Gordon Y. Liao

Gordon Y. Liao

Gordon Y. Liao is Chief Economist and Head of Research at Circle (NYSE: CRCL), the issuer of USDC, where he leads economic research and R&D — from the design of Arc, a Layer-1 blockchain purpose-built for stablecoin finance, to capital standards for digital dollars and post-quantum security. He previously served as a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Board, led research at Uniswap Labs, and managed fixed-income portfolios at the Harvard endowment. His research appears in the Review of Financial Studies and the Journal of Financial Economics. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics and an A.B. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard.

Google Scholar · LinkedIn · X

Selected work
Financial Innovation and the International Monetary System — 2026 Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City — How stablecoins and tokenization reshape currency competition and dollar dominance.
Five Facts About Stablecoins — Five facts about payment stablecoins, documented from granular blockchain data, 2020–2025.
Arc: An Open Layer-1 Blockchain Purpose-Built for Stablecoin Finance — Circle — Litepaper: USDC as native gas, deterministic sub-second settlement finality, and opt-in privacy.
The Hedging Channel of Exchange Rate Determination RFS — Currency hedging links external imbalances to exchange rates, the cross-currency basis, and option skew.

All research →