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 (TCAF) and post-quantum security. He previously shaped monetary-policy analysis 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.

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AFFILIATIONS CEPR Research Affiliate · Cornell FinTech Fellow · NABE Finance Roundtable Co-Chair · WEF Global Future Council Member
Current focus

Building the economic foundations of digital money: capital adequacy for stablecoins (TCAF), the design of Arc — an economically-secured Layer-1 blockchain — and what tokenization means for the dollar system.

Selected work
The Hedging Channel of Exchange Rate Determination RFS — Currency hedging links external imbalances to exchange rates, the cross-currency basis, and option skew.
Risk-based Capital for Stable Value Tokens — The Token Capital Adequacy Framework (TCAF) — risk-based capital for stablecoin issuers.
Stablecoins: Growth Potential and Impact on Banking — Federal Reserve International Finance Discussion Papers
Rare Disaster Probability and Options Pricing JFE — Disaster probabilities extracted from option prices. Updated U.S. series: /data/spx_disaster_prob_march2021update.csv

All research →

Recent
SPEAKING
"Making Onchain Agents Useful" — ETHDenver · Mar 2026
IN THE PRESS
Why Hyperliquid Chose USDC & the 30-Year Breaks 5% — Bits + Bips (Unchained)
WRITING
'Code as Law': The Tokenization of Financial Assets and the Paradox of Programmability — World Economic Forum