Stablecoins under Stress in a National Economy: Transaction-Level Evidence from Austrian Crypto-Asset Service Providers

2026-07-09

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenge of characterizing the transactional behavior of cryptocurrency service providers within national economies and the flow dynamics of stablecoins during stress events, hindered by on-chain anonymity and the absence of geographic identifiers. By uniquely integrating Austrian regulatory registration data with multi-chain transaction tracking, the authors directly map all domestic crypto service providers’ on-chain addresses to real-world entities, reconstructing their activity across Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDC, and USDT while distinguishing retail from institutional flows. The analysis reveals that Austrian providers intermediate approximately $30 billion annually in cross-border funds, reflecting deep global integration. During shocks such as the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, retail deposits and institutional redemptions uncover a two-tier redemption mechanism for USDC, demonstrating that stablecoins do not uniformly function as safe-haven assets—an insight only discernible at the transaction-level granularity, thereby transcending the limitations of conventional aggregate analyses.

Abstract

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.

Problem

• stablecoins
• financial stress
• crypto-asset service providers
• transaction-level data
• market integration

Innovation

• transaction-level analysis
• crypto-asset service providers
• stablecoins under stress
• regulatory registry
• risk transmission