Wharton Launches Academic Framework to Demystify Stablecoins for Finance Leaders

A Wharton School professor has released what he's calling a "Stablecoin Toolkit" designed to cut through the confusion surrounding digital currencies pegged to traditional assets—a move that arrives as finance chiefs increasingly confront questions about whether these instruments belong on corporate balance sheets.

Kevin Werbach, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at Wharton, published the framework this month to address what he describes as widespread misunderstanding about how stablecoins actually function and where they fit in the regulatory landscape. The toolkit aims to provide clearer definitions and regulatory frameworks for an asset class that has grown substantially but remains poorly understood outside crypto-native circles.

The timing matters for corporate finance teams. Stablecoins—cryptocurrencies designed to maintain a stable value by pegging to assets like the U.S. dollar—have evolved from a niche trading tool into something that's starting to show up in treasury conversations, cross-border payment discussions, and vendor settlement debates. But most CFOs lack a clear mental model for evaluating them, which is precisely the gap Werbach's academic work attempts to fill.

The professor's approach treats stablecoins not as a monolithic category but as a bridge technology sitting uncomfortably between two worlds: the programmable, always-on infrastructure of digital assets and the regulated, audited certainty of traditional finance. That dual nature creates the confusion. A stablecoin looks like a dollar, trades like a dollar, and is supposed to be worth a dollar—but it's not actually a dollar, and the mechanisms ensuring that peg vary wildly depending on the issuer.

Werbach's toolkit breaks down these mechanisms and the regulatory considerations that flow from them, offering what amounts to a translation layer for finance professionals who need to evaluate stablecoins without becoming crypto experts. The framework addresses questions that actually matter to controllers and treasurers: What backs this thing? Who audits it? What happens if the peg breaks? Which regulator has jurisdiction?

These aren't theoretical concerns. The stablecoin market has experienced spectacular failures—most notably the 2022 collapse of TerraUSD, which was supposed to maintain its dollar peg through algorithmic mechanisms rather than actual dollar reserves. That implosion wiped out roughly $40 billion in value and demonstrated that "stablecoin" is a description of intent, not a guarantee of outcome.

The Wharton framework arrives as U.S. regulators are finally moving toward coherent stablecoin oversight, though the exact shape of that regulation remains uncertain. For finance leaders, that regulatory ambiguity creates a practical problem: evaluate stablecoins too early and you're taking unquantifiable risk; wait too long and you might miss efficiency gains in payments or treasury operations.

Werbach's academic toolkit doesn't answer whether any given company should use stablecoins—that's a risk-adjusted decision that varies by organization. Instead, it provides the analytical structure to make that decision intelligently, which is arguably more valuable than a blanket recommendation.

The broader question the toolkit implicitly raises is whether corporate finance is ready for programmable money. Stablecoins aren't just digital dollars; they're dollars that can be embedded in smart contracts, moved 24/7 without banking intermediaries, and integrated into automated treasury operations. That functionality is either revolutionary or irrelevant depending on your organization's needs, but you can't evaluate it without first understanding what you're actually evaluating.

For now, most CFOs can safely ignore stablecoins. But the number of contexts where that's true is shrinking—international payments, vendor relationships with crypto-native companies, and certain treasury operations are all areas where the question is shifting from "why would we?" to "should we?" Werbach's framework at least ensures that when finance leaders ask that question, they're asking it about the right thing.