Marnix Amand came to economics by way of engineering and central banking. A senior lecturer at Yale Jackson and in the Economics Department, he spent years in policy roles at the Dutch Central Bank, the Dutch Finance Ministry, and France Stratégie, developing a drive to move past metaphors for a deeper understanding of how digital currencies work. He joined the faculty at the University of Lausanne before coming to Yale’s Jackson School and Department of Economics in 2017.

Lately, stablecoins have captured his attention. Dollar-backed digital currencies have been circulating on the margins of global finance for over a decade, but a new wave of legislation have moved them to the center of serious policy debate. Amand has engaged with policymakers on what stablecoins could mean for the plumbing of international trade, and advocated for the subject to feature at the 2026 Transatlantic Bridge Conference, co-hosted by Yale Jackson.

Amand teaches macroeconomics and the economics of the European Union, and his research centers on international trade and firm size. He explained his current work in a recent interview.

For readers with only a vague idea of what cryptocurrency is, where does stablecoin fit in?

The simplest version: Bitcoin is worth whatever the market says it is on any given day — which is why you hear about it rising and crashing. Stablecoins don’t do that, because by construction they’re pegged to the dollar. One stablecoin equals one dollar. Hence the name.

That sounds simple, but a lot of questions immediately follow: who guarantees that? By what mechanism? What happens in a crisis? The answers are actually quite interesting. But the basic idea is a digital currency with the stability of the dollar and, in theory, the efficiency advantages of blockchain technology. At least, that’s what its proponents would like.

What’s the case for stablecoins in international trade?

The existing international payment system is surprisingly clunky. A lot of trade happens in dollars, so you don’t always need foreign exchange — but even when you don’t, the correspondent banking system that routes payments between countries is slow and expensive. Fintechs have already shortcut this for individuals. And many countries have created efficient domestic payment systems. Large-scale trade payments are next.

Stablecoins offer two improvements. The first is cost and speed. The second is more interesting: conditional payments, what the field calls payment versus delivery. The problem with buying a container of goods from China is timing. Pay before it ships, you’re at risk — what if it sinks? Pay on arrival, the seller is at risk — you could change your mind mid-Pacific. So we have letters of credit, insurance, intermediaries. It works, but it adds costs.

A stablecoin smart contract works like escrow without an escrow account. I hand you a hundred-dollar bill that’s in your pocket, but it’s not spendable until the job is done. I’ve already paid, so I can’t take it back — but you don’t have access until delivery is confirmed. The same logic applies to currency swaps: rather than paying dollars in the morning and receiving euros in the afternoon, with all the counterparty risk that implies, the payments either both go through simultaneously or neither does. A German bank, Bankhaus Herstatt, actually failed in 1974 in exactly that scenario. We still call it Herstatt risk.

What are the main obstacles?

Several. Trust and adoption: nobody will use a stablecoin system launched by an unknown party. It needs credible players — J.P. Morgan has already started something along these lines. The same logic applies to supplier networks: if Amazon runs its payments through a stablecoin system, its suppliers may not have much room to say no.

Then there are the limits of what smart contracts can actually resolve. They reduce certain kinds of risk, but disputes don’t disappear, they just move. What if I think you did a bad job cleaning my basement and you think you did a great job? Who decides whether the payment is released? And money isn’t supposed to be conditional in principle. A hundred-dollar bill is a hundred-dollar bill. You’re asking people to revise some fairly deep assumptions.

Finally, regulation. We spent 150 years figuring out how to regulate banks — imperfectly, as 2008 reminded us. Are stablecoins held to the same standard? Until recently, the honest answer was no. Most were domiciled in Caribbean jurisdictions with lax rules, which is partly why some operators ended up in legal trouble.

Has the GENIUS Act changed that?

It has, despite its many flaws, made significant improvements in this area. The law, passed at the start of the current administration, brings stablecoins onshore. A US-regulated, US-based stablecoin is a fundamentally different animal from one registered in St. Kitts and Nevis. The legislation isn’t perfect, but it creates a framework where none existed before.

There’s also a statecraft dimension that deserves more attention. The dollar’s dominance in global finance is one of the most powerful tools the US has. The ability to impose financial sanctions — on Russia, on Iran, on terrorist organizations — depends on the US being the indispensable node in the international payment system. Dollar-denominated, US-regulated stablecoins could extend that dominance into new digital infrastructure. But if other countries build their own parallel systems — China is actively developing central bank digital currencies partly to insulate itself from sanctions — the picture looks different. It’s one of the reasons I pushed for stablecoins to be on the agenda at the 2025 Transatlantic Bridge conference.

You came to this through central banking, not through the crypto world. Does that shape how you think about it?

I think so. I worked at the Dutch Central Bank in 2011 and 2012, and the questions that interested me there were about the fundamentals of money and payment systems. When Bitcoin emerged, the popular explanations frustrated me: “mining” metaphors that didn’t really explain what bitcoin creation actually was. I wanted to understand the mechanism. What is the algorithm doing?

What I concluded fairly quickly was that cryptocurrency, as originally conceived, is a brilliant solution to a problem nobody was really asking to have solved. Building a fully decentralized payment system with no central authority is genuinely hard, and the cryptography that solved it is ingenious. But did we need that? I’m not sure.

Stablecoins feel different. They’re addressing a real inefficiency in how money moves around the world. My undergrad degree was in engineering, and I think that shapes my instinct: understand the system before you make claims about it. What is it actually doing? Where does it break? That’s still the question I’m asking.