Digital Money – From the outside

Forms of Money, How They are Stored, How They Move

While exploring the impact of stablecoins on the future of money, I have found that public discussion of digital money often tends to conflate three things that are analytically distinct: the monetary instrument itself, the form in which it is stored or represented, and the infrastructure used to move it between parties. I believe that separating them assists understanding what is genuinely new about stablecoins and tokenised deposits, what is merely a change of form or rail, and where the real regulatory and systemic questions lie.

The three questions are:

• what is the money (the underlying claim and who stands behind it)?

• how is it held (the representation or storage form)? and

• how does it move (the payment rail or transmission infrastructure)?

Each has a different answer for central bank money, bank deposits, and fiat-backed stablecoins — and the differences matter at each level independently.

The Monetary Instrument

The monetary instrument is the underlying claim: i.e. the asset you actually own when you hold money. For central bank money, this is the liability of the central bank — a claim on the state that is backstopped by the sovereign’s taxing power and the central bank’s capacity to create reserves. For commercial bank deposits, it is a claim on an individual bank, convertible at par into central bank money on demand, and backstopped by deposit insurance, banking regulation, and lender-of-last-resort facilities. For a fiat-backed stablecoin, it is a claim on the issuer, redeemable for the reference fiat currency, and backstopped only by the reserve assets held and the legal framework governing redemption.

The monetary instrument is defined by who is liable (central bank, commercial bank, or stablecoin issuer), what backs that liability (sovereign authority, deposit insurance and capital, or reserve assets), and what rights the holder has (redemption at par, deposit insurance coverage, bankruptcy priority).

These are properties of the instrument regardless of how it is stored or how it is transmitted. A bank deposit is the same instrument whether it is accessed via a cheque book, a debit card, an online banking portal, or a tokenised deposit on a blockchain. The underlying claim — and its legal, regulatory, and credit characteristics — does not change because the representation changes.

The Representation and Storage Form

The representation form is how the monetary instrument is recorded, held, and evidenced. This is the dimension most directly affected by digitisation. Historically, representation forms have included: physical notes and coins (bearer instruments, value in the object); entries in a bank’s paper or electronic ledger (account-based, value in the record); and book entries in a central bank’s reserve account system (account-based, institutional access only).

Tokenisation is a change of representation form, not of monetary instrument. A tokenised deposit is the same bank deposit claim represented as a programmable token on a distributed ledger rather than as an entry in the bank’s conventional core banking system. The EBA (December 2024) is explicit on this point for EU law: a tokenised deposit remains a deposit for all legal and regulatory purposes.

The token is the envelope; the deposit is the contents. Similarly, a fiat-backed stablecoin token is the representation of a claim on the issuer — the token itself is not the money, it is the bearer instrument evidencing the money claim.

The representation form matters because it determines: programmability (can conditional logic be embedded?); composability (can the instrument interact with other on-chain instruments without conversion?); and bearer versus account-based character (does transfer require identity verification, or does possession of the token suffice?).

But changes in representation form do not, by themselves, change the nature of the underlying monetary claim or its regulatory treatment — though they may reveal that the regulatory framework was not designed with that representation in mind, creating classification gaps.

The Payment Rail

The payment rail is the infrastructure used to transmit value between parties: the pipes, protocols, and settlement systems through which money moves. The rail is analytically independent of both the instrument and its representation form. The same bank deposit can be transmitted via SWIFT (correspondent banking), Faster Payments (domestic push), RTGS (large-value settlement), a debit card network (Visa/Mastercard acquiring infrastructure), or a mobile payment app (M-Pesa, Venmo). The instrument does not change; the rail does.

For stablecoins, the blockchain is the payment rail. Solana, Ethereum, Tron, and Base are rails — infrastructure choices that determine transaction speed, cost, finality, programmability, and geographic accessibility. A USDC token on Solana and a USDC token on Ethereum represent the same underlying claim on Circle (the issuer) but travel on different rails with different properties. The rail choice affects the user experience and operational risk profile of a payment, but does not change what the USDC token is: a claim on Circle’s reserve pool, redeemable 1:1 for US dollars.

Some implications

The conflation of rail and instrument is I believe the source of several analytical errors that appear in policy discussions. When commentators argue that stablecoins are ‘just a payment method’, they are (correctly) identifying that the blockchain is a rail, but they may also be (incorrectly) implying that this makes the stablecoin token equivalent to a bank deposit. Comparisons of stablecoin transactions with credit card payments are I think equally problematic. It is rare in my experience to see much discussion of how fast payment systems stack up against stablecoins in terms of cost and speed. The added cost and complexity of the on/off ramps with the traditional banking system may also be missing.

The rail properties of a blockchain — open access, programmability, pseudo-anonymous transfer, irreversible finality — are genuine and consequential differences from RTGS or card networks. But there are significant differences between a stablecoin and a bank deposit at the instrument-level: who is liable, what backs the claim, whether deposit insurance applies, and whether settlement occurs in central bank money.

A further rail-level property requires explicit treatment: settlement finality on public blockchains is probabilistic, not absolute. On proof-of-work networks, finality accumulates over multiple block confirmations; on proof-of-stake networks such as Ethereum, economic finality is reached after two checkpoint epochs (approximately 12–15 minutes), though transactions may be practically irreversible within one or two blocks in most conditions. Solana’s optimistic confirmation model offers near-instant practical finality but with a technically distinct guarantee than Ethereum’s checkpoint-based economic finality. This contrasts with RTGS systems (Fedwire, TARGET2, CHAPS) where settlement is legally final and irrevocable the moment it is posted to the central bank’s books.

The finality distinction has direct institutional adoption implications: settlement finality is a legal and operational requirement for securities settlement (Delivery vs. Payment), large-value interbank transactions, and any use case governed by the EU’s Settlement Finality Directive or equivalent. A public blockchain rail that cannot offer the same finality guarantee as an RTGS system is not a direct substitute for those use cases until either the regulatory framework recognises on-chain finality as legally equivalent, or wholesale CBDC rails provide a bridge between blockchain settlement and central bank money finality.

I suspect that I am only scratching the surface of this topic and I am straying way outside my area of expertise so treat the above with caution. I am writing it down to clarify for myself the extent to which I have an understanding of the topic.

Feedback welcome on anything I have wrong or that I am missing

Tony – From the Outside

Where do bank deposits come from …

This is one of the more technical (and misundersood) aspects of banking but also a basic fact about money creation in the modern economy that I think is useful to understand. For the uninitiated, bank deposits are typically the largest form of money in a modern economy with a well developed financial system.

One of the better explanations I have encountered is a paper titled “Money creation in the modern economy” that was published in the Bank of England’s Quarterly Bulletin in Q1 2014. You can find the full paper here but I have copied some extracts below that will give you the basic idea …

In the modern economy, most money takes the form of bank deposits. But how those bank deposits are created is often misunderstood: the principal way is through commercial banks making loans. Whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower’s bank account, thereby creating new money.
The reality of how money is created today differs from the description found in some economics textbooks:
Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits. In normal times, the central bank does not fix the amount of money in circulation, nor is central bank money ‘multiplied up’ into more loans and deposits.
Although commercial banks create money through lending, they cannot do so freely without limit. Banks are limited in how much they can lend if they are to remain profitable in a competitive banking system. Prudential regulation also acts as a constraint on banks’ activities in order to maintain the resilience of the financial system. And the households and companies who receive the money created by new lending may take actions that affect the stock of money — they could quickly ‘destroy’ money by using it to repay their existing debt, for instance.
Money creation in the modern economy, Michale McLeay, Amar Radia and Ryland Thomas, Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin 2014 Q1

The power to create money is of course something akin to magic and the rise of stablecoins has revived a long standing debate about the extent to which market discipline alone is sufficient to ensure sound money. My personal bias (forged by four decades working in the Australian banking system) leans to the view that money creation is not something which banker’s can be trusted to discharge without some kind of supervision/constraints. The paper sets out a nice summary of the ways in which this power is constrained in the conventional banking system …

In the modern economy there are three main sets of constraints that restrict the amount of money that banks can create.
(i) Banks themselves face limits on how much they can lend. In particular:
– Market forces constrain lending because individual banks have to be able to lend profitably in a competitive market.
– Lending is also constrained because banks have to take steps to mitigate the risks associated with making additional loans.
– Regulatory policy acts as a constraint on banks’ activities in order to mitigate a build-up of risks that could pose a threat to the stability of the financial system.
(ii) Money creation is also constrained by the behaviour of the money holders — households and businesses. Households and companies who receive the newly created money might respond by undertaking transactions that immediately destroy it, for example by repaying outstanding loans.
(iii) The ultimate constraint on money creation is monetary policy. By influencing the level of interest rates in the economy, the Bank of England’s monetary policy affects how much households and companies want to borrow. This occurs both directly, through influencing the loan rates charged by banks, but also indirectly through the overall effect of monetary policy on economic activity in the economy. As a result, the Bank of England is able to ensure that money growth is consistent with its objective of low and stable inflation.

The confidence in the central bank’s ability to pursue its inflation objective possibly reflects a simpler time when the inflation problem was deemed solved but the paper is still my goto frame of reference when I am trying to understand how the banking system creates money.

If you want to dive a bit deeper into this particular branch of the dark arts, some researchers working at the US Federal Reserve recently published a short note titled “Understanding Bank Deposit Growth during the COVID-19 Pandemic” that documents work undertaken to try to better understand the rapid and sustained growth in aggregate bank deposits between 2020 and 2021. Frances Coppola also published an interesting post on her blog that argues that banks not only create money when they lend but also when they spend it. You can find the original post by Frances here and my take on it here.

A special shout out to anyone who has read this far. My friends and family think I spend too much time thinking about this stuff so it is nice to know that I am not alone.

Tony – From the Outside

“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

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

Stablecoin regulation

Another good post from JP Koning on stablecoin regulation. His key point, that regulation should follow the function of the activity rather than its form, is not a new contribution to the stablecoin regulation debate. There are lots of issues, ambiguities and areas for reasonable people to take different views on the question of what role stablecoins can or should play in the future of finance but this still seems to me like a sound organising principle.

What this means in practice is yet to be decided but here are a few preliminary thoughts:

I doubt that being regulated like a depositary institution (aka “bank”), as proposed by the recent President’s Working Group report, is the right answer – stablecoin issuers have adopted a variety of business models which tend to be quite different to the fractional reserve banking model adopted by most contemporary depositary institutions.
The issues Koning raises with the US Money Transmitter framework seem valid to me so that does not look like the right model either.
I am sceptical that the Free Banking model proposed by some stablecoin advocates will work as well as claimed but I recognise there is probably a bias at work here so I need to do some more work to properly understand how the Free Banking model works.
Part of the answer (I think) lies in establishing the right taxonomy that not only defines the different types of stablecoin business models but places them in a broader context that includes money transmitter businesses, depositary institutions (both the narrow bank kind and fractional reserve based models) and also the various forms of money market funds – this taxonomy would also distinguish systemically important business models from those which can be allowed to fail in an (ideally) orderly fashion

I included a link to JP Koning’s post above but if you are time poor then this extract captures the key point

“… the key point is that while there are times when stablecoins function like PayPal and Western Union, in other circumstances they are performing a role that PayPal and Western Union never do, which is to serve as the substructure for a set of financial utilities. Which suggests that stablecoins merit a different regulatory framework, one better fit for that function.
I don’t know what framework that should be. Banking, securities law, a special stablecoin license? But the old school money transmitter framework — which has very lenient requirements governing things like the safety of the transmitters underlying assets — is probably the wrong framework. If you serve as financial bedrock, you merit more robust regulation than Western Union.

Let me know what I am missing …

Tony – From the Outside

The future of stablecoin issuance appears to lie in becoming more like a bank

Well to be precise, the future of “payment stablecoins” seems to lie in some form of bank like regulation. That is one of the main conclusions to be drawn from reading the “Report on Stablecoins” published by the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets (PWG).

One of the keys to reading this report is to recognise that its recommendation are focussed solely on “payment stablecoins” which it defines as “… those stablecoins that are designed to maintain a stable value relative to a fiat currency and, therefore, have the potential to be used as a widespread means of payment.”

Some of the critiques I have seen from the crypto community argue that the report’s recommendations fail to appreciate the way in which stablecoin arrangements are designed to be self policing and cite the fact that the arrangements have to date withstood significant episodes of volatility without holders losing faith. Market discipline, they argue, makes regulation redundant and an impediment to experimentation and innovation.

The regulation kills innovation argument is a good one but what I think it misses is that the evidence in support of a market discipline solution is drawn from the existing uses and users of stablecoins which are for the most part confined to engaged and relatively knowledgeable participants. This group of financial pioneers have made a conscious decision to step outside the boundaries of the regulated financial system (with the protections that it offers) and can take the outcomes (positive and negative) without having systemic prudential impacts.

The PWG Report looks past the existing applications to a world in which stablecoins represent a material alternative to the existing bank based payment system. In this future state of the world, world stablecoins are being used by ordinary people and the question then becomes why this type of money is any different to private bank created money once it becomes widely accepted and the financial system starts to depend on it to facilitate economic activity.

The guiding principle is (not surprisingly) that similar types of economic activity should be subject to equivalent forms of regulation. Regulatory arbitrage rarely (if ever) ends up well. This is a sound basis for approaching the stablecoin question but it is not obvious to me that bank regulation is the right answer. To understand why, I recommend you read this briefing note published by Davis Polk (a US law firm), in particular the section titled “A puzzling omission” which explores the question why the Report appears to prohibit stablecoin issuers from structuring themselves as 100% reserve banks (aka “narrow banks”).

4. A puzzling omission.
By recommending that Congress require all stablecoin issuers to be IDIs, the Report would effectively require all stablecoin issuers to engage in fractional reserve banking and effectively prohibit them from being structured as 100% reserve banks (i.e., narrow banks9) that limit their activities to the issuance of stablecoins fully backed by a 100% reserve of cash or cash equivalents.10
The reason is that IDIs are subject to minimum leverage capital ratios that were calibrated for banks that engage in fractional reserve banking and invest the vast portion of the funds they raise through deposit-taking in commercial loans or other illiquid assets that are riskier but generate higher returns than cash or cash equivalents. Minimum leverage ratios treat cash and cash equivalents as if they had the same risk and return profile as commercial loans, commercial paper and long-term corporate debt, even though they do not. Unless Congress recalibrated the minimum leverage capital ratios to reflect the lower risk and return profile of IDIs that limit their assets to cash and cash equivalents, the minimum leverage capital ratios would make the 100% reserve model for stablecoin issuance uneconomic and therefore effectively prohibited.11 It is puzzling why the PWG, FDIC and OCC would recommend a regulatory framework that would effectively require stablecoin issuers to invest in riskier assets and rely on FDIC insurance rather than permitting stablecoins backed by a 100% cash and cash equivalent reserve.
This omission is puzzling for another reason. There has long been a debate whether deposit insurance schemes or a regime that required demand deposits to be 100% backed by cash or cash equivalents would be more effective in preventing runs or contagion. Indeed, the Roosevelt Administration, Senator Carter Glass, a number of economists and most well-capitalized banks were initially opposed to the proposal to create a federal deposit insurance scheme in 1933.12 Among the arguments against deposit insurance are that the benefits of deposit insurance in the form of reduced run and contagion risk are outweighed by the adverse effects in the form of reduced market discipline resulting from the reduced incentive of depositors to monitor the financial health of their banks. This reduced monitoring gives weaker banks more room to engage in risky activities the costs of which are borne by the stronger and more responsible banks in the form of excessive deposit insurance premiums or by taxpayers in the form of government bailouts.
In a competing proposal that has come to be known as the Chicago Plan, a group of economists led by economists at the University of Chicago argued in favor of a legal regime that required all demand deposits to be 100% backed by a reserve of cash or cash equivalents.13 Proponents of the Chicago Plan argued that it would be more effective in stemming runs and contagion than the proposed federal deposit insurance scheme, without undermining market discipline or creating moral hazard. The Chicago Plan would have been analogous to the original National Bank Act that required all paper currency issued by national banks to be fully backed 100% by U.S. Treasury securities. The Chicago Plan was ultimately rejected in favor of the federal deposit insurance scheme that was enacted in 1933 not because it would have been less effective than deposit insurance in stemming runs and contagion, but because it was viewed as too radical. Policymakers feared that by prohibiting banks from using deposits to fund commercial loans and invest in other debt instruments, the Chicago Plan would have resulted in a further contraction in the already severely contracted supply of credit that was fueling the great contraction in economic output that later became known as the Great Depression.
It is understandable why the Report does not recommend prohibiting IDIs from issuing, transferring or buying and selling stablecoins that represent insured deposit liabilities. What is puzzling in light of this history, however, is why the Report would effectively prohibit stablecoin issuers from structuring themselves as 100% reserve (i.e., narrow) banks that limit their activities to the issuance, transfer and buying and selling stablecoins fully backed by a 100% reserve of cash or cash equivalents.
“U.S. regulators speak on stableman and crypto regulation” Davis Polk Client Update, 12 November 2021

I am open to the possibility that the conventional bank regulation solution was unintended and that a narrow bank option might still be on the table. In that regard, I note that Circle has been pursuing the 100% reserve bank option for some time already so it would have been reasonable to expect that the PWG Report to discuss why this was not an option if they were ruling it out. The value of the Davis Polk note is that it neatly explains why being required to operate under bank regulation (the Leverage Ratio in particular) will be problematic for the stablecoin business model. This will be especially useful for those in the stablecoin community who may believe that fractional reserve banking is a free option to increase the riskiness of the assets that back the stablecoin liabilities.

But, as always, I may be missing something…

Tony – From the Outside

M-Pesa and the African Fintech Revolution – by Marc Rubinstein – Net Interest

You, like me, might be vaguely aware of the M-Pesa story of fintech innovation in Africa. Marc Rubinstein offers one of the best accounts I have encountered of how this came about and where it might be headed. Especially interesting is his analysis of why it took off in Kenya and the challenges it has faced in other markets.

You can find Marc’s post here – www.netinterest.co/p/m-pesa-and-the-african-fintech-revolution-3c1

Tony – From the Outside

Taming wildcat stablecoins …

… is the title of an interesting paper by Gary Gorton and Jeffrey Zhang which argues that:

Cryptocurrency, or stablecoins to be more precise, can be viewed as the latest variation in a long history of privately produced money
The experience of the United States during the Free Banking Era of the 19th century suggests that ” … privately produced monies are not an effective medium of exchange because they are not always accepted at par and are subject to bank runs”
Stablecoins are not as yet a systemic issue but could be, so policymakers need to adjust the regulatory framework now to be ready as these new forms of private money grow and and potentially evolve into something that can’t be ignored
Policy responses include regulating stablecoin issuers as banks and issuing a central bank digital currency

So what?

I am not convinced that a central bank digital currency is the solution. I can see a case for greater regulation of stablecoins but you need to be clear about exactly what type of stablecoin requires a policy response. Gorton and Zhang distinguish three categories …

The first includes cryptocurrencies that are not backed by anything, like Bitcoin. We call these “fiat cryptocurrencies.” Their defining feature is that they have no intrinsic value. Second, there are specialized “utility coins,” like the JPMorgan coin that is limited to internal use with large clients. Finally, there are “stablecoins,” which aspire to be used as a form of private money and so are allegedly backed one-for-one with government fiat currency (e.g., U.S. dollars)

I am yet to see a completely satisfactory taxonomy of stablecoins but at a minimum I would break the third category down further to distinguish the ways in which the peg is maintained. The (relatively few?) stablecoins that actually hold high quality USD assets on a 1:1 basis are different from those which hold material amounts of commercial paper in their reserve asset pool and different again from those which employ algorithmic protocols to maintain the peg.

However, you do not necessarily have to agree with their taxonomy, assessments or policy suggestions to get value from the paper – three things I found useful and interesting:

The “no-questions-asked ” principle for anything that functions or aims to function as money
Some technical insights into the economic and legal properties of stablecoins and stablecoin issuers
Lessons to be learned from history, in particular the Free Banking Era of the 19th century

The “no-questions-asked” principle.

Money is conventionally defined in terms of three properties; a store of value, a unit of account and a medium of exchange. Gorton and Zhang argue that “The property that’s most obvious, yet not explicitly presented, is that money also must satisfy the no-questions-asked (“NQA”) principle, which requires the money be accepted in a transaction without due diligence on its value“. They freely admit that they have borrowed this idea from Bengt Holmstrom though I think he actually uses the term “information insensitive” as opposed to the more colloquial NQA principle.

Previous posts on this blog have looked at both Holmstrom’s paper and other work that Gorton has co-authored on the optimal level of information that different types of bank stakeholders require. If I understood Holmstrom correctly, he seemed to extend his thesis on the value of being able to trade on an “information insensitive” basis to argue that “opacity” in the debt market is something to be embraced rather than eliminated. I struggle with embracing opacity in this way but that in no way diminishes the validity of the distinction he draws between the relative value of information in debt and equity markets and its impact on liquidity.

Gorton and Zhang emphasise the importance of deposit insurance in underwriting confidence in and the liquidity of bank deposits as the primary form of private money. I think that is true in the sense that most bank deposit holders do not understand the mechanics of the preferred claim they have on the assets of the bank they have lent to but it seems to me that over-collateralisation is equally as important in underwriting the economics of bank deposits.

If I have not lost you at this point, you can explore this question further via this link to a post I did titled “Bank deposits – turning unsecured loans to highly leveraged companies into (mostly) risk free assets – an Australian perspective“. From my perspective, the idea that any form of money has to be designed to be “information insensitive” or NQA rings very true.

Insights drawn from a technical analysis of stablecoins and stablecoin issuers.

The paper delves in a reasonable amount of detail into the technicalities of whether stablecoins are economically or legally equivalent to demand deposits and the related question of whether stablecoin issuers might be considered to be banks. The distinction between the economic and the legal status is I think especially useful for understanding how banking regulators might engage with the stablecoin challenge.

The over arching point is that stablecoins that look and function like bank demand deposits should face equivalent levels of regulation. That does not necessarily mean exactly the same set of rules but something functionally equivalent.

One practical outcome of this analysis that I had not considered previously is that they deem Tether to be based on an “equity contract” relationship with its users whereas the other stablecoins they analyse are “debt contracts” (see below). The link between Tether and a money market fund and the risk of “breaking the buck” has been widely canvassed but I had not previously seen the issue framed in these legal terms.

This technical analysis is summarised in two tables (Table 2: Stablecoins and their Contracts as of June 30, 2021 and Table 3: Stablecoins, Redemptions, and Fiat Money as of June 30. 2021) that offer a useful reference point for understanding the mechanics and details of some of the major stablecoins issued to date. In addition, the appendix to the paper offers links to the sources used in the tables.

Lessons to be learned from history

It may have been repeated to the point of cliche but the idea that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (George Santayana generally gets the credit for this but variations are attributed to Edmund Burke and Sir Winston Churchill) resonates strongly with me. The general argument proposed by Gorton and Zhang is that lots of the ideas being tried out in stablecoin design and DeFi are variations on general principles that were similarly employed in the lightly regulated Free Banking Era but found wanting.

Even if you disagree with the conclusions they draw, the general principle of using economic history to explore what can be learned and what mistakes to avoid remains a useful discipline for any practitioner of the dark arts of banking and money creation.

Summing up in the authors’ own words

The paper is long (41 pages excluding the Appendix) but I will wrap up this post with an extract that gives you the essence of their argument in their own words.

Tony – From the Outside

Conclusion
The more things change, the more they stay the same. It is still the case that regulation is being outpaced by innovation—thereby creating an uneven playing field—as it is easier and cheaper for more technologically advanced firms to offer similar products and services.
In this case, it is also true that the problems associated with privately produced money are the same as they were one hundred and fifty years ago. We stress three points from our review of history. First, the use of private bank notes was a failure because they did not satisfy the NQA principle. Second, the U.S. government took control of the monetary system under the National Bank Act and subsequent legislation in order to eliminate the private bank note system in favor of a uniform currency—namely, national bank notes. Third, runs on demand deposits only ended with deposit insurance in 1934.
Currently, it does not appear that stablecoins are used as money. But, as stablecoins evolve further, the stablecoin world will look increasingly like an unregulated version of the Free Banking Era—a world of wildcat banking. During the Free Banking Era, private bank monies circulated at time-varying discounts based on geography and the perceived risk of the issuing bank. Stablecoin prices are independent of geography but not independent of the perceived risk of their backing assets. If they succeed in differentiating themselves from fiat cryptocurrencies and become used as money, then they will likely trade at time-varying discounts as well. Policymakers have a couple of ways to address this development, and they better get going.

Stablecoin backing

… is a hot topic full of claims, counter claims and clarifications. Tether’s USDT token has been getting the bulk of the attention to date but questions are now being asked about Circle’s USDC token (a cryptographic stored value token or stablecoin that allows users to trade crypto assets).

My understanding is that USDC is one of the better (in relative terms) stable coins regarding backing and disclosure but this analysis from Amy Castor argues that is still not especially good and may be getting worse. The Financial Times makes a similar argument.

The broad problem they outline

Stablecoins generally start out with a promise that each coin is backed 1:1 with fiat currency (typically USD) or fully reserved
Ideally those fiat currency reserves are held on deposit in a bank on a custodial basis
Over time that simple promise becomes more nuanced with qualifications that dilute the fiat currency component and introduce concepts like “approved investments”
The location of the deposit may also become ambiguous
Not always clear if the backing itself has evolved or the disclosure evolves in response to questioning

USDT has been the most high profile example of asset backing being understood to be USD cash but evolving into something USD based but not always 100% cash or necessarily liquid. The two sources cited above suggest that USDC backing may also be less than 100% USD.

Amy Castor points to the change in USDC disclosure between February and March 2021 as evidence of an apparent change in (or clarification of?) the composition of the reserve backing.

Source: Amy Castor, “What’s backing Circle’s 25B USDC? We may never know”

As always I may be missing something, and maybe this is just my traditional banking bias, but Amy poses what seem to me to be pretty reasonable questions like “what are those approved investments? Who approves them? What percentage of assets are in that category?” that Circle is yet to answer.

Tony – From The Outside

A contest to control crypto

Gillian Tett (Financial Times) makes an interesting contribution to the crypto currency debate (link here) using Niall Ferguson’s metaphor of the “Square” and the “Tower” to examine the contest for who controls crypto.

Worth reading in full but here is a flavour of her observations…

Where does this leave the crypto “square”? In China, I suspect it will gradually be crushed. Beijing seems intent on using CBDCs to centralise power. In Europe, the “square” may be curbed by bureaucracy.
But the really interesting issue is what will happen in the US, a country that venerates free-market ideas and network-driven innovation. “American cultural values — from support for the underdog to adulation of the frontier explorer — seem to be the precipitating source of how crypto is changing our concept of money,” notes anthropologist Sara Ceraldi. Don’t count out the crowd.
Either way, the point is that nobody can explain crypto prices or other meme assets with monetary economics or portfolio theory alone. The power and culture of “squares” and “towers” matter. Rarely has finance been so fascinating or so hard to model with maths.
Gillian Tett, “A contest to control crypto is underway” Financial Times 24 June 2021

Tony – From The Outside