Matthias Obrecht

Cross-border payments remain among the most expensive, slowest, and least accessible financial services globally. Stablecoins have emerged as a working alternative in the corridors underserved by traditional correspondent banking, processing significant volume alongside traditional rails, but questions of trust, reserve integrity, adoption, and systemic risk remain unresolved.

As regulatory frameworks mature across jurisdictions, this roundtable will explore the question of whether stablecoins are poised to graduate from a parallel system into genuine cross-border payment infrastructure, and what has to be true about their design, governance, and regulatory treatment for that to happen.

With payment-native banks, institutional settlement networks, and central banks at the table, the conversation will move beyond the technology debate to the harder questions of standards, coexistence, and who bears the risk when settlement infrastructure fails at scale.

In recent years, the function of popular cryptocurrencies has shifted. While originally designed as payment instruments, they are nowadays more frequently used as highly volatile investment objects by a variety of investors including retail investors. While a BIS Working Paper showed that between 2015 and 2022 an estimated 73-81% of retail investors have likely lost money on their initial investment in Bitcoin, recent reviews by IOSCO and FSB found that investor protection is still underdeveloped in this area.

This raises the question how and to what extent investors, especially retail investors, must be protected. Starting with a discussion on the available data, the panellists will discuss gaps in current regulation and concepts for an appropriate cryptocurrency regulation architecture in the area of (retail) investor protection.