Banks Hold a Lever Over Stablecoin Adoption, BIS Economists Say

In brief

• A new BIS working paper using U.S. data from 2019 to 2025 found that higher bank deposit rates predict slower stablecoin market growth.
• The effect was stronger for Circle’s USDC than for Tether’s USDT, which the authors tied to USDC’s closer links to U.S. users.
• The authors said regulators should weigh whether issuers can pay yield. The paper reflects their views, not necessarily the BIS’s.

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.