The Bank for International Settlements published its annual economic report on June 23, and the chapter on the future of money reads as a verdict on the year behind it. Stablecoins, the report argues, fail the test of singleness, the assurance that every form of money in an economy redeems at par against central bank money. Circulation on public, permissionless blockchains creates resilience and financial-crime problems. Wide adoption would eat into bank funding and credit provision. And in emerging economies with weaker fundamentals, demand for dollar-pegged tokens raises capital-flow volatility and chips away at monetary sovereignty.
The timing gives the document its edge. It landed eleven months after the United States passed the GENIUS Act and legalized, licensed and encouraged the instrument Basel spent a chapter arguing against. The report never names the law. It does not need to. Every criticism maps onto a design choice the US framework blessed, from public-chain circulation to the reserve model that ties token supply to Treasury bills. Washington and Basel are now formally committed to opposite answers on the same question, and the rest of the world writes its rulebooks somewhere between them.
The counter-offer is the unified ledger
The BIS is careful to pair the critique with an alternative. Tokenization, the report says, is worth having; the question is where it happens. The proposal is a unified ledger that brings tokenized commercial bank deposits and tokenized central bank reserves onto a shared programmable platform, keeping innovation inside the two-tier banking system. Project Agorá, the flagship demonstration, now spans eight central banks and more than 40 regulated institutions and has moved into real-value testing. New general manager Pablo Hernández de Cos framed the ambition as shaping the future of money “in the public interest while preserving trust.”
Taken on its own terms, the plan is coherent wholesale plumbing. Agorá upgrades correspondent banking, compresses settlement times and keeps central bank money at the centre of interbank life. Banks would gain most of what tokenization promises without ceding deposits to token issuers, and central banks would keep the anchor role the report considers non-negotiable. If the project delivers, cross-border interbank payments in a decade will be faster, cheaper and better supervised than they are today.
The adoption the report warns about is retail
The difficulty is that the stablecoin growth Basel worries about is not happening in interbank markets. A week before the annual report, the IMF published an analysis of stablecoins in Nigeria describing dollar tokens as a growing cross-border channel that reduces payment friction while raising new policy trade-offs. The users in that story are households protecting savings from a depreciating naira and businesses paying suppliers across borders that correspondent banking serves slowly and expensively. Argentina, Turkey and much of East Africa tell versions of the same story.
A unified ledger has no product for those users. It connects central banks and regulated institutions to each other; it does not put a dollar substitute in the pocket of a Lagos importer whose bank cannot. The report’s sovereignty warning is accurate as description, and that is what limits it as prescription. Dollarization through an app is happening because the formal system leaves specific demands unmet: stores of value that hold purchasing power, cross-border payments that clear in minutes at single-digit cost, accounts that do not require a banking relationship the local system will not extend. The official sector’s answer improves the formal system everywhere except at the point of unmet demand. Central banks in the affected countries understand this, which is why the practical policy responses, Nigeria’s move toward licensing stablecoins among them, look less like the BIS blueprint and more like regulated coexistence.
What to watch from here is whether the official-sector track produces anything a user can touch. Agorá has moved from proof of concept toward real-value testing, and the pilots worth following are the ones that reach corridors where dollarization pressure is live, because that is where the unified ledger’s promise gets tested against the app already on the phone. A wholesale platform that makes remittances into Nigeria or the Philippines materially cheaper through the banking system would be a genuine answer to stablecoin adoption. A faster interbank market in the G10 would not.
The report frames the choice ahead as innovation inside the system or fragmentation outside it. The framing arrives late. Savers and businesses across the markets the BIS worries about have been choosing for three years, and the annual report is best read as a plan to win back customers the official sector never tried to serve.