The IMF’s latest stablecoin paper sharpens the policy tradeoff between dollar access and faster capital flight

A new IMF working paper is adding more structure to one of the most important unresolved questions in stablecoins: whether digital dollars mainly improve financial access, or whether they also create a faster transmission channel for stress in countries where foreign exchange is tightly controlled. The paper’s answer is not a simple yes or no. Instead, it suggests that stablecoins can be welfare-improving in normal conditions while becoming destabilizing in periods of acute exchange-rate pressure, which is exactly the kind of split outcome policymakers and market operators have been struggling to price into the next phase of adoption.

The study, published in IMF Working Papers as issue 144 and authored by economist Brandon Tan, focuses on economies with fixed or heavily managed exchange-rate regimes. In those systems, access to hard currency is often rationed through banks or official allocation channels, which means the true degree of currency misalignment is not always obvious in real time. In the paper’s setup, stablecoins matter because they can give households and firms another path to dollar-like claims outside the official queue. That can improve access to foreign currency and reveal information about market demand that would otherwise stay fragmented across private or informal trading channels.

But the paper’s central warning is that the same mechanism that improves access can also tighten coordination during a crisis. Because stablecoins generate a visible, high-frequency market price, they can turn scattered private concerns about devaluation into a common public signal. When that signal becomes more precise, market participants do not just learn more about exchange-rate pressure; they also learn more about what everyone else is likely to do. In the paper’s model, that reduces dispersion in beliefs and can make a run out of the local currency more synchronized once misalignment becomes severe enough.

That state-dependent logic is the most important takeaway. According to the paper’s abstract and registered DOI metadata, the access and allocation benefits dominate when currency misalignment is modest, meaning stablecoins can improve welfare in calmer conditions. But when misalignment is high, the coordination externality becomes more expensive. A deeper stablecoin market can strengthen exit incentives precisely because it sharpens the public signal around stress. In practical terms, that means the same stablecoin infrastructure that helps users obtain dollar exposure in ordinary periods may also accelerate pressure on reserves, capital controls or exchange-rate pegs when confidence weakens.

For the stablecoin industry, the implication is that distribution into frontier and tightly managed-currency markets cannot be treated as a purely payments-led growth story. Issuers and wallets often highlight lower-cost access, always-on settlement and broader financial reach. Those advantages are real, and the IMF paper does not dismiss them. But as adoption expands, infrastructure design starts to matter at the macro level: redemption pathways, exchange integrations, market depth and the visibility of onchain pricing can all influence how quickly local currency stress becomes collective behavior. That is especially relevant for the largest dollar stablecoins, whose liquidity and price discovery already operate across global venues rather than inside a single domestic banking perimeter.

For regulators, the paper points away from both extremes. It does not read like an argument for blanket prohibition, and it does not support a hands-off view that more dollar rails are automatically stabilizing. Instead, the paper points toward a contingent approach: preserve low-friction foreign-currency access in normal periods, but be prepared for temporary and targeted measures when pressure becomes run-like. That framing matters because many governments are now approaching stablecoins through payments, remittances and financial inclusion lenses, while the more difficult questions sit in balance-of-payments management, FX controls and crisis coordination. The policy stack may need to distinguish between ordinary use and stress use rather than relying on one permanent rule for both.

The broader significance for RWA and onchain finance is that stablecoins are no longer just a crypto settlement primitive. In many markets they are becoming a parallel access layer for dollar claims, and that gives them macroeconomic significance closer to payments infrastructure than to a niche trading tool. The IMF paper does not settle the debate, but it does clarify it: the key question is not whether stablecoins are good or bad for managed-currency systems in the abstract. The real question is how much informational power and coordination capacity a dollar stablecoin market adds when domestic confidence starts to wobble. As more real-world financial activity moves onto tokenized rails, that distinction will matter for both adoption strategy and policy design.