Original title: Stablecoins under Stress in a National Economy: Transaction-Level Evidence from Austrian Crypto-Asset Service Providers
Pietro Saggese, Michael Sigmund, Burkhard Raunig, Esther Segalla +2 · July 2026
Cryptocurrency activity connects to regular finance, but because blockchains hide identities and locations, tracking real-world risk is difficult. Researchers solved this by using an official Austrian regulatory registry. This allowed them to link real crypto service providers directly to their blockchain addresses. They tracked movements in Bitcoin, Ether, USDC, and USDT through May 2025, splitting regular everyday users from large institutions. They found that these providers handled roughly USD 30 billion with outside parties, connecting globally rather than locally. Large institutions made up most of the value, while everyday users made up most transaction counts. During three major financial shocks, the two groups reacted through different mechanisms, showing that stablecoins do not serve as a uniform safe haven. During the Silicon Valley Bank failure, regular users deposited funds while institutions withdrew them.
Imagine a small country where every bank is required to post its daily cash flow on a public billboard, but the names are just codes. One day the government releases a master list matching each code to the actual bank. Now you can watch exactly how money moves. Before, you could only guess whether a cash crunch was coming from panicked locals or fleeing foreign investors. With the codes decoded, you see that when one specific bank in another country fails, local people run to deposit cash while big investors quietly wire it out. That is what this paper does — it decodes the pseudonyms to see who is actually moving the money and why.
Central banks, regulators, and anyone designing a digital euro or similar public digital money need to know how crypto actually flows under pressure. This paper shows that stablecoins — supposedly safe — behave differently depending on the shock, and that retail and institutional users react in opposite ways. Without registry-based data, these patterns are invisible, meaning regulators have been flying blind on a trillion-dollar market's integration with the real economy.
The paper is limited to Austrian-registered CASPs, so its geographic specificity may not generalize. It relies on a regulatory registry that identifies addresses only for registered entities, meaning unregistered or foreign CASPs interacting with Austrian users are not captured. The analysis covers only four cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ether, USDC, USDT) and three specific shock events. The distinction between retail-like and institutional flows is inferred from transaction patterns, not from direct customer data.
Ask anything about this paper. Answers come from its abstract, and say so when the abstract doesn't cover your question.
Stablecoins under Stress in a National Economy: Transaction-Level Evidence from Austrian Crypto-Asset Service Providers — Pietro Saggese, Michael Sigmund, Burkhard Raunig et al.
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.