Stablecoins and the Future of Payments: Evidence from Financial Markets

Alexander Copestake, Cage Englander, Maria Martinez Peria and Germán Villegas-Bauer

No 2026/052, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: We examine whether financial market participants, in aggregate, expect stablecoins to play an important role in payments. Using high-frequency variation in stock prices, we estimate that U.S. legislation supporting the use of stablecoins in payments reduced the market value of listed incumbent payment firms by 18% or approximately $300 billion, consistent with stablecoins increasing competition in the payments sector. This impact is larger than that of other recent pro-competitive regulatory shocks and (i) proportionately larger for incumbents focused on cross-border payments, (ii) smaller for incumbents protected by network effects, and (iii) smaller for incumbents already offering crypto-related services.

Keywords: Crypto Assets, Stablecoins, Payments, Stock Returns; IMF working papers; payment firm; financial market participant; copyright page; views of the IMF; Asset prices; Stocks; Blockchain and DLT; Market capitalization; Global (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 58
Date: 2026-03-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-fdg, nep-mon and nep-pay
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=574831 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2026/052

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/pubs/ord_info.htm

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Akshay Modi ().