Sophia Le Vesconte

The role of financial market infrastructure for stablecoins

This Spotlight article outlines certain roles a financial market infrastructure (FMI) could play in the stablecoin ecosystem and how this may support policy objectives. In particular, we discuss:

• the significance and legal characteristics of stablecoins, focusing on their unique aspects versus other digital settlement assets;
• the role(s) that an FMI could play in supporting settlements in stablecoins among financial institutions and in managing systemic risks more broadly; and
• certain legal and regulatory considerations, including to illustrate stablecoin-related activities an FMI may be able to conduct within the scope of existing frameworks and authorisations.

Smart contracts: navigating a course between a consensus arrangement and a legal contract

In this Spotlight article, the authors propose a rebuttal to one of the conclusions in ‘Sailing into the rules of smart contracts’, an article co-authored by Akber Datoo and Jeffrey Golden and published in the June edition of this journal ((2021) 6 JIBFL 387).