Dollar stablecoins have spread fastest in Lagos, Buenos Aires and Istanbul rather than Frankfurt or Tokyo, and the reason is not app design. A resident of a high-inflation economy can hold a dollar claim on a phone without a bank account abroad. That is now large enough to concern the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements, because it looks like an old problem, currency substitution, moving through a new channel.
Where the demand comes from
Three uses recur in the evidence: protecting savings from depreciation, receiving remittances, and settling trade that was already priced in dollars. None of this is new behaviour. What is new is the rail.
Argentina is the clearest case. A report published on 30 August 2026 by the venture firm a16z crypto, using data from the analytics firm Artemis, found that stablecoins account for 94% of all peso-denominated crypto trading volume, the highest share Artemis records for any national currency. The figure describes crypto trading activity, not household savings, and it comes from a firm with a commercial interest in the sector, so it is directional rather than definitive. It sits alongside a legal channel: Argentina eased restrictions on buying dollars in April 2025, and by late August 2026 the premium on digital dollars over the official exchange rate had narrowed to about 4%, according to reporting on the same study.
Turkey shows the pattern under a currency that has weakened for longer. A white paper from Boğaziçi University's Center for Applied Research in Finance, by Cenk Karahan and Vedat Akgiray, reported in April 2026, put Turkey's stablecoin transaction volume at 4.3% of GDP between April 2023 and March 2024, nearly $38 billion, and concluded that this was the highest ratio to economic output of any country. The authors recommend a domestically controlled dollar stablecoin followed by a lira-pegged one; that is an academic proposal, not policy.
Nigeria supplies the clearest remittance evidence, because the IMF has written about it directly. A note by Axel Schimmelpfennig, the IMF's mission chief for Nigeria, and the economist Bo Zhao, published on 16 June 2026, cites Chainalysis data showing about $59 billion in crypto-asset inflows to Nigeria, including stablecoins, in the year to June 2024, and says Nigeria has accounted for roughly 60% of stablecoin inflows into sub-Saharan Africa since 2019. Coverage of the note links the growth to sharp naira depreciation, high inflation and limited access to foreign exchange in 2023–2024, and to the central bank's February 2021 restriction on banks serving crypto exchanges, which pushed activity to peer-to-peer channels. Chainalysis ranked Nigeria second on its Global Crypto Adoption Index in 2024 and sixth in 2025; that is a vendor index, best read as an activity ranking rather than a market share.
The limit of all these figures is the same: on-chain analysis sees wallet flows, not purpose, so almost none of them separate savings from speculation from ordinary payments. Reserve composition and the instruments behind the tokens are covered in our institutional view of stablecoins; this piece is about where the demand originates and what it does to policy.
What the IMF and the BIS have said, and in what capacity
Three kinds of institutional statement tend to be run together in coverage of this topic, and they carry different weight.
A departmental paper
The IMF's "Understanding Stablecoins", a departmental paper published on 2 December 2025 by Tobias Adrian and co-authors in the Fund's Monetary and Capital Markets Department, is a staff assessment rather than one official's view. It states that stablecoins "may contribute to currency substitution, increase capital flow volatility by circumventing capital controls, and fragment payment systems unless interoperability is ensured", and that these risks "could be more pronounced in countries experiencing high inflation, in countries with weaker institutions, or in countries with diminished confidence in the domestic monetary framework."
A working paper with its own dataset
BIS Working Paper 1370, "Dollarisation and monetary control: what lessons for the rise of stablecoins?", published on 21 July 2026 by Boris Hofmann, Aaron Mehrotra and Jan Paulick, compares foreign-currency deposits with dollar-pegged stablecoin inflows across more than 130 economies. It finds that both forms of dollarisation are associated with similar drivers, including strong exchange-rate pass-through and sovereign or banking crises, and that both are persistent once established. Its sharpest finding is that "unlike deposit dollarisation, stablecoin flows seem to be largely unaffected by either broad or specific capital flow restrictions", which the authors attribute to stablecoins partly circulating outside the regulatory perimeter. Like all BIS working papers it carries the authors' views rather than the BIS's, but it is the most concrete evidence behind the claim that stablecoins weaken capital flow management.
A speech
Dan Katz, speaking as the IMF's First Deputy Managing Director, gave a lecture titled "Stablecoins: Promise, Risks, and Policy Choices for Emerging Markets" at the University of Cape Town on 7 August 2026. It is a speech, one official's framing for a particular audience, not Fund doctrine. Katz put stablecoin market capitalisation at around $300 billion, almost 99% of it dollar-denominated, with 2025 transactions above $30 trillion, of which $6.1 trillion were cross-border and around $390 billion related to payments, against a global cross-border payments market estimated at about one quadrillion dollars a year. The more distinctive argument was aimed at governments hoping a local-currency stablecoin would ease dollarisation: putting local and dollar stablecoins on the same blockchain could make conversion between them easier and bypass the intermediaries that currently give authorities levers over capital flows, so a domestic token could speed up the substitution it was meant to slow. Katz urged authorities to bring on-ramps, off-ramps and on-chain exchange points within regulation. That is an argument, not a modelled result.
How specific countries have responded
Responses vary with the starting point, and the status of each measure matters.
Nigeria has built a perimeter on paper. According to a June 2026 practice guide by the law firm EandC Legal, the Investments and Securities Act 2025, enacted in March 2025, reclassifies digital assets as securities and, under Section 357, treats all stablecoins, including fiat-backed ones, as securities; the SEC's Rules on Digital Assets, as amended in June 2025, require 1:1 reserves with monthly independent attestations and quarterly SEC audits; and the central bank's anti-money-laundering supervision pilot for a group of virtual asset service providers, which include the consortium behind the naira token cNGN, began on 31 March 2026. The guide describes these as in force. Iwa Salami, a professor of financial law at the University of East London, wrote on 3 August 2026 that stablecoins "are largely unaddressed in Nigerian rules although use is growing fast." The two accounts can both hold: the statutory perimeter exists, but whether it is applied to the flows the IMF describes is a separate question. The IMF note set out four priorities: safeguard monetary stability, regulate stablecoins in line with international frameworks, gather better data on stablecoin flows, and upgrade payment infrastructure so that stablecoins are not filling its gaps. Those are recommendations, not measures taken.
Turkey has regulated the service providers rather than the tokens. Law No. 7518, adopted on 26 June 2024 and in force since July 2024, requires crypto asset service providers to be licensed by the Capital Markets Board. On the monetary side, Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye governor Fatih Karahan, at a briefing on the bank's Inflation Report on 13 August 2026 in remarks later republished by the BIS, said the bank had run no one-week repo auctions since the previous reporting period, kept money-market rates near 40%, and that the share of Turkish lira deposits had risen to 62% in the second quarter of 2026. The speech does not mention stablecoins, so any link between tight rates and stablecoin demand is inference, not something the governor claimed.
Lebanon is the starkest test. In a piece for OMFIF published on 22 July 2026, Mustafa Dah of the Lebanese American University describes how banking failure and the currency's collapse since the 2019 crisis have deepened reliance on cash dollars. Banque du Liban Decision 13790, introduced in January 2026, set up a regime for electronic-payment providers and prohibits them from issuing, dealing in or facilitating virtual assets without BdL authorisation; that is in force. But as of July 2026, Dah writes, the central bank's published circulars do not appear to include stablecoin-specific authorisation rules, and residents can still use offshore platforms or transfer tokens directly between wallets. Dah also notes BIS research identifying Lebanon, under a niche-adoption scenario, as one of several crisis-hit economies where pockets of dollar-stablecoin holdings could emerge. The caution is plain: stablecoins "cannot recapitalise banks, restore trapped deposits or determine how Lebanon's losses should be allocated", and they risk what Dah calls infrastructure dollarisation, dependence on foreign private systems as well as a foreign currency.
Vietnam has drawn a dated line. Its Law on Digital Technology Industry, passed on 14 June 2025 and in force since 1 January 2026, recognises crypto assets as a category of digital asset but not as legal tender or a means of payment. Resolution 05/2025/NQ-CP of 9 September 2025 set up a five-year pilot for licensed crypto trading, settled in dong, which law firm commentary says excludes assets backed by fiat currency or securities, so dollar stablecoins such as USDT sit outside the licensed market.
Benefits, risks, and what is unresolved
The case for stablecoins in these markets is concrete. The World Bank's Remittance Prices Worldwide put the global average cost of sending $200 at 6.36% in the third quarter of 2025, against a target of 3% by 2030; remittance corridors are where the efficiency argument is strongest. The same settlement mechanics, with the issuer freezes and redemption limits that come with them, are examined for corporate treasurers in our look at stablecoin payments; households sending remittances face a smaller version of the same counterparty question.
The case for caution is concrete too. The IMF paper, the BIS working paper and the Katz lecture agree on the mechanism: stablecoins let residents reach dollars in ways capital flow restrictions have so far not reached, and the effect is likely to be largest where institutions are weakest. What remains unresolved is scale. By Katz's own figures, payment-related stablecoin flows are small beside global cross-border payments, and none of the sources above sets a threshold at which faster substitution becomes a financial stability problem rather than a payments improvement. For the rules major jurisdictions have actually adopted, see what regulators permitted in 2026.
This describes publicly reported evidence and institutional statements; it is not investment, tax or legal advice.