Background & Biography
His former BIS responsibilities combined economic advice with departmental leadership, following an economics professorship at Princeton. He also helped colleagues develop the institution’s innovation unit and led it temporarily at launch. The career connects monetary scholarship with organisational experience in financial technology. His scholarship has examined banks, finance across national borders and monetary arrangements. His later digital-innovation work considered what changing technology meant for financial firms, their customers and public monetary authorities.
On taking office in 2026, he set out a programme for maintaining confidence as payment arrangements change. He proposed expanding experiments with public digital money and digitally represented bank balances. Alongside international cooperation, he called for safeguards linking innovation and wider international use of the domestic currency to financial resilience. His programme also connected these goals to longer operating hours for foreign-exchange trading and arrangements for settling the national currency outside the country.
Notable Contributions
A paper coauthored with Raphael Auer and Cyril Monnet, revised in 2023, considers who should maintain a monetary ledger. The researchers compare arrangements in which one operator, a committee, or a wider population can update records. Their question concerns economic incentives rather than engineering a particular chain. Participants must have reasons to check transfers accurately and avoid supporting incompatible histories. Within the model, sufficiently durable future rewards make a single operator the preferred arrangement. With weaker incentives, distributing responsibility can be preferable. The result is conditional: choosing more participants does not automatically produce a better system. Governance must also account for verification costs and the continuing credibility of promised compensation. The starting problem is reciprocal exchange: someone delivering goods today cannot automatically make the recipient supply goods later.
His sole-authored study published in March 2026 explores why users may spread across competing blockchains instead of gathering on one payment network. In the model, maintaining agreement among record keepers requires compensation that users ultimately fund. More demanding agreement requirements raise the reward needed. Limited processing space supports transaction charges, but those charges can push some users toward cheaper entrants. Chains with less demanding agreement rules then serve people unwilling to pay the incumbent network’s fees. This sorting weakens the benefits that normally come from broad acceptance of a common monetary instrument. The paper argues that stablecoins can inherit the separation between their underlying chains. These are conclusions from an economic framework with specified incentives, rather than a performance verdict on every live network.
In a 2025 paper with Jon Frost and two other researchers, he studies competition among bank balances, platform payment tokens and public digital money. The stylised economy separates physical commerce from online activity and gives payment instruments different reach. Connecting the systems increases access and trade, while changing which providers serve customers. Merchant charges can rise even as participation improves. Under the assumptions used, a public currency and infrastructure enabling rapid transfers across providers yield equivalent outcomes for payments market structure. This finding concerns the model’s treatment of access and competition; it does not establish that the two arrangements are operationally identical. The framework explicitly leaves cryptocurrencies and stablecoins outside its analysis. The model still assigns private firms a customer-facing role in distributing the public instrument and serving its users.
A 2025 bulletin coauthored with Iñaki Aldasoro and three other researchers proposes using publicly recorded transfer histories to inform compliance assessments when cryptoassets meet conventional finance. Its approach distinguishes separately traceable transaction outputs from wallet balances whose constituent units become mixed. For the latter, earlier movements between addresses would help assess provenance. The proposal envisages thresholds set by authorities, with criteria reflecting the rules of the relevant jurisdiction. It is a design proposal for diagnostic screening, rather than a determination about any holder’s unlawful conduct. The distinction between an asset’s recorded history and an individual’s conduct is important when reporting what the proposed scoring mechanism would measure. The proposal places screening at conversion into ordinary money, rather than assuming an intermediary approves every movement on a public chain.
Why Katharos.ai Follows Hyun Song Shin
Katharos.ai follows his contribution to research that connects payment architecture with the incentives and responsibilities around it. A review first issued in 2021, written with Auer and four other colleagues, considers public digital money within an economy shaped by data. Its scope includes privacy, market competition, technology choices and consequences for bank funding. This offers a useful editorial lens: evaluating a proposed monetary instrument requires examining who operates it, who handles information, and how its design affects the surrounding financial system. Those questions extend beyond whether a digital balance can be issued.
Areas to Follow
- Follow the announced next stage of Hangang and cooperation through Agorá, looking for evidence about trials, safeguards and institutional responsibilities. The opening programme provides a dated statement of intent; later reporting should establish what was tested and what decisions actually followed.
- Watch how subsequent research tests the relationship between connected payment systems, customer access and merchant pricing, particularly when real markets differ from the simplifying assumptions of the competition model.
- Track whether the proposed historical-risk assessment method is evaluated in practice, how thresholds are chosen, and whether the distinction between individual outputs and mixed holdings remains workable.
Reporting Scope
Coverage distinguishes jointly authored analysis from institutional policy. The review identifies unresolved questions about payments spanning national borders, alongside choices about privacy and system design. It supplies a research agenda rather than a universal deployment prescription. Reporting should identify which design is being examined and avoid treating a theoretical possibility as an adopted operating arrangement.
Areas of Influence
His fragmentation analysis brings the cost of sustaining agreement into discussions of competing networks. It asks whether attracting users to cheaper chains changes money’s ability to coordinate exchange across a shared system.
His collaborative governance research helps compare responsibility for maintaining financial records. It makes the durability of incentives part of the choice between concentrated and distributed authority over a ledger.
Photo: BIS
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