BIS released its tokenized-ledger blueprint with a stablecoin warning

The Bank for International Settlements released its full 2025 Annual Economic Report at its annual general meeting on June 29, 2025, placing a central-bank-anchored “unified ledger” at the center of its vision for tokenized finance while arguing that stablecoins were not suitable as the monetary system’s foundation.

The intervention mattered because it separated two ideas often grouped together in digital-asset promotion: tokenization, which the BIS called potentially transformative, and privately issued stablecoins, which it judged against the institutional properties of money. The report arrived as lawmakers and financial companies were debating whether dollar-linked tokens could move from crypto trading rails into mainstream payments.

The June 29 release completed a staged publication

Chronology matters. The BIS had published the report’s dedicated chapter on the next-generation monetary system and an accompanying press release on June 24, 2025. The June 29 event was the release of the complete 126-page Annual Economic Report at the institution’s Basel meeting, not the first public appearance of every stablecoin conclusion.

A June 29 speech by BIS economic adviser Hyun Song Shin reinforced the institutional framing, describing stablecoins as a policy issue for central banks and connecting them to growing links across the financial system. The report also states that its views do not necessarily represent those of every BIS member central bank. It was an influential policy blueprint, not a binding rule, treaty or coordinated ban.

Stablecoins failed the BIS’s three tests

The BIS assessed monetary arrangements through singleness, elasticity and integrity. Singleness means different forms of the same currency are accepted at par. Elasticity means liquidity can expand when needed to settle large obligations without gridlock. Integrity means safeguards against fraud, money laundering and other illicit activity.

Its stablecoin critique was structural. Tokens can trade away from their promised redemption value, do not have direct central-bank settlement, and depend on reserve assets and an issuer’s redemption capacity. Public-blockchain bearer instruments can also circulate beyond an issuer’s direct oversight. The BIS therefore argued that stablecoins performed poorly as the mainstay of a monetary system, although adequately regulated tokens might retain a subsidiary role.

The report said more than 99% of stablecoins were denominated in U.S. dollars. That concentration led it to warn of “stealth dollarisation” in jurisdictions where residents use dollar tokens during inflation or foreign-exchange instability. This was a policy-risk assessment, not evidence that a specific country had lost monetary control on June 29.

The alternative kept central banks at the core

The BIS proposed a “trilogy” of tokenized central-bank reserves, commercial-bank money and government bonds on a programmable unified ledger. In that design, money and assets could be settled together, potentially reducing reconciliation steps, delays and counterparty risk in securities transactions and cross-border payments.

A unified ledger did not necessarily mean a public blockchain. The report explicitly allowed architectures that might or might not use distributed-ledger technology. Its model preserved the existing two-tier monetary structure: central-bank reserves would provide final settlement, while commercial banks would continue issuing deposits and supplying credit.

The BIS pointed to Project Agorá, then involving seven central banks and 43 private-sector institutions, as an experiment related to the blueprint. Participation did not prove the architecture was production-ready, cheaper at scale or agreed upon by all institutions.

A policy fault line, not a market verdict

By June 29, the U.S. Senate had passed the GENIUS Act on June 17 by 68–30, but the measure was not yet law. That contrast made the BIS report consequential: one major policy process was building rules for payment stablecoins while the central-bank forum argued they should remain peripheral to the monetary core.

No event-day price, volume, supply or fund-flow move can be attributed to the report from the reviewed evidence. The defensible conclusion is institutional rather than market-causal: the BIS endorsed tokenization while drawing a sharp boundary around who should issue settlement money, how compliance should work and where finality should reside.