Category: Web/Tech

That is a paper by Paul Belleflamme and Eric Toulemonde, from a few years ago:

We analyze the effects of various taxes on competing two-sided platforms. First, we consider nondiscriminating taxes. We show that specific taxes are entirely passed to the agents on the side on which they are levied; other agents and platforms are left unaffected. Transaction taxes hurt agents on both sides and benefit platforms. Ad valorem taxes are the only tax instrument that allows the tax authority to capture part of the platforms’ profits. Second, regarding asymmetric taxes, we show that agents on the untaxed side benefit from the tax. At least one platform, possibly the taxed one, benefits from the tax.

This may all turn out to matter more if the new multinational corporate tax regime comes into existence.  Of course you can vary the assumptions further yet, and get additional and differing results, but please keep in mind: the tax you impose is not the incidence you get.

I was curious about if banks had many use cases for stablecoins, so I talked to [redacted] who works at a nationwide bank that focuses on small business lending. The use case he mentioned was that sometimes they need cash very quickly to stay within their requirements but wires are slow and cumbersome. If you could use a crypto network, the settlement time in minutes would be a big advantage.

The mechanics don’t quite work out because they would also want to use a product that does not change valuations compared to dollars. Stabecoins should fit the bill, but to transfer stablecoins from one bank account to another you would have to wire or ACH someone like Coinbase, do the transaction on chain, then withdraw the money from coinbase. So it would not be fast.

It is possible to imagine where every bank has their own stablecoin backed by US dollars they hold 1:1. It’d be like the days of banks issuing their own gold back notes. If Alice Bank needed more USD, they could borrow from Bob Bank. The actual mechanism might be that Bob Bank uses cash reserves to instantly create USDB and sends the USDB to Alice Bank’s wallet. Alice Bank then goes to Uniswap and trades USDB for their own USDA stablecoin. Alice Bank then retires those stablecoins and releases cash from their stablecoin cash reserves into their general fund. Any customer of Alice Bank or Bob Bank could do this same transaction with other bank customers to have cash faster than an ACH.

Can this happen today? Uniswap 3.0 is a leap forward for adding liquidity for automated market making and is especially beneficial for stablecoin transactions. There are practical limits on small transaction sizes and very large transaction sizes. The biggest practical transaction is limited by liquidity in the trading pools. Uniswap 3.0 should make this much larger than previous automated market makers, the actual amount depends on how much liquidity the market makers provide. The smallest size is limited by fees. Uniswap is launching Layer 2 scaling very soon, but the scaling is optimistic roll ups that utilize fraud proofs. If the banks were only transacting in Layer 2 this would not be a problem, but with fraud proofs it can take one week to take funds out of Layer 2 into the main Layer 1 chain. ZK-SNARK based roll ups would fix this, allowing instant settlement, and are progressing rapidly, but aren’t available yet. Blockchain technologies are still somewhat immature for this use case, but that capability is rapidly approaching.

Banks are so regulated they may not want to get involved without regulators giving them a nod. If the government favors a digital dollar, they may not want to give that nod. I think China has made its preference clear. They want a digital yuan and independent crypto networks will be subordinated. Very soon governments and central banks might have a choice between writing 100 pages of regulation that clarify standards for registered banks creating stablecoins and de facto creating a digital dollar system or embarking on a very large project to create their own digital dollar that requires much more work and owning implementation risk.

Will be fun to watch!

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, and here is one excerpt, related to earlier ideas from the New Monetary Economics:

The most common worry is that a central bank digital currency, or CBDC, would lead to disintermediation, with individuals or wholesalers putting their money into a CBDC system rather than commercial banks. The result would be fewer loans and less private-sector economic activity.

CBDC proponents typically say regulation can fix this problem. They favor some combination of issuance limits on CBDC units, CBDC access for wholesalers and major players only, or penalty interest rates or fees on CBDC holdings.

Yet all of these ideas create barriers — you might even call them “capital controls” — between ordinary dollars and CBDC dollars. If there are limits or barriers to dollar-to-CBDC conversion, dollars and CBDC units will not sell for the same price. Why should they? They perform different functions for different clienteles. Of course if the Fed allows unrestricted conversions, a one-to-one price would be enforced by arbitrage. But such open and unfettered privileges are precisely what policy advocates are seeking to limit.

The result would be a bit like the Chinese system. The yuan has for a long time had one value within China and another in world markets, with the difference being enforced by capital controls. And with a Chinese digital currency on the way, China may soon have (at least) three different currency prices.

In this new world, people will ask whether the U.S. dollar unit of account refers to “ordinary dollars” or to CBDC dollars. There might be two competing “dollar units of account” — or, more plausibly, retail prices would continue to be denominated in terms of ordinary dollars and the CBDC would have a floating exchange rate with respect to these “retail dollars.”

…the price of the CBDC dollar would become both a major policy variable and a major indicator of where central bank policy is headed. To what extent does the Fed wish to allow transactions, intermediation and resources to flow into the CBDC-linked sector? Current debates about open-market operations or interest on reserves will become arcane and outdated. The regulations roping off the CBDC sector from the retail-dollar sector would become truly significant, and would give the Fed (and other regulatory parties) much greater influence over sectoral allocation.

Over time, the CBDC financial sector would become much larger, as more of the economy digitizes and demands the hypermodern CBDC payment and settlement system. That would mean that the dominant U.S. currency — the CBDC dollar —would be fully separate from the mainstream accounting unit, namely the retail dollar.

Whether some other currency might replace the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency is a perennial debate. Maybe the real alternative to the dollar is … the CBDC dollar.

There is further relevant analysis at the link.