or community development financial institutions to extend credit and other financial services to underserved populations, as prescribed under the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 and related laws.

www:https://ecashact.us/#ecashact

Summing up

I have been a professed sceptic on the need for a retail CBDC in advanced economies with well functioning fast payment systems (see here and here) but this proposal is intriguing and one that I will watch with interest.

Tony – From the Outside

Central bank digital currencies: a new tool in the financial inclusion toolkit?

The BIS recently published a paper summarising what had been learned from a series of interviews with nine central banks exploring how these institutions were thinking about the potential of a CBDC to support the pursuit of “financial inclusion” objectives explicit or implicit in their mandates.

A lot of what the paper documents and discusses will be pretty familiar to anyone who has been following the BIS and individual central banks on this topic but I think the following observations offered by the paper about the best way to pursue financial inclusion is worth noting

It needs to be noted that many of these features [i.e. the benefits of a CBDC] can, in isolation, be offered by other payment innovations, and many gaps could be addressed through regulation and sound oversight arrangements. Combining different payment innovations – such as open application programming interfaces (APIs), fast payment services, contactless chips and QR codes – could achieve many of the same goals. This is particularly true when accompanied by robust regulatory and oversight arrangements that public authorities can use to catalyse private sector players, enforce sound governance arrangements and foster required coordination and collaboration. Adoption of relevant technologies for supervisory and regulatory compliance could also improve the efficiency and effectiveness of regulators and supervisors. What is truly different about CBDC is that it is a direct claim on the central bank. It is an open question for central banks whether CBDCs or other policy interventions are the best fit for their jurisdiction. Yet if a CBDC is to be issued (for financial inclusion or other motives), interviews with central banks clearly point to the importance of inclusive design elements to successfully promote inclusive outcomes. We discuss these elements in the next subsection.

Page 13, paragraph 16

There is a narrative that sees CBDC adoption as inevitable based in part on the fact that so many central banks are looking at the question. In contrast, the BIS paper clearly states that a CBDC is not a “panacea” and that many of the outcomes a CBDC might deliver could equally be delivered by other payment innovations such as “open application programming interfaces (APIs) , fast payment services, contactless chips and QR codes”

It is also worth noting that, of the nine central banks interviewed, eight were emerging market and developing economies and only one (Bank of Canada) an advanced economy. The results should therefore be interpreted with that bias in mind.

Summing up, my take is that

  • the business case for a retail CBDC seems to have the most weight in the emerging market and developing economies with relatively poorly developed financial infrastructure
  • the business case for a retail CBDC in an advanced economy is less obvious
  • other initiatives such as central bank sponsorship of fast payment systems might be a better use of central bank resources
  • not explicitly referenced in the paper, but the recent experience with the roll out of fast payment systems in Brazil and India offer interesting case studies
  • the central bank focus on CBDCs seems to continue to be heavily weighted toward account based systems
  • token based CBDCs are mentioned in passing but do not seem to be high on the list of priorities

Let me know what I am missing

Tony – From the Outside

The Stablecoin TRUST Act

Stablecoin regulation is one of my perennial favourite topics. Yes I know – I need to get out more but getting this stuff right does truly matter. I have gone down this particular rabbit hole more than a couple of times already. This has partly been about the question of how much we can rely on existing disclosure regarding reserves (here and here for example ) but the bigger issue (I think) is to determine what is the right regulatory model that ensures a level playing field with existing participants in the provision of payment services while still allowing scope for innovation and competition.

JP Koning has been a reliable source of comment and insight on the questions posed above (see here and here for example). Dan Awrey also wrote an interesting paper on the topic (covered here) which argues that the a state based regulatory model (such as the money transmitter licensing regime) is not the answer. There is another strand of commentary that focuses on the lessons to be learned from the Free Banking Era of the 19th century, most notably Gorton and Zhang’s paper titled “Taming Wildcat Stablecoins” which I covered here.

Although not always stated explicitly, the focus of regulatory interest has largely been confined to “payment stablecoins” and that particular variation is the focus of this post. At the risk of over-simplifying, the trend of stablecoin regulation appears to have been leaning towards some kind of banking regulation model. This was the model favoured in the “Report on Stablecoins” published in November 2021 by the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets (PWG). I flagged at the time (here and here) that the Report did not appear to have a considered the option of allowing stablecoin issuers to structure themselves as 100% reserve banks (aka “narrow banks”).

Against that background, it has been interesting to see that United States Senator Toomey (a member of the Senate Banking Committee) has introduced a discussion draft for a bill to provide a regulatory framework for payment stablecoins that does envisage a 100% reserve model for regulation. Before diving into some of the detail, it has to be said that the bill does pass the first test in that it has a good acronym (Stablecoin TRUST Act where TRUST is short for “Transparency of Reserves and Uniform Safe Transactions”.

There is not a lot of detail that I can find so let me just list some questions:

  • The reserve requirements must be 100% High Quality Liquid Assets (HQLA) which by definition are low return so that will put pressure on the issuer’s business model which relies on this income to cover expenses. I am not familiar with the details of the US system but assume the HQLA definition adopted in the Act is the same as that applied to the Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) for depositary institutions.
  • Capital requirements are very low (at most 6 months operating expenses) based I assume on the premise that HQLA have no risk – the obvious question here is how does this compare to the operational risk capital that a regulated depositary institution would be required to hold for the same kind of payment services business activity
  • Stablecoin payment issuers do not appear to be required to meet a Leverage Ratio requirement such as that applied to depositary institutions. That might be ok (given the low risk of HQLA) subject to the other questions about capital posed above being addressed and not watered down in the interests of making the payment stablecoin business model profitable.
  • However, in the interest of a level playing field, I assume that depositary institutions that wanted to set up a payment stablecoin subsidiary would not be disadvantaged by the Leverage Ratio being applied on a consolidated basis?

None of the questions posed above should be construed to suggest that I am anti stablecoins or financial innovation. A business model that may be found to rely on a regulatory arbitrage is however an obvious concern and I can’t find anything that addresses the questions I have posed. I am perfectly happy to stand corrected but it would have been useful to see this bill supported by an analysis that compared the proposed liquidity and capital requirements to the existing requirements applied to:

  • Prime money market funds
  • Payment service providers
  • Deposit taking institutions

Let me know what I am missing

Tony – From the Outside

Note – this post was revised on 14 April 2022

  1. The question posed about haircuts applied to HQLA for the purposes of calculating the Liquidity Coverage Ratio requirement for banks was removed after a fact check. In my defence I did flag that the question needed to be fact checked. Based on the Australian version of the LCR, it seems that the haircuts are only applied to lower quality forms of liquid assets. The question of haircuts remains relevant for stablecoins like Tether that have higher risk assets in their reserve pool but should not be an issue for payment stablecoins so long as the reserves requirement prescribed by the Stablecoin TRUST Act continues to be based on HQLA criteria.
  2. While updating the post, I also introduced a question about whether the leverage ratio requirement on depositary institutions might create an un-level playing field since it does not appear to be required of payment stablecoin issuers

The elasticity of credit

One of the arguments for buying Bitcoin is that, in contrast to fiat currencies that are at mercy of the Central Bank money printer, its value is underpinned by the fixed and immutable supply of coins built into the code. Some cryptocurrencies take this a step further by engineering a systematic burning of their coin.

I worry about inflation as much as the next person, perhaps more so since I am old enough to have actually lived in an inflationary time. I think a fixed or shrinking supply is great for an asset class but it is less obvious that it is a desirable feature of a money system.

Crypto true believers have probably stopped reading at this point but to understand why a fixed supply might be problematic I can recommend a short speech by Claudio Borio. The speech dates back to 2018 but I think it continues to offer a useful perspective on the value of an elastic money supply alongside broader comments about the nature of money and its role in the economy.

Borio was at the time the Head of the BIS Monetary and Economic Department but the views expressed were his personal perspective covering points that he believed to be well known and generally accepted, alongside others more speculative and controversial.

I did a post back in March 2019 that offers an overview of the speech but recently encountered a post by J.W. Mason which reminded me how useful and insightful it was.

The specific insight I want to focus on here is the extent to which a well functioning monetary system relies on the capacity of credit extended in the system to expand and contract in response to both short term settlement demands and the longer term demands driven by economic growth.

One of the major challenges with the insight Borio offers is that most of us find the idea that money is really just a highly developed form of debt to be deeply unsatisfying if not outright scary. Borio explicitly highlights “the risk of overestimating the distinction between credit (debt) and money” arguing that “…we can think of money as an especially trustworthy type of debt”

Put differently, we can think of money as an especially trustworthy type of debt. In the case of bank deposits, trust is supported by central bank liquidity, including as lender of last resort, by the regulatory and supervisory framework and varieties of deposit insurance; in that of central bank reserves and cash, by the sovereign’s power to tax; and in both cases, by legal arrangements, way beyond legal tender laws, and enshrined in market practice.

Borio: Page 9

I did a post here that explains in more detail an Australian perspective on the process by which unsecured loans to highly leveraged companies (aka “bank deposits”) are transformed into (mostly) risk free assets that represent the bulk of what we use as money.

Borio outlines how the central banks’ elastic supply of the means of payment is essential to ensure that (i) transactions are settled in the interbank market and (ii) the interest rate is controlled …

“To smooth out interbank settlement, the provision of central bank credit is key. The need for an elastic supply to settle transactions is most visible in the huge amounts of intraday credit central banks supply to support real-time gross settlement systems – a key way of managing risks in those systems (Borio (1995)).”

Borio: Page 5

… but also recognises the problem with too much elasticity

While the elasticity of money creation oils the wheels of the payment system on a day to day basis, it can be problematic over long run scenarios where too much elasticity can lead to financial instability. Some degree of elasticity is important to keep the wheels of the economy turning but too much can be a problem because the marginal credit growth starts to be used for less productive or outright speculative investment.

This is a big topic which means there is a risk that I am missing something. That said, the value of an elastic supply of credit looks to me like a key insight to understanding how a well functioning monetary system should be designed.

The speech covers a lot more ground than this and is well worth reading together with the post by J.W. Mason I referenced above which steps through the insights. Don’t just take my word for it, Mason introduces his assessment with the statement that he was “…not sure when I last saw such a high density of insight-per-word in a discussion of money and finance, let alone in a speech by a central banker”.

Tony – From the Outside

Why Canada is cultivating an M-pesa moment for bitcoin – Izabella Kaminska

Izabella Kaminska is one of the commentators that I find reliably generates interesting and useful insights. Personally I remain sceptical on crypto but this link takes you to a post where she makes an argument that I find persuasive.

For those short of time here is an extract capturing the key points I took from her post…

My position on crypto has evolved over time to appreciate this factor. Crypto may not be an optimal system. It’s clunky. It’s energy intensive. It’s confusing. But as a back-up system for when the shit really hits the fan, it’s an incredibly worthwhile system to have in place and I increasingly think we should be grateful that some deep-pocketed individuals with concerns for freedom and privacy took the risks they did to make it become a thing.

I have in the past compared crypto to a monetary equivalent of the right to bear arms, whose main purpose, many argue, is to act as a deterrent to rising authoritarianism. Its optimal deployment is as a right that it is never actually exercised.

Crypto should be treated the same way. On a day to day basis, it’s much better for us all to trust in a centralised and properly supervised system. But having crypto there as a challenger or backup system is no bad thing. It should in theory enhance the core system by helping to keep it honest and working in our interests.

“Why Canada is cultivating an M-pesa moment for bitcoin”, The Blind Spot 18 February 2022

Tony – From the Outside