Stablecoins under Stress in a National Economy: Transaction-Level Evidence from Austrian Crypto-Asset Service Providers

Jul 16, 2026

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Cryptoassets are increasingly intertwined with traditional finance, making their behavior during macro-financial stress central to financial stability and public digital money design. The work overcomes pseudonymity and missing geographic identifiers by using Austria’s regulatory registry that identifies on-chain addresses of licensed crypto-asset service providers. It reconstructs transaction activity across Bitcoin, Ether, USDC, and USDT through May 2025, separating retail-like from institutionally mediated flows. Findings show large global intermediation, strong counterparties concentration, divergent shock responses, and non-uniform stablecoin safe-haven behavior.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages55

Reading Time2 h 19 min

Abstract

Introduction

arXiv :2607 .08524v1 [ q-fin .GN] 9 Jul 2026 Stablecoins under Stress in a National Economy: Transaction-Level Evidence from Austrian Crypto-Asset Service Providers Pietro Saggese∗1,2, Michael Sigmund3 , Burkhard Raunig3 , Esther Segalla3 , Bernhard Haslhofer2 , and Christos A. Makridis2,4 1 IMT Scuola Alti Studi Lucca 2 Complexity Science Hub 3 Oesterreichische Nationalbank (OeNB) 4 Arizona State University July 10, 2026 Abstract Cryptoassets are increasingly entangled with the traditional financial system, and how this activity integrates into national economies and behaves under stress bears on financial stability and the design of public digital money. However, blockchain pseudonymity and the lack of geographic identifiers force existing work to rely on indirect proxies to infer and locate market participants. Here we use a regulatory registry that directly identifies the on-chain addresses of all crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) registered in Austria, reconstructing their on-chain transaction activity across Bitcoin, Ether, USDC, and USDT through May 2025, and separating retail-like from institutionally mediated flows. We find that Austrian CASPs intermediate roughly $30 billion with external counterparties and are integrated globally rather than domestically. In value, this activity is dominated by a few institutional counterparties; in number, by retail-like ones. Around three major shocks, the Terra-Luna collapse, the FTX bankruptcy, and the Silicon Valley Bank failure, the two groups respond through different mechanisms, and stablecoins do not act as a uniform safe haven. The clearest case is SVB, where retail-like deposits and institutional withdrawals are consistent with USDC’s two-tiered redemption mechanism. These patterns are invisible in aggregate data. Registry-based, transaction-level measurement thus offers a reproducible, cross-jurisdictional basis for monitoring how cryptoasset markets transmit risk. Keywords: Cryptoasset, Stablecoin, Crypto Asset Service Providers, Blockchain, Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, Silicon Valley Bank, FTX JEL codes: C81, E42, E58, F31, G19, G23, O33 ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail: [pietro.saggese@imtlucca.it](pietro.saggese@imtlucca.it) 1 Introduction How does the demand for digital assets respond to macro-financial shocks? The question is central to financial stability, monetary transmission, and the design of public digital money, yet it has resisted clean empirical answers. Cryptoassets are now a major asset class, with a total market capitalization of roughly $2 .2 trillion mid-2026, 1 and their growing entanglement with the traditional financial system, through stablecoin reserves, custodial intermediaries, and institutional participation, makes their behavior under stress a first-order concern for regulators and central banks. However, measuring how these markets interact with national financial systems faces a binding data constraint: blockchain transactions are pseudonymous, public networks can generate fresh addresses by design, and on-chain activity carries no geographic identifier. Existing work therefore infers jurisdiction-level activity from indirect proxies such as web traffic, IP geolocation, off-chain exchange data, or survey indices (Auer et al., 2025; Parino et al., 2018; Von Luckner et al., 2023; Makridis, 2025; Abramova et al., 2023), all of which are noisy, partial, and ill-suited to fine-grained behavioral analysis. Basic questions thus remain open: how large crypto activity is within an economy, how individuals reallocate across assets and custody structures under stress, and whether stablecoins serve the safe-haven function their issuers claim. In this paper, we address this gap by measuring, at the transaction level, how the cryptoasset activity intermediated by all licensed crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) in a national jurisdiction is structured and how it responds to stress. Our approach exploits a feature of

FAQs

Why is measuring cryptoasset activity under stress difficult with existing blockchain data?

Blockchain transactions are pseudonymous, networks can generate new addresses, and on-chain activity lacks geographic identifiers. Existing research therefore relies on indirect proxies that are noisy and ill-suited for fine-grained behavioral inference.

What data source enables the transaction-level measurement in this study?

The study uses Austria’s regulatory registry, which directly identifies the on-chain addresses of all crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) registered in Austria. From this address-to-entity registry, it reconstructs CASP activity on Bitcoin, Ether, USDC, and USDT through May 2025.

How do retail-like and institutional actors respond to major shocks according to the findings?

The two groups respond through different mechanisms. After shocks such as the Terra-Luna collapse, FTX bankruptcy, and Silicon Valley Bank failure, stablecoins do not behave as a uniform safe haven, and the clearest case is SVB where retail-like deposits and institutional withdrawals align with USDC’s two-tiered redemption mechanism.

Jul 16, 2026

Upload by Sage