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"For stablecoins to flourish as widely used payment vehicles they require a proper regulatory framework. A good starting point is to adhere to the principle of "same risk, same activity, same regulation." Another worthwhile principle is to not recreate the wheel. With this in mind, this Commentary offers some suggestions as to how stablecoins and their issuers could be regulated using the existing regulatory frameworks that are applied to retail payments-system providers and deposit-taking institutions. These existing frameworks include the Bank Act, its provincial statutory counterparts, and the relatively recent Retail Payments Activities Act. We paraphrase the Financial Stability Board's high-level recommendations for global stablecoins - many of which apply in a domestic setting as well - and assign the legislation/recommendations/authority based on the Canadian context." [Jeremy Kronick & Mark Zelmer, CD Howe]

"Earlier this week, the House Committee on Financial Services held a hearing on stablecoins or digital assets tied to fiat currency. The Hearing was driven by the recent report by the President's Working Group (PWG) on Financial Markets. While stablecoins are not (yet) systemically worrisome, the market has grown to $174 billion in market capitalization. stablecoins currently represent more than 75% of trading on all digital asset trading platforms."

"Why are interest rates on dollar-pegged stablecoins so much higher than interest rates on actual dollars? You'd think that a stablecoin worth a dollar would command the same interest rate as a dollar, namely zero. But a quick search of lending rates on stablecoins reveals rates of anything from 9% to 13%, or even more."

Australia's NAB has completed an intra-bank cross-border transaction using NAB-issued stablecoin on the public and permissionless Ethereum blockchain, involving deployment of stablecoin smart contracts for seven major global currencies. NAB's AUDN stablecoin will be fully backed one-for-one with Australian dollars and managed as a liability of the bank, will be the cornerstone for NAB's ambitions in digital assets. NAB claims this is the world's first use case of a large financial institution leveraging a public blockchain for cross-border payment rails.

"Tron's Decentralized USDD algorithmic stablecoin slipped further from parity with the US dollar today. USDD dropped to slightly below 0.97 before recovering to around $0.98. This marks the second time the stablecoin has slipped out of dollar parity since it was first founded earlier this year. In June, the stablecoin dipped all the way to $0.96 before bouncing back to its intended value."

The US Federal Reserve Board (FRB) published a note that describes the general lifecycle of a stablecoin from its issuance to its redemption. It then categorizes various stabilization mechanisms and discuss how they work in practice. A key observation is that, although several stablecoins may peg their value to the same real-world asset, stabilization mechanisms can vary greatly in terms of maintaining stability with the reference asset, and so may have varying susceptibilities to the risk of runs from the stablecoin to the reference asset.

Societe Generale subsidiary SocGen Forge unveiled the EUR-pegged EURCV stablecoin (EUR CoinVertible), which is initially being issued on the Ethereum public blockchain with plans for other blockchains as well. This is the first public blockchain stablecoin issued by a subsidiary of a global systemically important bank (G-SIB). Access to the fully-backed stablecoin is restricted to investors that have been through SocGen KYC and AML procedures. The motivation for the issuance includes using it as a robust settlement asset for on-chain transactions, corporate treasury, on-chain liquidity funding and an asset for margin calls.

The Brookings Institute published a paper by Timothy Massad, U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) , on how blockchain-based stablecoins could undermine the global financial system plumbing that has been exploited by U.S. authorities to protect national security interests (e.g., by implementing sanctions). He discusses various regulatory and legislative options, and finds them either insufficient or disrespecting reasonable privacy expectations. Mr. Massad suggests that, at minimum, stablecoin issuers should be required to engage in enhanced monitoring of blockchains for suspicious transactions and consider when the issuer must "freeze" stablecoins.

The UAE Central Bank (CBUAE) approved a framework for stablecoin regulation on June 14, 2024, which allows only dirham-backed stablecoins to be used for payments. Other crypto-assets will be restricted to trading, investment, and corporate treasury purposes while foreign stablecoins will only be permitted for purchasing specific virtual assets like non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The new law mandates that no entity can issue a payment token without submitting a white paper to the central bank for approval. Banks are not directly permitted to issue payment tokens but can do so through subsidiaries or affiliates, provided they meet licensing and regulatory requirements. The new framework is set to commence in June 2025.

The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) published guidance on the issuance of stablecoins. It provides information on aspects of financial market law that arise in relation to stablecoin projects and the impact of such projects on the supervised institutions. The guidance also draws attention to the increased risks in the areas of money laundering, terrorist financing and the circumvention of sanctions. In particular, the identity of all persons holding the stablecoins must be adequately verified by the issuing institution or by appropriately supervised financial intermediaries. In other words anonymous transfers are prohibited.

Stablecoins Vulnerable to Regulatory Uncertainty: European Central Bank "Less innovative Stablecoins could provide a solution to users Seeking a stable store of value, especially if legitimised by the adherence to standards that are typical of payment services, the jury is still out on the potential future role of more innovative Stablecoins outside their core user base."

This paper presents a methodology to build a stablecoin pegged to a basket of major currencies ("librae") with stability maximizing weights. It shows that such a stablecoin is less volatile than any single-currency-pegged stablecoins.

This is a great summary of the potential systemic risks around Tether by Timothy Massad, ex-Chairman of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission. He calls for a strengthening of the regulation of crypto-assets generally and in particular stablecoins. He seems supportive of the Stablecoin Tethering and Bank Licensing Enforcement (STABLE) Act, introduced in Congress last December, that would require that stablecoins be issued by a bank and would impose certain standards.

Celo, a decentralized financial app, is adding a new stablecoin, backed by the Euro. The Euro stablecoin will be backed by a basket of cryptocurrencies that are algorithmically adjusted to maintain a stable price. The Celo Euro is the second stablecoin to launch on the platform after the Celo Dollar (cUSD), launched in June 2020.

CoinMetrics has produced an in-depth research report on the rise of stablecoins following the March 2020 crypto crash. Stablecoin supply has exploded in 2020 but it's unclear exactly why. After it took 5 years for stablecoin supply to reach 6 billion, it only took another 4 months for it to grow from 6 billion to 12 billion following the March 12th crypto crash.

The finance ministers of the five European Union member states repoertedly said in a joint statement that stablecoins should not be allowed to operate in the 27-member bloc until legal, regulatory and oversight challenges had been addressed. The five countries want all stablecoins to be pledged at a ratio of 1:1 with fiat currency, with reserve assets denominated in the euro or other currencies of EU members states, and deposited in an EU-approved institution. All entities operating as part of a stablecoin scheme should be registered in the EU, they said. Such a move would likely impact the Geneva-based Libra Association, which plans to issue and govern Libra.

According to this paper co-written by the Diem Association's Christian Catalini, fiat-backed stablecoins must rely on reserves of high-quality, liquid assets and be subject to a framework that protects coin holders from credit risk, market risk, operational risk, as well as the insolvency or bankruptcy of the issuer. Although decentralized stablecoin designs eliminate the need to trust an intermediary, they are either exposed to death spirals, or highly capital inefficient, as they must be highly over-collateralized to account for the lack of an intermediary. While these trade-offs might be acceptable for narrow use cases within the cryptocurrency space, without a breakthrough in decentralized stablecoin design, they are likely to limit the usefulness of these coins for mainstream adoption.

A new World Economic Forum white paper investigates the benefits and limitations of stablecoins for supporting financial inclusion in historically excluded or underserved populations. It concludes that, overall, stablecoins do not present features or capabilities that significantly reduce barriers to financial inclusion compared to pre-existing options, once accounting for consistent legal and compliance requirements. stablecoins are subject to many of the same adoption and inclusion hurdles as other forms of retail finance, such as reliable internet and electricity, digital and financial literacy, and government identity documentation.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) published a paper on volatility spillover from asset-backed stablecoins to money market instruments, focusing on Tether. stablecoins bear liquidity mismatch risks similar to money market funds, which may expose them to a fire-sale of reserve assets in times of crypto ecosystem instability and in turn increase the volatility of these reserve assets. It finds that, in extreme circumstances, these fire-sales could have material impacts on the traditional financial system such as the money market. The paper proposes regulations that require stablecoin issuers to provide standardized and regular disclosures of their reserve assets holdings, and possibly imposing restrictions on the composition of reserve assets and requiring well- defined redemption rights

The Clearing House (TCH) published a paper that analyzes US insured depository institutions legal authority to issue stablecoins and engage in stablecoin-related activities. It finds that, in 2020 and 2021, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) gave national banks the clear legal authority to issue and exchange stablecoins, based on language in the National Bank Act, and consistent with numerous legal decisions and regulatory determinations regarding a bank's authority to issue payments and deposit instruments. National banks have always been permitted to develop innovative deposit and payment mechanisms, as receiving deposits and acting as financial intermediaries are core functions of banks.