Three Essays on Blockchain and the Transformation of International Trade, Finance, and Money

This dissertation consists of three essays on how blockchain-based infrastructures reshape cross-border economic activity by changing how trust is produced, how intermediation is organized, and how liquidity and money are provided. The unifying lens is that blockchain enables shared verification and programmable assets, which can reduce coordination frictions, but can also generate new forms of systemic risk and policy trade-offs. The first essay studies blockchain adoption in international trade through a PRISMA-based systematic literature review. It synthesizes evidence on where distributed ledgers can improve transparency, auditability, and process efficiency in trade documentation and supply-chain coordination, and identifies recurring constraints related to stakeholder incentives, scalability/interoperability, data governance at the on-/off-chain boundary, and regulatory fragmentation. The second essay analyzes the DeFi ecosystem as a laboratory for blockchain-enabled financial intermediation. Using monthly category-level Total Value Locked (TVL) data from the Cambridge DeFi Navigator, it estimates VAR and time-varying VAR models to map short-run spillovers and state-dependent connectedness. Results point to a hierarchical structure in which staking-related expansions precede broader increases in credit and trading activity, while credit-related shocks explain a large share of short-run uncertainty and connectedness intensifies during stress regimes. The third essay examines USD-pegged stablecoins as tokenized private money that can alter domestic liquidity portfolios in small open economies. It develops a portfolio model of monetary substitution and monetary-policy leakage, in which households allocate real liquidity between domestic money and tokenized dollars. The model is brought to the data using local projections on a monthly panel of 24 countries over 2018–2025. The results show a negative dynamic response of M1 growth in relatively high-exposure economies following expansions in global stablecoin capitalization, suggesting that tokenized dollar use is already detectable on the monetary margin, although the estimated effects remain modest at current scale.