Alternative EOI C - Causal-Style Stablecoin De-Peg Attribution
Title (paste-ready): Descriptive Attribution of Stablecoin De-Peg Events: Open Tooling for Cross-Border Monetary Rails
EOI BODY (paste-ready)
The stablecoin market crossed US$200 billion in market capitalisation by late 2025, with frequent de-peg events that move within minutes. Public on-chain traces and post-mortem reports document each event in detail. No open methodology attributes the cause class consistently across events. Brookings and BIS analysts observe that descriptive studies of stablecoin events outnumber attribution-style studies by roughly five to one. The gap is real and reachable with public data.
We propose stablecoin-attribution, an open MIT-licensed library for descriptive attribution of stablecoin de-peg events. The library ingests on-chain transfers, oracle feeds, exchange order-book data, and macro-news arrivals. It applies extreme-value-theory tail dependence with instrumental-variable proxies drawn from news arrival timestamps. This extends Joerg’s 2025 reaction-times-to-news methodology into crypto monetary rails. The methodological precedent comes from FRG23 anomaly detection plus FRG24 price-impact work, both at AUS. Outputs are a library, an open event-attribution database, and four working papers. Foundation-model tools serve inference only.
Specific aims: (1) Develop tail-dependence and IV-proxy methods for de-peg attribution. (2) Curate the open stablecoin event database, CC-BY year 1. (3) Deliver stablecoin-attribution under MIT by year 2. (4) Validate against three documented de-peg events from 2024-2026. (5) Train one UAE-based PhD via AUS Office of Graduate Studies.
Application-readiness arc. Months 0-6 are the Applied baseline. FRG23 and FRG24 methods port into the project repository, and the public event database starts curation. Months 6-12 produce a working prototype attributing two historical events. Months 12-18 reach Tech Development with cross-event validation. Months 18-24 deliver the first Validation step. A named user from the COST 19130 European regulator pool runs stablecoin-attribution on a then-current event by month 24.
PI Stephen Chan is at AUS Mathematics & Statistics in Sharjah. Co-PI Joerg Osterrieder chairs COST Action 19130 across 51 countries and coordinates the MSCA-DN Industrial Doctoral Network with twenty institutions and one hundred researchers. Co-PI Youcheng Sun at MBZUAI Computer Science leads verification of the attribution claims, drawing on his Verifi work (IEEE TDSC 2024). UAE delivery anchors at AUS plus MBZUAI through Co-PI presence. Two UAE-based PhDs are recruited, one at AUS under Stephen and one at MBZUAI under Youcheng. Capacity building includes a graduate course at AUS on stablecoin econometrics plus workshops at AUS in year 1 and MBZUAI in year 2. CBUAE Fintech Office and ADGM RegLab are the target regulator outreach during the May full-proposal phase. All code MIT, methods/datasets CC-BY where licence allows.