Are stablecoins money?

The Economist, The Economist
5 min read3 Sep 2026, 04:42 PM IST
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An advertisement for the cryptocurrency Bitcoin is displayed on a building (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)
Summary
Policymakers’ job is to make them safe as well as useful

IN TEXTBOOKS MONEY is a means of exchange, a store of value and a unit of account. In life it is a giant confidence trick: people trade with it, save it and keep count with it because everyone else does. Notes are just slips of paper; coins, mere alloy. Most money is simply data: some in the form of “reserves”, liabilities of the central bank; much more of it created by banks calling loans and deposits into being at a keystroke.

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