Stablecoin Integration and Stress Transmission Through Crypto-Asset Service Providers: Evidence from Austria
Pietro Saggese, Michael Sigmund, Burkhard Raunig, Esther Segalla, Bernhard Haslhofer, Christos Makridis
Stablecoins are increasingly entangled with traditional finance, making their response to stress a financial stability concern. However, blockchain pseudonymity and the lack of geographic identifiers force existing work to rely on indirect proxies to infer and locate market participants. In this paper, we exploit a regulatory registry that directly identifies the on-chain addresses of every crypto-asset service provider (CASP) registered in Austria at the end of 2024, reconstructing their Bitcoin, Ether, USDT, and USDC activity through May 2025. Austrian CASPs intermediate roughly $30 billion in cumulative external transfers, while transfers among them are negligible. Combining two transaction-level signals, interaction with CASP cold wallets and on-chain transaction frequency, we classify CASP counterparty activity as retail-like or institutionally mediated. Around stress events, the two groups exhibit distinct flow responses that are obscured in aggregate data. After the FTX bankruptcy, we observe retail-like withdrawals and institutional deposits across assets. After Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) failure, retail-like USDC deposits and institutionally mediated withdrawals are consistent with USDC's asymmetric redemption access. Registry-based, transaction-level measurements thus offer a reproducible basis for cross-jurisdictional monitoring of how cryptoasset markets transmit risk.
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