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| Biagio Bossone |
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| ''Digital money and the law: the unfinished logic of e-money and the future of stablecoins'' |
| ( 2026, Vol. 46 No.2 ) |
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| Over the past two decades, regulators have sought to make digital money safe by layering prudential
safeguards onto electronic money and, more recently, stablecoins. Yet this regulatory evolution has
left unresolved a foundational legal question: who owns the money involved in a digital money
issuance—specifically, the funds paid in by users and the assets backing the issued digital value? This
article argues that the failure to clarify ownership has embedded a structural contradiction in digital-
money law. Instruments designed to function as custodial, cash-like value are legally constructed as
issuer liabilities, turning what is meant to be riskless money into credit by design. Tracing this logic
from the EU's e-money directives through their global diffusion, the article shows how a hybrid
custody–credit framework became regulatory orthodoxy across jurisdictions and was subsequently
inherited by stablecoin regulation, including the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA).
By conflating custody and credit, current regimes generate avoidable fragility and obscure the
monetary hierarchy. The article concludes that stablecoins force policymakers to confront a choice
long postponed by e-money law: either treat digital money as custody, with user ownership and
structural bankruptcy remoteness, or as credit, with issuers recognised and regulated as monetary
institutions. |
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| Keywords: electronic money, stablecoins, custody, ownership, float, customer funds, MiCA, monetary hierarchy |
JEL: E4 - Money and Interest Rates: General
E5 - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit: General |
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| Manuscript Received : Jul 02 2026 | | Manuscript Accepted : Jun 30 2026 |
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