Stablecoins and the Monetary Order: What Is at Stake and What Should Drive their Design?

The global monetary system has a plumbing problem. Correspondent banking is slow, expensive, and exclusive, and now a $300 billion stablecoin market has grown around it. Yet 97% of that market is dollar-denominated, issuers hold hundreds of billions in short-term Treasuries, already impacting yields, and the largest stablecoin carries rating agencies’ lowest stability ratings.

Stablecoins could become genuinely useful payments infrastructure: for cross-border payments, programmable settlement, and treasury operations. In this roundtable we explore what it takes to make stablecoins truly stable and useful for broad adoption, and why Switzerland is well-placed to help (re-)define what responsible stablecoin design looks like.