Quick Summary
- The Bank for International Settlements — the central bank of central banks — just published a working paper that says the quiet part out loud: banks still control how fast stablecoins grow.
- The mechanism is not a ban and not a law. It is the interest rate on a savings account. When banks raise deposit rates, stablecoin growth slows measurably.
- Using weekly U.S. data from January 2019 to June 2025, the researchers found stablecoin market cap grew about 15% over a typical 10-week stretch — and a one basis point bump in deposit rates cut that to roughly 12%, or as low as 6% under a second estimate.
- Circle’s USDC was far more sensitive to that lever than Tether’s USDT.
- Bitcoin has no deposit rate, no issuer, and no counterparty holding a lever. That is the entire point — and it is also the reason Bitcoin looks boring on a spreadsheet.
What The BIS Actually Published
Stablecoins have spent years being sold as the friendly, regulated, grown-up version of crypto — the one the banks can live with. This week the bank of the banks explained, in polite academic language, exactly how much power the banks still have over it.
The Bank for International Settlements published a working paper written by BIS economist Iñaki Aldasoro and Rashad Ahmed of the Andersen Institute for Finance and Economics. They pulled weekly U.S. data from January 2019 through June 2025 and asked a simple question: what happens to stablecoin adoption when a bank account starts paying more?
The answer is that it stalls. Over a typical 10-week window in their sample, stablecoin market capitalisation grew by about 15%. Nudge deposit rates up by a single basis point — one hundredth of one percent, an almost invisible move for a savings account — and that growth estimate drops to roughly 12% under the authors’ baseline method. Under a second approach built to isolate cause and effect, it collapses to about 6%.
Stablecoins did not stop growing. They just slowed down, measurably, because a bank changed a number in an app.
The paper’s conclusion is the part worth reading twice. Banks, the authors write, “retain some influence over the pace of that adoption through deposit pricing.”
Influence. Over the pace of adoption. Through the price of parking cash at a bank.
There are caveats, and they matter. A working paper reflects the views of its authors, not necessarily the BIS. The sample covers a single high-rate cycle, during which stablecoins paid holders no interest at all. And the researchers went out of their way to note that the effect was stronger for Circle’s USDC than for Tether’s USDT, which they attribute to USDC’s closer ties to U.S. users.
They also floated two policy questions regulators should weigh: whether stablecoin issuers should be allowed to pay holders yield, and what it means to force issuers to keep part of their reserves inside bank deposits.
Read those two questions together and the shape of the whole game appears. One determines whether a stablecoin can compete with a savings account. The other determines whether the money backing a stablecoin sits inside the very institutions that would be competing with it.
One Basis Point Beat An Entire Act Of Congress
Here is what makes this paper genuinely uncomfortable.
For two years, the stablecoin debate in Washington was fought like a heavyweight title fight. The GENIUS Act was signed into law and takes effect in January, effectively legalising stablecoins in the United States and writing the rules for issuance, use, and custody. The CLARITY Act died in the Senate. Lobbyists spent enormous sums, senators traded barbs, and the entire crypto industry held its breath over which framework would win.
Meanwhile, the actual brake on stablecoin growth was never in the bill. It was a deposit rate.
No vote. No committee hearing. No presidential signature. A bank repricing its savings product is enough to move the adoption curve, and the BIS data says so out loud. The legislation sets the perimeter. The interest rate sets the speed limit.
That is what people mean when they say the system has levers, and you are not the one holding them. You cannot vote on a deposit rate. You cannot lobby it. You cannot opt out of its effect on the thing you are holding, because the thing you are holding is priced in competition with it — whether it admits that or not.
You Do Not Hold A Stablecoin. You Hold A Claim.
Strip away the branding and a stablecoin is a promise. You send dollars to a company. The company gives you a token and says: this is worth a dollar, trust us. The company invests the dollars — largely in short-term government debt, and under new rules potentially inside bank deposits. If the company freezes your address, your token still exists and you still cannot move it.
That is not a flaw in stablecoins. That is stablecoins working as designed. They are an interface on top of the existing financial system, and interfaces inherit the permissions of everything underneath them.
This is the same structure that has been failing people all year. Cobo is killing its wallet app and will bill users $100 a month to keep holding their own Bitcoin. Coinbase’s own outage reminded everyone what custodial risk looks like when a company’s problems become your problems. America became a net buyer of Bitcoin for the first time since 2022 while quietly selling the reserve that used to back the dollars. And Deutsche Bank, the bank that called the selloff a loss of conviction, is now building Bitcoin custody of its own.
Notice the pattern. Every one of those stories is a company deciding the terms of your access. A wallet app that dies. A platform that goes dark. A bank that changes its mind. A regulator that changes its mood. And now, per the BIS, a deposit rate that quietly decides how much of your money stays where.
Bitcoin Has No Lever To Pull
Now run the same test on Bitcoin.
There is no issuer to raise a rate at you. No company holds your coins unless you hand them over. No committee decides whether the network can pay yield, because the network does not pay yield and never promised to. There is no USDC-versus-USDT comparison to make, because there is no counterparty to be more or less sensitive to American savers.
That is not a marketing line. It is the mechanical reason the BIS paper is about stablecoins and not about Bitcoin. You cannot slow down a savings decision by changing a deposit rate when the asset has no yield to compete with in the first place. There is no lever because there is no company standing between you and the money.
The trade-off is real and you should say it out loud: Bitcoin pays you nothing for holding it. It has no yield, no dividend, no loyalty programme, and no one to call when the price drops. Every bit of convenience you get from a stablecoin, a custodial wallet, or a bank account is paid for with a lever somebody else is holding.
You are not choosing between a good product and a bad one. You are choosing between owning an asset and owning a promise about an asset.
What To Do With This
Nothing in this article is financial advice, and none of it requires you to sell anything today. It requires you to be honest about what you are holding.
If your dollars sit in a stablecoin, you are holding a claim on a company, and that company’s behaviour is being modelled against bank deposit rates by researchers at the bank of central banks. If your Bitcoin sits on an exchange, you are holding a claim on an exchange, and the exchange’s terms are set by people who are not you. If your Bitcoin sits in a wallet whose keys you generated and can read without a company’s permission, you are holding an asset, and nobody can raise a rate to slow that down.
The BIS just told you where the levers are. The only question left is how many of them point at your stack.
FAQ
What did the BIS actually find?
Using weekly U.S. data from January 2019 to June 2025, BIS economist Iñaki Aldasoro and Rashad Ahmed found that higher bank deposit rates predict slower stablecoin market growth. A one basis point increase cut a typical 10-week growth estimate from about 15% to roughly 12%, and to about 6% under a second method.
Why does a one basis point change matter so much?
Because it is almost nothing — one hundredth of a percent. If a move that small shifts adoption measurably, then the lever banks hold is not theoretical. It is operational, and it does not require a single law to be passed.
Why was USDC more sensitive than USDT?
The authors attribute it to USDC’s closer links to U.S. users, which makes it more directly comparable to a U.S. bank deposit. Tether’s user base is more international.
Does this mean stablecoins are unsafe?
No. It means they are permissioned. A stablecoin is a claim on a company, and companies can freeze addresses, change terms, and compete with banks on rates set by banks. That is a design choice, not a scandal.
How is Bitcoin different here?
There is no issuer to set a yield, no company holding your coins if you self-custody, and no counterparty whose incentives the BIS can model against deposit rates. There is also no yield. You trade the promise for the asset.
Final Thoughts
This is the part the stablecoin industry does not want written down. For years the pitch has been that stablecoins are the bridge — the safe, regulated, dollar-denominated way to be in crypto. What the BIS paper shows is that the bridge has a toll booth, and the toll booth is owned by the banks on the other side.
You are being told to be grateful for a dollar token whose growth rate the banking sector can throttle by adjusting the interest on a savings account. You are being told this is progress, because at least a bill got signed.
Meanwhile the thing that cannot be throttled, cannot be frozen by an issuer, and cannot be slowed by a deposit rate keeps getting called the boring option. It has no yield. It has no marketing department. It has no compliance team deciding whether you are allowed to move your own money on a Sunday.
There is a whole industry built on the idea that you should accept a promise instead of an asset, because the promise is convenient. Convenience is what the lever is attached to.
If you are going to hold Bitcoin, hold it. Not a receipt for it, not a claim on a company that holds it, not a token that tracks it. Your keys, your coins, no lever.
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So here is the question worth arguing about in the comments: if a savings account rate can move stablecoin adoption more than an act of Congress could, why is anyone still calling stablecoins the future of money?
This article is for education only and is not financial advice.
THE BANKS JUST ADMITTED THEY HOLD A LEVER OVER STABLECOINS - AND BITCOIN HAS NO LEVER TO PULL.
