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A new academic report argues that Bitcoin (BTC) and even the U.S. dollar ultimately derive value from collective belief—but warns that stablecoins may be the most fragile link between traditional money and blockchain because they reintroduce the very intermediaries crypto was designed to remove.
The analysis, published in February 2026 by the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and LTI@UniTo, a think tank affiliated with the University of Turin, asks whether blockchain can genuinely decentralize ‘money, contracts and finance.’ Lead author Bruno Biais of HEC Paris and other financial economists approach the sector less as a technology story and more as a monetary and market-structure problem, praising crypto’s operational breakthrough while placing stablecoins under the harshest scrutiny.
At the heart of the report is a classic proposition in monetary economics: money has value not because it is intrinsically useful, but because people expect others to accept it tomorrow. The authors describe this as a ‘belief-backed bubble’—a rational bubble sustained by expectations. Importantly, they insist this logic does not stop at crypto.
Quoting Nobel laureate Jean Tirole’s line that “Bitcoin is a pure bubble and if trust disappears its value goes to zero,” the report says the same sentence applies, in theory, to fiat currencies such as the dollar and the euro. The practical difference, it argues, is the presence of a sovereign backstop: states have taxation power, legal authority, and institutions that can coordinate and enforce broad acceptance. Cryptoassets do not. That absence, the authors suggest, is why markets can never fully rule out an extreme “toward-zero” scenario—an uncertainty that helps explain Bitcoin’s persistent volatility.
Still, the report treats Bitcoin’s scale as evidence that decentralization can generate real economic value, not merely froth. It highlights metrics that, in its view, demonstrate resilience: Bitcoin’s market capitalization has at times exceeded 5% of U.S. GDP, Ethereum (ETH) has approached roughly 1%, and the Bitcoin network is supported by tens of thousands of nodes globally. The system’s ability to reach consensus roughly every 10 minutes and prevent double-spending over many years without centralized control is presented as the core achievement that has attracted investor confidence and hardened into market value.