THE BANK OF KOREA MEASURED IT — REACH FOR A DOLLAR TOKEN AND YOUR OWN MONEY FALLS — THE LADDER TO HARDER MONEY HAS ONE MORE RUNG

The Bank of Korea’s researchers asked a simple question: what happens to a country’s money when its people can buy dollar tokens directly? They used Binance’s own listings as the experiment. Before a currency gets a direct pair with dollar stablecoins, the demand for dollars just shows up as a markup — people pay extra for the token, and the exchange rate barely moves. After the pair opens, the dam breaks. The firms selling the tokens balance their books by selling the local currency for real dollars, and the study found the local money falls — in the bank’s own words, higher token premiums come with “significant local currency depreciation.” Korea has no such pair yet, so Korean demand piles up as a markup instead: about $64 billion of stablecoins bought with won in a single year, the most of any local currency in Asia-Pacific. Read what this is. A central bank documented, with its own math, that when people get a door to harder money, they walk through it — and the money they leave behind gets lighter. The dollar is the first rung of that ladder. But the dollar is also somebody’s local money, managed by a committee, its supply set by decree. The same flow the bank measured draining the won and the real toward the dollar is the flow the Fundamentalist expects to keep climbing — out of every money that can be printed, toward the one that cannot. The bank’s answer is to regulate the door and strengthen the won. The door doesn’t argue. It just counts the people walking through.