Banks campaigning to prevent stablecoins from draining their deposit base may already hold a simple but powerful competitive tool. A new working paper published by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) finds that higher bank deposit rates predict slower stablecoin growth, suggesting traditional lenders can influence adoption through their own pricing decisions.

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The findings add an empirical dimension to banks’ push to restrict stablecoin yield. Banks have argued that competition from digital dollars could erode the low-cost deposits that support lending. The research supports the existence of competition between the two channels, but suggests that banks have some capacity to defend their funding base.

Using weekly U.S. data from January 2019 through June 2025, BIS economist Iñaki Aldasoro and Rashad Ahmed of the Andersen Institute for Finance and Economics examined whether stablecoin holdings respond to changes in deposit returns.

Stablecoin market capitalization grew by an average of approximately 15% over a 10-week period in their sample. Their baseline estimate suggests that a one-basis-point increase in deposit interest rates, equivalent to 0.01 percentage point, reduced that growth by roughly three percentage points, to about 12%. A second method designed to isolate cause and effect produced an estimated reduction approximately three times larger, bringing stablecoin growth to about 6%.

Those results describe slower expansion, rather than a contraction in stablecoin supply. As noted by Decrypt , a one-basis-point increase is a sizable weekly change for savings rates, which typically move slowly.

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