The Stablecoin Operating Manual: Distribution, Reserves, and Compliance
A stablecoin book for people who do not trade crypto.
Written for banking, payments, asset management, VC, family offices, and global operators, this book explains stablecoins as businesses: who prints, who taxes, who earns the reserve spread, and who breaks in a run.
It gives practical frameworks including the Six-Layer Stablecoin Stack, Channel Tax, Trust Stack, Real vs. Fake Demand, Compliance-as-Spec, and the Dollar Distribution Stack.
Intro
In Q1 2026, Circle paid Coinbase $330.6M in distribution costs while its own GAAP net income was $55.2M. One channel took six times the issuer’s profit.
The issuer prints; the channel taxes.
This is not about coin prices. It is a framework for reading stablecoins as businesses: distribution, reserves, trust, compliance, and failure modes.
The peg is the entry ticket, redemption is trust, distribution is the moat, reserves are the profit, compliance is the boundary.