Notes

• [1]
   See Serkan Arslanalp, Barry Eichengreen, and Chima Simpson-Bell, “Dollar Dominance and the Rise of Nontraditional Reserve Currencies,” IMF Blog, June 01, 2022, accessed August 04, 2025, https://​www.​imf.​org/​en/​Blogs/​Articles/​2022/​06/​01/​blog-​dollar-​dominance-​and-​the-​rise-​of-​nontraditional-​reserve-​currencies.
• [2]
   Editorial note: The BRICS’s membership has since expanded, now comprising eleven countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Iran.
• [3]
   For an international currency to be dominant it must be safe and highly liquid. According to the Triffin dilemma, a currency cannot remain a dominant international currency forever because liquidity requires a current account deficit, which erodes confidence, but a current account surplus would lead to a lack of international liquidity and so to instability.
• [4]
   The innovations that stablecoins are poised to bring about are significant and point to their further expansion. Indeed, stablecoins can already facilitate the automatic execution of transactions via smart contracts, reducing settlement risk (Arner et al. 2020).
• [5]
   The lack of liquidity caused by the strict regulation of monetary issuance contributed to GDP falling by a combined total of 25% in the four years before the currency board was abandoned.
• [6]
   Aramonte et al. (2022) use the term “cryptoisation” because their argument is based on all crypto assets.
• [7]
   The five principal stablecoins at the time of writing (Tether, USD Coin, Binance USD, DAI, and Pax Dollar) are denominated in dollars.
• [8]
   This helps to explain why the United States is less eager to issue a digital dollar.
• [9]
   Examples include Project Cedar, launched by the New York Innovation Center (Federal Reserve Bank of New York), and the European Investment Bank’s recent issuance of a digital bond on a blockchain (Project Venus, in November 2022), which was coordinated by the Banque de France and the Banque centrale du Luxembourg.
• [10]
   CBDCs could also help to preserve the uniformity of money and its efficiency as a medium of exchange. In contrast, stablecoins, and cryptocurrencies in general, encourage monetary fragmentation because their decentralized issuance via a distributed ledger imposes limits on scalability (BIS 2022b).
• [11]
   See the speeches by Christopher Waller and Daleep Singh at the “Digital Currencies and National Security Tradeoffs” symposium, organized by the Harvard National Security Journal, Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 14, 2022.
• [12]
   Eichengreen and Flandreau (2009) explain that the dollar took over the position enjoyed by the sterling before the First World War thanks to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which authorized banks to grant commercial loans in dollars in order to encourage use of the dollar as the invoicing and settlement currency for cross-border transactions. The next stages in the process were to encourage the dollar’s use in private financial transactions, and then to encourage its use as a reserve currency by central banks and governments.
• [13]
   These authors also show that the ratio of renminbi reserves to international transactions invoiced in renminbi is similar to the ratio of euro reserves to international transactions invoiced in euros.
• [14]
   In the domain of cross-border payments, on the other hand, preserving monetary sovereignty is much more difficult and certainly not desirable, because it means self-exclusion from the international markets.