Crypto Community Downplays IMF Concerns About Stablecoins

A recent International Monetary Fund report warns of threats posed to emerging markets by stablecoins.

But as CoinDesk reported Wednesday (Dec. 10), some cryptocurrency experts say that the concerns flagged in the IMF’s report are not yet a serious threat, as the stablecoin market is not yet large enough to have a true systemic impact on emerging markets (EMs).

“It’s way too soon for stablecoins to have much of an impact on EM currency runs, and their total market size is still tiny relative to FX flows – being legalized by the GENIUS Act won’t be relevant for quite a while yet (the law is passed but not yet active, maybe Jan 2027),” Noelle Acheson, author of the Crypto is Macro Now newsletter, said in an interview with CoinDesk.

She added that the issue might never be relevant “for emerging markets whose traders have to follow local legislation which would probably frown on any use of stablecoins at all.”

Acheson said that while fiat-backed stablecoins have jumped from $5 billion in 2020 to almost $300 billion today, they are still primarily crypto trading on-ramps used to fund crypto purchases, as seen by USDT pairs dominating spot volume on major exchanges.

David Duong, head of institutional research at Coinbase, told CoinDesk that stablecoins’ limited scale and policy frictions keep them from having a systemic impact.

“Sure, stablecoins can accelerate flight‑to‑USD in countries where they’re already popular, but their overall scale remains small relative to cross‑border portfolio flows,” he said. “The bulk mechanics of bond/equity redemptions, NDF [non-deliverable forwards] channels, and mutual fund outflows would still dominate macro moves.”

As covered here, the IMF report says that stablecoin flows reached roughly $1.5 trillion in 2024, with especially high shares in corridors tied to emerging markets and developing economies.

“These flows are small compared to the approximately one quadrillion dollars in global cross-border payment activity but are non-trivial in specific regions and use cases,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this week.

Another theme from the report, PYMNTS added, concerns the relationship between stablecoins and the broader movement toward asset tokenization. Tokenization refers to representing traditional assets on distributed ledgers, allowing for programmability, peer-to-peer transfer and automated settlement.

“The IMF’s assessment of future demand for stablecoins is agnostic but acknowledges that if tokenized assets expand significantly, demand for stable settlement instruments could rise,” the report added.