Abstract: Fiat-backed stablecoins are expanding, and their issuers may attain systemic relevance as reserve portfolios grow and as they may become increasingly intertwined with financial markets. This paper analyzes the resulting risks and the design choices that can mitigate them. A detailed financial-economics discussion forms ...more »

Abstract: We develop novel measures of stablecoin shocks and use them to identify the causal effects of stablecoin adoption on U.S. financial markets. Combining a daily narrative dataset of stablecoin-specific news with changes in the combined market capitalization of USDC and USDT, we measure high-frequency ...more »

Abstract: We study competition between a welfare-maximizing public platform and a profit-maximizing private platform in a two-sided payment market. We characterize the public platform’s optimal pricing and show that it balances the benefits of increased competition against the welfare costs of network fragmentation. While introducing ...more »