The institution that serves as the central bank for central banks just delivered a pointed message to the stablecoin industry: you can’t do this alone.
Gaston Gelos, Deputy Head at the Bank for International Settlements, told the Reuters podcast “The Big View” that stablecoins and digital tokens “still depend on central banks to work smoothly.” The comments arrived alongside the release of the BIS Annual Economic Report’s third chapter on June 23, 2026, which lays out a detailed case for why these instruments need institutional anchoring to avoid becoming systemic risks.
What the BIS actually found
The BIS report zeroes in on three fundamental problems with how stablecoins currently work: limited redeemability, insufficient elasticity, and constrained liquidity. In English: when things get stressed, stablecoins can’t always be cashed out at face value, they can’t expand or contract supply to meet demand the way traditional money does, and they sometimes lack the depth of market needed to handle large transactions smoothly.
The report critiques existing stablecoin arrangements for what it calls “deviations from par value.” The core argument from the BIS is structural. Modern money works through what economists call a two-tier system: central banks issue the base money that anchors everything, and commercial banks create the credit that flows through the economy. Stablecoins, as currently designed, sit outside this architecture.
