🧵 The Lords' financial services regulation committee heard from Simon Gleeson, a lawyer and academic specializing in financial law, yesterday on the matter of stablecoins. Also testifying was Kern Alexander, a banking and financial market academic. Here's a summary of some of the more interesting points made 👇 Gleeson framed stablecoins primarily as an evolutionary financial instrument rather than a revolutionary one, arguing that economically and legally they resemble longstanding structures such as banknotes or money-market-fund-like instruments that are easier to transfer digitally.

He emphasized that the core conceptual model is a transferable claim backed by high-quality liquid assets, sitting halfway between money and securities, and that regulation must distinguish between the composition of the asset backing the coin and the payment or transfer mechanism through which it circulates.