稳定币与支付的未来：来自金融市场的证据

Stablecoins and theFuture of Payments: Alexander Copestake, Cage Englander,Maria Soledad Martinez Peria, Germán Villegas-Bauer WP/26/52 IMF Working Papersdescribe research inprogress by the author(s) and are published toelicit comments and to encourage debate.The views expressed in IMF Working Papers are 2026MAR IMF Working PaperResearch Department Stablecoins and the Future of Payments: Prepared byAlexander Copestake, Cage Englander,Maria Soledad Martinez Peria, Germán Villegas-Bauer*1 Authorized for distribution byGiovanni Dell'Ariccia March2026 IMF Working Papersdescribe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicitcomments and to encourage debate.The views expressed in IMF Working Papers are those of theauthor(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the IMF, its Executive Board, or IMF management. ABSTRACT:We examine whether financial market participants,inaggregate, expect stablecoins to play an important role in payments. Usinghigh-frequency variation in stock prices, we estimate that U.S. legislationsupporting the use of stablecoins in payments reduced the market value oflisted incumbent payment firms by 18% or approximately $300 billion, What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust,allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a Ever since crypto’s invention, enthusiasts have promised that blockchain tokens will findwidespread legal use cases, displacing conventional means of payment, any day now.But 1Introduction Will crypto assets play an important role in payments? While Nakamoto (2008) aimed to providean electronic version of cash, usage of bitcoin for payments remains concentrated in illicit transac- tions (e.g., Rogoff, 2025a,b).1Recently, proponents of stablecoins have predicted mass adoption Empirically assessing the potential role of stablecoins in payments is challenging. First, adop-tion of new payments technologies can be slow initially because potential users wait for a criticalmass of others to adopt first (Alvarez, Argente, Lippi, Méndez, and Van Patten, 2023). Second, fewer than 10% of stablecoin transactions recorded on blockchains reflect transactions between In this paper, we shed light on the potential role of stablecoins in payments through an indirectapproach: examining financial markets’ valuations of incumbent payment firms. Financial market Seru, and Stoffman, 2017). Investors in incumbent payment firms must take a stand on the futurelandscape within which those firms will operate, and their reactions to news about stablecoins We study the stock market valuations of U.S.-listed payment firms around key congressionalvotes in the passage of S.1582, the bill that would become the Guiding and Establishing NationalInnovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act (the GENIUS Act). This Act reduces regulatory uncertainty by creating the first U.S. federal regulatory system for “payment stablecoins,” and increases trust In our baseline specification, we focus on the ten trading hours surrounding the decisive con-gressional vote that sent the bill to the president to be signed into law.We compare the stockreturns of incumbent payment firms to those of other financial firms, controlling for company and Markets had already partially anticipated Congress passing the GENIUS Act prior to the vote.As a result, the immediate price response did not reflect the full effect of the GENIUS Act be- extent of the dampening effect of anticipation and so reverse-engineer the full “no anticipation” effect of the legislation.6 We estimate that the passage of the GENIUS Act in 2025 reduced thetotal market capitalization of incumbent payment firms by 18%, or approximately $300 billion. To unpack the drivers of these differential returns, we consider how the decline in stock returnsvaries with the characteristics of the incumbent payment firms. We inspect the firms’ regulatoryfilings and classify them on three important dimensions: (i) whether the firm’s primary businessfocuses on cross-border rather than domestic payments; (ii) whether proprietary network effects We conclude by benchmarking our results against other historical shocks to payment firms. Ourestimated impact of U.S. stablecoin legislation on U.S. payment firms is slightly larger than compa- Together, our results suggest that financial market participants expect stablecoins to sub-stantially but heterogeneously increase the competitive pressure faced by incumbent payments providers.Cross-border payments firms are expected to be most exposed, consistent with thestarker contrast between relatively slow and expensive existing cross-border payments systems Literature.We contribute to three main strands of literature: on payments, on blockchains andtheir applications, and on high-frequency identification. First, a substantial literature examines the adoption of different payments technologies. Build-ing on e