稳定币交易的剖析

The anatomy of stablecoin by Fabian Schär, Anneke Kosse, Tara Rice, TakeshiShirakami and Jirapat Siridhasanakul Monetary and Economic Department June 2026 JEL classification: E42, O33, G28, C81, G23 Keywords: blockchain, payments, policy and regulation,stablecoins, transaction complexity BISWorking Papers are written by members of the Monetary and EconomicDepartment of the Bank for International Settlements, and from time to time by othereconomists, and are published by the Bank. The papers are on subjects of topical This publication is available on the BIS website (www.bis.org). ©Bank for International Settlements 2026. All rights reserved. Brief excerpts may bereproduced or translated provided the source is stated. ISSN 1020-0959 (print)ISSN 1682-7678 (online) The Anatomy of Stablecoin Fabian Schär1,2, Anneke Kosse3Shirakami3, and Jirapat Siridhasanakul1Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Basel2Swiss Finance Institute3Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures, Bank for International Settlements4Formerly Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures, Bank for International SettlementsWorking Paper Version: June 10, 2026 Abstract:Stablecoin transfers are often interpreted as payments.On pro-grammable blockchains, however, they are frequently embedded in atomicallyexecuted transaction bundles that combine trading, lending, arbitrage, liquid-ity provision, and settlement.We show that ignoring this structure materi-ally distorts the interpretation of stablecoin activity. Using 593 million eventlogs from 141 million Ethereum transactions involving three major U.S. dollarstablecoins, we develop a replicable framework to measure transaction com-plexity from archive node data, public contract labels, and event signatures.The analysis combines measures of token and contract co-usage, action type, 1Introduction Stablecoins have emerged as a core component of blockchain-based fi-nancial systems.Beyond facilitating peer-to-peer payments, they serveas settlement assets for often complex financial transactions, as well as A growing literature examines stablecoins in the context of cross-borderpayments, monetary policy transmission, and systemic risk, often inter-preting stablecoin transfers of value as economically analogous to simplepayment transactions such as consumer payments, remittances, and sim-ple settlement flows.While such uses are economically important, thisperspective overlooks a defining feature of blockchain-based financial sys-tems: the ability to compose multiple financial operations into a single, A central contribution of this paper is to formalize the distinction be-tween stablecoin transfers and the transactions in which they are embed-ded.A transaction specifies the bundled sequence of operations to beexecuted; transfers, by contrast, are event logs emitted by the stablecoin merely taxonomic. A given transfer may reflect very different economiccontent:it can constitute a payment between independent parties, anintermediate leg of a multi-step settlement, or a purely technical move-ment executed for internal accounting, collateral rebalancing, or routingwithin a protocol.Treating transfers as standalone observations there- The paper’s distinction between simple payments and more complextransactions is crucial for policy and standard setting work by centralbanks and securities regulators to enhance the safety and efficiency offinancial market infrastructures (FMIs). In 2012, the Committee on Pay-ments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) and the International Organi-zation of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) issued the Principles for Fi- In contrast to retail payments (e.g., consumer payments, remittancesor business to business payments), wholesale money settlements are sys-temic in nature. Reflecting this systemic importance, PFMI Principle 9sets out risk management requirements, including those related to thequality of settlement assets used for money settlement.In July 2022,CPMI-IOSCO issued guidance on how to apply the PFMI to stablecoin a significant share of stablecoin activity relates to such transactions. Analyzing and understanding this broader transaction context is alsowhere the economic stakes lie. Atomic execution and composability maysubstitute for intermediated settlement, mitigate counterparty risk, andenable forms of contingent contracting that are difficult to replicate on This paper examines the structural composition of stablecoin transac-tions and analyzes how stablecoin transfers are connected to other block-chain event logs. We construct a novel dataset comprising more than onehalf of a billion event logs and the associated transaction-level informa-tion for three U.S. dollar-denominated stablecoins. Rather than treating Our analysis yields two main findings: First, a substantial share of stablecoin activity extends beyond simplepayments, and the magnitude of that share depends fundamentally onwhether one observes transactions or transfe