Opinion: The conscious recoupling of payment float is coming to stablecoins
The trend paves the way for "nation-building" stablecoins.
In conventional banking, we observe episodic phases of deleveraging followed by re-leveraging. Viewed through that lens, the rise of stablecoins initially signaled a shift within the endogenous monetary system — the domain central bankers seek to influence, but rarely fully control — toward broad-based deleveraging. Structurally, stablecoins resembled a market-led return to narrow banking in that world. Aka deleveraging.
Many central bankers frowned upon this characteristic of stablecoins, arguing that this is precisely why they would never be able to compete with central bank money. In their eyes, high-performing economies depend on access to credit, which in turn requires a degree of monetary elasticity that stablecoin architectures do not naturally provide.
“Stablecoins offer some promise on tokenisation but fall short of requirements to be the mainstay of the monetary system when set against the three key tests of singleness, elasticity and integrity,” wrote Hyun-Song Shin, now governor of the Central Bank of Korea, for the Bank for International Settlements in June 2025.
