In case you were worried, at a hearing on the Financial Stability Oversight Council’s Annual Report to Congress, United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen hinted that the stablecoin market is not big enough to present a threat to our financial stability.

For context, over the past few days, UST dropped to under $0.40 and USDT (the largest stablecoin by market capitalization) briefly depegged from the dollar.

Referring to digital assets writ large, Yellen said, “They present the same kind of risks that we have known for centuries in connection with bank runs.” This raises the question: Why hint about the potential risks of stablecoins? Why not just come out strong and declare an official position?

The main method of exchanging cryptocurrency into spendable fiat currency is via stablecoins (which are supposed to be pegged dollar-for-dollar to fiat currency). Take away that mechanism and you have a lot of numbers immutably stored on blockchains that don’t have much utility.