The Bank for International Settlements’ 2026 annual report rejects stablecoins on four core criteria and proposes a “unified ledger” anchored to central banks.
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) published its Annual Economic Report 2026 on Sunday 28 June, presented during the annual general meeting in Basel, Switzerland. The document devotes an entire chapter to stablecoins, titled “Anchoring trust in money: innovation beyond stablecoins”, concluding that dollar-pegged tokens do not meet the fundamental requirements of any monetary system.
According to the BIS report, stablecoins are found deficient on four essential properties: singleness, elasticity, interoperability, and integrity. Prices deviate from their pegs on secondary markets, redemptions involve friction, and the tokens resemble ETF shares more than payment instruments.
Total stablecoin market capitalisation stood at roughly 320 billion dollars at the end of May 2026, with over 99% of supply indexed to the US dollar. The dominant share is split between Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC. The report then models the macroeconomic effects of broader adoption: in a scenario calibrated on the United States, the net impact on GDP is slightly negative over the medium term. According to the BIS, higher funding costs for banks and a decline in lending outweigh the fiscal benefit generated by issuer demand for public debt. The drag remains contained even in extreme scenarios where the stablecoin market reaches 1 trillion, 2 trillion, or 3 trillion dollars.
The BIS also argues that stablecoins account for a significant share of illicit on-chain activity, circulating on permissionless blockchains where pseudonymity and self-custody wallets weaken KYC and anti-money-laundering controls. On this front, the report warns of the risk of “stablecoin dollarization”: in emerging markets, households could hold dollar-denominated tokens as a store of value, distorting capital flows and eroding the monetary sovereignty of their respective countries. For those following the debate on the digital euro, this is the same scenario the ECB uses to justify the urgency of a European CBDC as a counterweight to dollar stablecoins.
As an alternative, the BIS proposes a “unified ledger” that brings together tokenised central bank reserves, tokenised commercial bank money, and other regulated private instruments on a single platform, with central bank money as the anchor. The document cites Project Agora as proof of the model’s feasibility: a cross-border payments prototype involving eight central banks, the BIS itself, and more than 40 private institutions.
