🟡 The Dual Face of Stablecoins: As Convenient as They Are Vulnerable

📅 Fecha

23 de julio de 2025

✍️ Autor y fuente

황석진 (Prof. Hwang Seok-Jin, Dongguk Univ.)
Publicación: 주간조선

🧾 Summary (non-simplified)

The article explores the dual nature of stablecoins in the digital finance ecosystem, emphasizing both their growing institutional legitimacy and their inherent risks — particularly regarding AML (Anti-Money Laundering). Following the U.S. GENIUS Act and Japan/EU stablecoin frameworks, Korea is now accelerating legislative discussions on won-based stablecoins. While the article acknowledges the technological potential of stablecoins for remittance, payments, and DeFi, it stresses the dangers of illicit use, due to blockchain’s permissionless architecture and the anonymity it affords.

Key points include:

• The FATF’s international regulatory standards (VASP registration, STRs, Travel Rule).

• Legislative trajectories in the U.S. (GENIUS Act), EU (MiCA), and Japan (Amendments to the Payment Services Act).

• Korea’s current legal vacuum on stablecoins, with emphasis on the need for institutional design grounded in AML.

• Strategic recommendations: issuer limitations to regulated financial institutions, technical enforcement of wallet whitelistings, and alignment with central bank digital currency (CBDC) policies.

The article positions AML not merely as regulation, but as infrastructure for trust — essential for monetary policy, systemic stability, and sovereign digital finance.

⚖️ Five Laws of Epistemic Integrity

1. ✅ Truthfulness of Information

🟢 High
The article is structurally honest and does not overstate. It presents the limitations and risks of stablecoins alongside their potential, acknowledging uncertainty where appropriate.

2. 📎 Source Referencing

🟡 Moderate
While it references the FATF, GENIUS Act, MiCA, and domestic legislative drafts, no links or document IDs are provided. The argument rests on well-known policy facts, but would benefit from source anchoring.

3. 🧭 Reliability & Accuracy

🟡 Moderate
The technological framing (smart contract restrictions, wallet whitelisting, etc.) is correct in principle, though actual implementation complexity is understated. The text accurately outlines current gaps in Korean regulation.

4. ⚖️ Contextual Judgment

🟢 High
The author rightly situates the issue within the broader geopolitical and monetary policy landscape, integrating regulatory convergence, financial stability, and CBDC competition.

5. 🔍 Inference Traceability

🟡 Moderate
Arguments flow logically, but a few critical assumptions (e.g., technical feasibility of real-time AML enforcement at scale) are presented as viable without operational evidence or case studies.

🧩 Structured Opinion — BBIU Analysis

The recent article on the "dual face of stablecoins" correctly highlights the tension between convenience and risk, but fails to structurally articulate what those two faces are. The true polarity lies in:

• 📈 Accelerated transactional efficiency vs. 🕳 Erosion of regulatory visibility

• ⚙️ Programmable finance infrastructure vs. 💣 Systemic fragility from non-state actors

• 🌐 Decentralized cross-border liquidity vs. 📉 Macroeconomic instability through uncontrollable capital flows

Moreover, stablecoins increase the velocity of money, especially when integrated into high-frequency DeFi environments. If velocity increases while aggregate demand stagnates or declines, this creates a dangerous dynamic: apparent liquidity with no real economic absorption — a setup for inflation in synthetic asset classes and deflation in the real economy.

The Korean government’s challenge is that its institutional reflexes are slower than the systems it seeks to regulate. In this context, even a single private entity (like a sovereign fund) with sufficient capital and information asymmetry could exploit stablecoin flows to displace monetary authority.

Additionally, while stablecoins rely on hardened cryptographic primitives (ECDSA, Keccak, etc.), their true vulnerability lies not in brute-force decryption, but in soft spots: smart contract exploits, liquidity attacks, oracle manipulation, and cross-protocol arbitrage.

Symbolic security is often mistaken for technical security. Most systemic failures begin not with a hack, but with an unverified assumption.

Ultimately, stablecoins are not just financial instruments; they are sovereignty vectors. Unless rigorously audited, regulated, and epistemically secured, they may shift the center of gravity away from the state — not through confrontation, but via unnoticed displacement.