Fed Governor Waller: Stablecoin is an important innovation for DeFi, but there's still a risk of runs

Speaking at the Vienna Macroeconomics Symposium organised by the Institute for Advanced Study in Vienna, Austria, Fed Governor Waller expressed his views on decentralised finance, saying that stablecoins, which were born in the world of cryptocurrencies to provide a ‘safe’ asset with a stable value for trading, are another important innovation of DeFi. Almost all stablecoins are pegged one-to-one to the US dollar, and they offer buyers and sellers the opportunity to transact in a decentralised way, using stablecoins as a settlement tool. 
Since stablecoins are effectively digital currencies, they can reduce the need for payment intermediaries and thus lower the cost of global payments, but they are not guaranteed to be secure, and history is replete with cases of runs on synthetic dollars. Stablecoins therefore face all the problems faced by any real alternative to the dollar and could benefit in terms of payments and could be used as a secure asset on a variety of new trading platforms if appropriate guardrails could be put in place to minimise the risk of runs and to mitigate other risks, such as the possibility that they could be used for illicit financing.