Stablecoins under Stress in a National Economy: Transaction-Level Evidence from Austrian Crypto-Asset Service Providers
For financial regulators and central banks, the paper provides a reproducible, transaction-level method to monitor cryptoasset risk transmission within national economies, revealing patterns invisible in aggregate data.
Using a regulatory registry that identifies on-chain addresses of all Austrian crypto-asset service providers, the study reconstructs transaction activity across Bitcoin, Ether, USDC, and USDT through May 2025, finding that Austrian CASPs intermediate roughly USD 30 billion globally. Around three major shocks (Terra-Luna, FTX, SVB), stablecoins did not act as a uniform safe haven, with retail and institutional responses differing, particularly during SVB where USDC's two-tiered redemption mechanism drove distinct behaviors.
Cryptoassets are increasingly entangled with the traditional financial system, and how this activity integrates into national economies and behaves under stress bears on financial stability and the design of public digital money. However, blockchain pseudonymity and the lack of geographic identifiers force existing work to rely on indirect proxies to infer and locate market participants. Here we use a regulatory registry that directly identifies the on-chain addresses of all crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) registered in Austria, reconstructing their on-chain transaction activity across Bitcoin, Ether, USDC, and USDT through May 2025, and separating retail-like from institutionally mediated flows. We find that Austrian CASPs intermediate roughly USD 30 billion with external counterparties and are integrated globally rather than domestically. In value, this activity is dominated by a few institutional counterparties; in number, by retail-like ones. Around three major shocks, the Terra-Luna collapse, the FTX bankruptcy, and the Silicon Valley Bank failure, the two groups respond through different mechanisms, and stablecoins do not act as a uniform safe haven. The clearest case is SVB, where retail-like deposits and institutional withdrawals are consistent with USDC's two-tiered redemption mechanism. These patterns are invisible in aggregate data. Registry-based, transaction-level measurement thus offers a reproducible, cross-jurisdictional basis for monitoring how cryptoasset markets transmit risk.