The BIS paper “DeFiying Gravity? An Empirical Analysis of Cross-Border Bitcoin, Ether and Stablecoin Flows” by Raphael Auer, Ulf Lewrick, and Jan Paulick offers empirical support for several arguments raised in the recently published issue of Law & Contemporary Problems on regulating cryptoassets.

The finding that crypto flows largely bypass geographic frictions and capital controls reinforces the need for globally coordinated regulation, as emphasized in Douglas Arner, Tanvi Ratna, Sijuade Animashaun, Jatin Bedi, and Naveen Mishra’s “Centralization in Decentralized Finance” and Dirk Zetzsche and Julia Sinnig’s “The EU Approach to Digital Currencies,” which both highlight jurisdictional fragmentation and the limitations of national oversight.

The BIS’s evidence of regulatory circumvention strengthens the case made by Yesha Yadav, Jose Fernandez da Ponte, and Amy Davine Kim in “The Evolving Role of Digital Currencies in the Global Economy,” which examines how inconsistent regulatory frameworks across borders can encourage strategic behavior and increase systemic risk.

The observation that stablecoins and low-value Bitcoin transfers are increasingly used for remittances—particularly in corridors with high traditional costs—supports the argument in Carlos Cantú, Jon Frost, and Thomas Noone’s “Some Perspectives on the Regulation of Stablecoins” that regulatory approaches must account for both their speculative uses and their growing role as payment instruments.

Finally, the BIS findings on the growing scale and concentration of stablecoin flows reinforce concerns raised by Yuliya Guseva, Sangita Gazi, and Douglas Eakeley in “On Innovation and the Coexistence of Stablecoins and Central Bank Digital Currencies” and by Ross Buckley in “Implications for the Dollar of Central Bank Digital Currencies.” Both papers examine how large-scale stablecoin adoption could pose risks to monetary sovereignty and financial stability if left unregulated or poorly coordinated.

Find the links to the papers below.