FSB sizes stablecoin market at $300 billion, finds data blind spots on holders
DeFi & Yields ·
The Financial Stability Board's new note on cross-border stablecoin risk puts the sector's value near $300 billion and warns that regulators still cannot reliably trace who holds the tokens or where redemption pressure might surface.
Published October 12, 2026, the note estimates the market stayed roughly flat over the prior year, with 99 per cent of value tied to the US dollar, according to defiprime.com. The FSB treats a token as a global stablecoin once it has actual or potential use spanning multiple jurisdictions and enough scale to matter for financial stability, whether through payments, as a store of value, or through links to broader markets.
The core concern is jurisdictional mismatch: the entity issuing a token, the reserves backing it, the legal claims holders can make, and the markets where it trades can each fall under different national authorities. Because tokens circulate continuously on secondary markets through pseudonymous addresses, an issuer may have no visibility into who holds its liabilities, where those holders are based, or which location will generate redemption demand. Reserve assets, by contrast, stay anchored to specific jurisdictions and follow the trading hours and settlement rules of wherever those assets are held, creating a timing gap that round-the-clock trading can widen during a selloff, even as deep secondary markets can also pull a token back toward its peg through arbitrage.
The FSB outlines three channels through which stress could spill into traditional finance: forced sales of reserve assets, withdrawals of bank deposits to cover redemptions, and disruptions where a stablecoin is embedded in real-economy payments or settlement, alongside foreign-exchange exposure tied to cross-border use. Multi-issuer structures draw particular scrutiny, since affiliated issuers can share liability for a single token while holding separate reserve pools — meaning redemption demand could concentrate at one affiliate while another holds the matching reserves, leaving the system dependent on reserve rebalancing, market access, and coordination that can all falter under stress.
A related development in the same cluster shows the FSB also issuing a broader framework for monitoring cross-border stablecoin risk, pointing toward coordinated international oversight rather than purely domestic rules.
Left unresolved is how regulators intend to close the data gaps the note itself describes, including how insolvency claims would be assigned among pseudonymous holders and which national insolvency regime would even apply to a multi-jurisdiction arrangement. The FSB also flags that emerging market and developing economies could hit systemic exposure thresholds at lower adoption levels than advanced economies, given risks of currency substitution and strain on domestic banking systems — a dimension the note raises but does not yet quantify.