Daniel Aronoff

Daniel Aronoff, F. Christopher Calabia, Anders Brownworth et al.

U.S. dollar stablecoins are increasingly used as payment and settlement instruments beyond cryptocurrency markets. With the enactment of the GENIUS Act in 2025, the United States established the first comprehensive federal framework governing their issuance, backing, and supervision. This paper evaluates the financial, technological, and regulatory risks that may arise as GENIUS-compliant stablecoins scale into mainstream use. We show that maintaining par-value redemption may depend not only on backing-asset quality, but also on the functioning of Treasury and repo markets, the balance-sheet capacity of broker-dealers, and the operational reliability of blockchain-based transaction rails. Even conservatively backed stablecoins can face stress from redemption surges, market-intermediation bottlenecks, or technological disruptions. We argue that durable stability will likely require an integrated approach spanning financial-market infrastructure, prudential regulation, and software governance. While grounded in U.S.\ law, the analysis identifies principles that are relevant for regulators in other jurisdictions developing stablecoin regimes.

Daniel Aronoff, Kristian Praizner, Armin Sabouri

Bitcoin transaction fees will become more important as the block subsidy declines, but fee formation is hard to study with blockchain data alone because the relevant queueing environment is unobserved. We develop and estimate a structural model of Bitcoin fee choice that treats the mempool as a market for scarce blockspace. We assemble a novel, high-frequency mempool panel, from a self-run Bitcoin node that records transaction arrivals, exits, block inclusion, fee-bumping events, and congestion snapshots. We characterize the fee market as a Vickery-Clarke-Groves mechanism and derive an equation to estimate fees. In the first-stage we estimate a monotone delay technology linking fee-rate priority and network state to expected confirmation delay. We then estimate how fees respond to that delay technology and to transaction characteristics. We find that congestion is the main determinant of delay; that the marginal value of priority is priced in fees, which is increasing in the gradient of confirmation time reduction per movement up in the fee queue; and that transactor choice of RBF, CPFP, and block conditions have economically important effects on fees.

Daniel Aronoff, Robert M. Townsend

We construct an empirically founded model of a repo trade intermediated by two broker-dealers and prove multiple equilibrium and the existence of equilibrium at the joint profit maximizing volume of trade. We then present a smart contract that resolves multiple equilibrium by requiring each broker-dealer to report its client schedule and its minimum hurdle spread, and implementing a selection rule that filters out hurdle-infeasible outcomes. Whenever there exists an equilibrium that exceeds both hurdle spreads, the protocol selects the joint profit maximizing feasible trade and thereby avoids a collapse to no trade. The smart contract is a machine executed algorithm which eliminates the need for trust. Hardware and cryptography are used to prevent leakage of broker-dealer client trade schedules, and to enable privacy-protected auditing with zero-knowledge proofs of the integrity of computations. The outcome can be implemented by a myopic strategy where a broker-dealer truthfully reports its own variables without anticipating its counterparty's reports. This minimizes cognitive and computational complexity, thereby making our smart contract suitable for real-world deployment.