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“Give a man a gun, he can rob a bank.

Give a man a bank, he can rob the world.”

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These lines came back to me while reading the BIS’s 2025 report on stablecoins. The report lays out a firm case: stablecoins are risky, lack flexibility, and don’t belong at the core of the financial system. It warns of poor regulation, limited credit creation, and threats to monetary stability.

But the more I read, the more one question kept coming up:

Compared to what?

The BIS holds stablecoins to a high bar, while giving traditional banks a pass. Yet the banking system has delivered crisis after crisis, hidden risk, and a structure where depositors take the risk but see little of the reward.

Stablecoins aren’t perfect. But they weren’t built to copy banks. They were built because banks keep failing us.

This isn’t a blanket defense of stablecoins. It’s a look at the double standards we’ve normalized.

And why a simpler, safer alternative deserves more credit than it gets.

1: The BIS View on Stablecoins

One message stood out in the BIS report: stablecoins are too risky to be a core part of the financial system. They list three main problems:

• No singleness. Stablecoins don’t always trade 1:1 across markets. That breaks the consistency of monetary system.
• No integrity. Many don’t follow KYC or anti-money laundering rules. This makes them prone to misuse.
• No elasticity. They’re fully backed, so they can’t expand credit like banks do.

Put simply, the BIS thinks stablecoins might work in narrow use cases, but they’re not fit to anchor real-world finance.

That sounds fair at first. But the more you look, the more it feels incomplete.

Because the BIS is applying a harsh lens to stablecoins and giving traditional banks a pass. That’s the double standard.

Before we accept their verdict, we need to ask a basic question:

How does the banking system score on the same three points?