26 posts on "Cryptocurrencies"
October 1, 2025
A Historical Perspective on Stablecoins
Digital currencies have grown rapidly in recent years. In July 2025, Congress passed the “Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act” (GENIUS) Act, establishing the first comprehensive federal framework governing the issuance of stablecoins. In this post, we place stablecoins in a historical perspective by comparing them to national bank notes, a form of privately issued money that circulated in the United States from 1863 through 1935.
September 24, 2025
The Financial Stability Implications of Tokenized Investment Funds
In a previous post, we provided background information about the emergence of tokenized investment funds and their use cases. These use cases are currently limited to the digital asset ecosystem. However, the recent approval of cryptocurrency exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and the passage of the GENIUS Act raise concerns about the impact of these tokenized investment fund to the broader financial system. In this post, we assess this impact by considering three economic mechanisms based in part on market participants’ investment strategies and liquidity needs. They include: liquidity transformation, interconnections between the digital asset and the traditional financial system, and transaction settlement. Through these mechanisms, tokenization of investment funds can bring about financial stability benefits in the form of reduced redemption pressures and additional sources of liquidity for fund issuances, but may also increase interconnectedness between the traditional financial system and digital asset ecosystem, thereby amplifying existing financial stability risks.
The Emergence of Tokenized Investment Funds and Their Use Cases
A blockchain is a distributed database where independent computers across the world maintain identical copies of a transaction record, updating it only when the network reaches consensus on new transactions—making the history transparent and extraordinarily difficult to alter. Historically, bonds have traded almost entirely in over-the-counter (OTC) markets, while equities and money market fund shares have largely settled through centralized infrastructures such as stock exchanges and central securities depositories. In both settings, each institution maintains its own records, and post-trade steps like confirmation, clearing, and settlement require multiple intermediaries and repeated reconciliation.
April 23, 2025
Stablecoins and Crypto Shocks: An Update
Stablecoins are crypto assets whose value is pegged to that of a fiat currency, usually the U.S. dollar. In our first Liberty Street Economics post, we described the rapid growth of stablecoins, the different types of stablecoin arrangements, and the May 2022 run on TerraUSD, the fourth largest stablecoin at the time. In a subsequent post, we estimated the impact of large declines in the price of bitcoin on cumulative net flows into stablecoins and showed the existence of flight-to-safety dynamics similar to those observed in money market mutual funds during periods of stress. In this post, we document the growth of stablecoins since 2019, including the evolution of the reported collateral backing major stablecoins. Then, we estimate the impact on the stablecoin industry of large bitcoin price increases that occurred between 2021 and 2025.
April 21, 2025
The Origins of Market Power in DeFi
In our previous Liberty Street Economics post, we introduced the decentralized finance (DeFi) intermediation chain and explained how various players have emerged as key intermediaries in the Ethereum ecosystem. In this post, we summarize the empirical results in our new Staff Report that explains how the need for transaction privacy across the DeFi intermediation chain gives rise to intermediaries’ market power.
March 27, 2025
Interoperability of Blockchain Systems and the Future of Payments
In a previous post, we introduced a three-pillar framework for interoperability of payment systems and discussed how technological, legal, and economic factors contribute to achieve interoperability and aid in the “singleness of money”—that payments and exchange are not subject to volatility in the value of the money itself—in the context of legacy systems. In this post, we use the framework to characterize the interoperability of blockchain systems and propose a methodology for evaluating interoperability. We show evidence of limited interoperability and draw insights for the future of payment systems.
Posted at 7:01 am in Cryptocurrencies | Permalink
February 14, 2025
How Censorship Resistant Are Decentralized Systems?
Public permissionless blockchains are designed to be censorship resistant, meaning access to the blockchain is unhampered. In practice, different blockchain ecosystem actors (such as users, builders, or proposers) can influence the degree to which a blockchain is resistant to censorship. In a recent Staff Report, we examine how sanctions imposed by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Tornado Cash, a set of noncustodial cryptocurrency smart contracts on Ethereum, affected Tornado Cash and the broader Ethereum network. In this post, we summarize findings regarding sanction cooperation at the settlement layer by “block proposers”—a set of settlement actors specifically responsible for selecting new blocks to add to the blockchain.
August 5, 2024
The DeFi Intermediation Chain
Decentralized Finance, or DeFi, is a rapidly growing ecosystem of financial applications built on blockchain technology, primarily on the Ethereum network. These applications aim to recreate traditional financial instruments and services, such as lending, borrowing, trading, and insurance. The DeFi intermediation chain connects a series of intermediaries who find arbitrage opportunities, aggregate transactions into blocks, validate these blocks, and ultimately append them to the blockchain. In this post, we summarize results from our staff report describing how arbitrage opportunities arise in the Ethereum blockchain, and how the need to keep these arbitrage opportunities private gives rise to the intermediation chain.
May 28, 2024
Do Exchange‑Traded Products Improve Bitcoin Trading?
Spot bitcoin exchange-traded products (ETPs) began trading in the U.S. on January 11, 2024. For investors, these ETPs purport improved liquidity and price efficiency, and more convenient access to bitcoin trading compared to other means of trading bitcoin in spot markets. Proponents also cite bitcoin holdings as a portfolio diversification opportunity due to historically low correlation with traditional financial securities. Others argue that bitcoin remains a speculative asset and that ETPs increase its interconnections with the traditional financial system. In this post, we examine the initial performance, trading costs, and price efficiency of spot bitcoin ETPs in the U.S.
March 8, 2024
Stablecoins and Crypto Shocks
In a previous post, we described the rapid growth of the stablecoin market over the past few years and then discussed the TerraUSD stablecoin run of May 2022. The TerraUSD run, however, is not the only episode of instability experienced by a stablecoin. Other noteworthy incidents include the June 2021 run on IRON and, more recently, the de-pegging of USD Coin’s secondary market price from $1.00 to $0.88 upon the failure of Silicon Valley Bank in March 2023. In this post, based on our recent staff report, we consider the following questions: Do stablecoin investors react to broad-based shocks in the crypto asset industry? Do the investors run from the entire stablecoin industry, or do they engage in a flight to safer stablecoins? We conclude with some high-level discussion points on potential regulations of stablecoins.
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