Banks Hold a Lever Over Stablecoin Adoption, BIS Economists Say

Banks worried about losing customers to stablecoins may already have a counterweight: the interest rate on a savings account.

That’s the takeaway from a new working paper published by the Bank for International Settlements, the Basel-based bank for central banks. Using weekly U.S. data from January 2019 through June 2025, BIS economist Iñaki Aldasoro and Rashad Ahmed of the Andersen Institute for Finance and Economics found that stablecoin growth slows when banks raise deposit rates.

Stablecoin market capitalization grew by about 15% over a typical 10-week span in the sample used by the researchers. A one-basis-point bump in deposit rates, a sizable weekly move for slow-moving savings rates, cut that to roughly 12% under the authors’ baseline estimate. Under a second method designed to isolate cause and effect, it fell to about 6%. Stablecoins kept growing, just more slowly.

To separate cause from coincidence, the authors relied on a quirk in bank behavior. Lenders barely raise savings rates until the federal funds rate passes about 3%, and then they reprice much faster.

The link was stronger for Circle’s USDC than for Tether’s USDT, which the authors attribute to USDC’s closer ties to U.S. users. The paper concludes that banks “retain some influence over the pace of that adoption through deposit pricing.”

The findings come with caveats. Working papers reflect the authors’ views, not necessarily the BIS’s, and the sample spans a single high-rate cycle in which stablecoins paid holders no interest.

The authors said regulators should weigh whether stablecoin issuers may pay holders yield, along with the trade-offs of requiring issuers to keep part of their reserves in bank deposits.

That debate is live in Washington. Banks have lobbied to keep stablecoin yield off the table, a fight that loomed over the Clarity Act’s failed Senate vote. Meanwhile, the OCC, FDIC, and Treasury are writing rules to implement the GENIUS Act, which takes effect in January. The GENIUS Act, signed into law by President Donald Trump in July of last year, essentially legalized stablecoins in the United States and set rules of the road for their issuance, use, and custody.

The BIS has long scrutinized stablecoins and the cryptocurrency space more broadly. In 2021, it argued the rise of blockchain-based digital dollars made central bank digital currencies more urgent, and a 2023 BIS survey warned they could threaten financial stability if widely adopted.