Yesha Yadav, Chris Odinet, and Andrea Tosato on the Moneyness of Stablecoins

**David Beckworth** (0:02)
Welcome to Macro Musings, where each week we pull back the curtain and take a closer look at the most important macroeconomic issues of the past, present, and future. I am your host, David Beckworth, a senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. I'm glad you decided to join us.
Our guests today are Chris Odinet, Andrea Tosato, and Yesha Yadav. They have a new paper titled The Moneyness of Stable Coins, where they argue that the key distinction and question about stable coins is not merely whether they are backed or technically efficient, but whether they are actually money-like in a legal and institutional sense. The authors develop a framework they call moneyness, the degree to which an instrument functions like money. Their central claim is that moneyness is not just an economic property, it is fundamentally a legal institutional construction. They argue that stable coins currently fall short of true moneyness, even after the Genius Act, because there are still legal hurdles to be cleared.
Welcome to the show, everyone.

**Yesha Yadav** (1:08)
David, thank you for having us.

**Chris Odinet** (1:09)
Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you for having us.

**David Beckworth** (1:12)
Well, it's great to have you on. It was a great paper, very topical, and we need legal scholars like you working on this issue because it's more than economics, right? It's more than finance. That's the key point of your paper. But before we get into it, why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself, starting with you, Chris.

**Chris Odinet** (1:26)
Sure, happy to. I'm delighted to be here. I've been a long time fan of the podcast. So my name is Chris Odinet. I'm on the faculty at Texas A&M University's Law School. I teach property law, commercial finance, bankruptcy, and I teach a class called consumer banking.

**Yesha Yadav** (1:41)
David, thanks so much for having us again, and just to echo Chris, huge fan of yours and the podcast for bringing so much insight to the world. So thank you for doing that. I am a market structure nerd across the board.
So QG's markets, digital assets, payments, and obviously as we've discussed before in the case of treasuries.

**Andrea Tosato** (1:58)
Again, I joined my co-authors in being delighted to be a big fan of the pod. I'm Andrea Tosato. I'm a professor at law at SMU-Dedman School of Law, and I am fascinated by private law, commercial law, and in particular, the legal framework for digital assets.
From there, the road to stable coins is short.

**David Beckworth** (2:16)
Well, I should mention to the listeners and watchers of the video that Yesha and I are neighbors in Nashville.

**Yesha Yadav** (2:21)
We are, but we haven't had a tea yet.

**David Beckworth** (2:23)
We have not met up.

**Yesha Yadav** (2:23)
We have to correct that.

**David Beckworth** (2:24)
Yes, but I've been down to Vanderbilt a few times. You've been on the podcast at least twice before, so check out the previous shows. Good discussions on the treasury market. Maybe we'll come back, because there's a lot going on there right now. Tons. But let's talk about this paper, and tell me the journey into the paper. How did you guys get involved in discussing stable coins and the moneyness issue in particular?

**Chris Odinet** (2:45)
Sure, I guess I'll kick us off, but I'm sure my co-authors have probably a more elegant and insightful way of describing our partnership. It really started because Andrea and I, for the past several years, have been writing papers about the property law and the commercial law aspects of digital assets. We were both, to one degree or another, involved in amendments made to the Uniform Commercial Code, which is the principal body of commercial law in the United States, to accommodate, to deal with, to bring clarity to transactions involving digital assets.
And in the course and scope of writing all of these papers, which actually culminated in a book coming out next month with Oxford University Press, this little plug, we wrote a chapter on stable coins. In fact, just as we were finishing the final chapter on stable coins, the Genius Act was passed. So we expanded that chapter to take an account of the Genius Act, finish the book. But we really felt like there was a financial regulation meets commercial law, meets property and private law dimension that needed more treatment. And we really needed a financial regulation superstar to join us in writing a serious and rigorous paper about moneyness from a new perspective, from a perspective that takes into account these commercial law, these private law, not just the public law, not just the economic perspectives. And that road led us to Yesha Yadav.